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+The Project Gutenberg EBook Northern Lights, v4,  by Gilbert Parker
+#17 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+  Contents:
+    A Man, A Famine, And A Heathen Boy
+    The Healing Springs And The Pioneers
+    The Little Widow Of Jansen
+    Watching The Rise Of Orion
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
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+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
+
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+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**EBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These EBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers*****
+
+
+Title: Northern Lights, Volume 4.
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: July, 2004  [EBook #6189]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on September 6, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+
+
+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NORTHERN LIGHTS, v4, 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 4.
+
+
+
+A MAN, A FAMINE, AND A HEATHEN BOY
+THE HEALING SPRINGS AND THE PIONEERS
+THE LITTLE WIDOW OF JANSEN
+WATCHING THE RISE OF ORION
+
+
+
+
+A MAN, A FAMINE, AND A HEATHEN BOY
+
+Athabasca in the Far North is the scene of this story--Athabasca, one of
+the most beautiful countries in the world in summer, but a cold, bare
+land in winter.  Yet even in winter it is not so bleak and bitter as the
+districts south-west of it, for the Chinook winds steal through from the
+Pacific and temper the fierceness of the frozen Rockies.  Yet forty and
+fifty degrees below zero is cold after all, and July strawberries in this
+wild North land are hardly compensation for seven months of ice and snow,
+no matter how clear and blue the sky, how sweet the sun during its short
+journey in the day.  Some days, too, the sun may not be seen even when
+there is no storm, because of the fine, white, powdered frost in the air.
+
+A day like this is called a poudre day; and woe to the man who tempts it
+unthinkingly, because the light makes the delicate mist of frost shine
+like silver.  For that powder bites the skin white in short order, and
+sometimes reckless men lose ears, or noses, or hands under its sharp
+caress.  But when it really storms in that Far North, then neither man
+nor beast should be abroad--not even the Eskimo dogs; though times and
+seasons can scarcely be chosen when travelling in Athabasca, for a storm
+comes unawares.  Upon the plains you will see a cloud arising, not in the
+sky, but from the ground--a billowy surf of drifting snow; then another
+white billow from the sky will sweep down and meet it, and you are caught
+between.
+
+He who went to Athabasca to live a generation ago had to ask himself if
+the long winter, spent chiefly indoors, with, maybe, a little trading
+with the Indians, meagre sport, and scant sun, savages and half-breeds
+the only companions, and out of all touch with the outside world, letters
+coming but once a year; with frozen fish and meat, always the same, as
+the staple items in a primitive fare; with danger from starvation and
+marauding tribes; with endless monotony, in which men sometimes go mad--
+he had to ask himself if these were to be cheerfully endured because, in
+the short summer, the air is heavenly, the rivers and lakes are full of
+fish, the flotilla of canoes of the fur-hunters is pouring down, and all
+is gaiety and pleasant turmoil; because there is good shooting in the
+autumn, and the smell of the land is like a garden, and hardy fruits and
+flowers are at hand.
+
+That is a question which was asked William Rufus Holly once upon a time.
+
+William Rufus Holly, often called "Averdoopoy," sometimes "Sleeping
+Beauty," always Billy Rufus, had had a good education.  He had been to
+high school and to college, and he had taken one or two prizes en route
+to graduation; but no fame travelled with him, save that he was the
+laziest man of any college year for a decade.  He loved his little
+porringer, which is to say that he ate a good deal; and he loved to read
+books, which is not to say that he loved study; he hated getting out of
+bed, and he was constantly gated for morning chapel.  More than once he
+had sweetly gone to sleep over his examination papers.  This is not to
+say that he failed at his examinations--on the contrary, he always
+succeeded; but he only did enough to pass and no more; and he did not
+wish to do more than pass.  His going to sleep at examinations was
+evidence that he was either indifferent or self-indulgent, and it
+certainly showed that he was without nervousness.  He invariably roused
+himself, or his professor roused him, a half-hour before the papers
+should be handed in, and, as it were by a mathematical calculation,
+he had always done just enough to prevent him being plucked.
+
+He slept at lectures, he slept in hall, he slept as he waited his turn
+to go to the wicket in a cricket match, and he invariably went to sleep
+afterwards.  He even did so on the day he had made the biggest score,
+in the biggest game ever played between his college and the pick of the
+country; but he first gorged himself with cake and tea.  The day he took
+his degree he had to be dragged from a huge grandfather's chair, and
+forced along in his ragged gown--"ten holes and twelve tatters"--to the
+function in the convocation hall.  He looked so fat and shiny, so balmy
+and sleepy when he took his degree and was handed his prize for a poem on
+Sir John Franklin, that the public laughed, and the college men in the
+gallery began singing:
+
+                   "Bye O, my baby,
+                    Father will come to you soo-oon!"
+
+He seemed not to care, but yawned in his hand as he put his prize book
+under his arm through one of the holes in his gown, and in two minutes
+was back in his room, and in another five was fast asleep.
+
+It was the general opinion that William Rufus Holly, fat, yellow-haired,
+and twenty-four years old, was doomed to failure in life, in spite of the
+fact that he had a little income of a thousand dollars a year, and had
+made a century in an important game of cricket.  Great, therefore, was
+the surprise of the college, and afterward of the Province, when, at the
+farewell dinner of the graduates, Sleeping Beauty announced, between his
+little open-eyed naps, that he was going Far North as a missionary.
+
+At first it was thought he was joking, but when at last, in his calm and
+dreamy look, they saw he meant what he said, they rose and carried him
+round the room on a chair, making impromptu songs as they travelled.
+They toasted Billy Rufus again and again, some of them laughing till they
+cried at the thought of Averdoopoy going to the Arctic regions.  But an
+uneasy seriousness fell upon these "beautiful, bountiful, brilliant
+boys," as Holly called them later, when in a simple, honest, but indolent
+speech he said he had applied for ordination.
+
+Six months later William Rufus Holly, a deacon in holy orders, journeyed
+to Athabasca in the Far North.  On his long journey there was plenty of
+time to think.  He was embarked on a career which must for ever keep him
+in the wilds; for very seldom indeed does a missionary of the North ever
+return to the crowded cities or take a permanent part in civilised life.
+
+What the loneliness of it would be he began to feel, as for hours and
+hours he saw no human being on the plains; in the thrilling stillness of
+the night; in fierce storms in the woods, when his half-breed guides bent
+their heads to meet the wind and rain, and did not speak for hours; in
+the long, adventurous journey on the river by day, in the cry of the
+plaintive loon at night; in the scant food for every meal.  Yet what the
+pleasure would be he felt in the joyous air, the exquisite sunshine, the
+flocks of wild-fowl flying North, honking on their course; in the song of
+the half-breeds as they ran the rapids.  Of course, he did not think
+these things quite as they are written here--all at once and all
+together; but in little pieces from time to time, feeling them rather
+than saying them to himself.
+
+At least he did understand how serious a thing it was, his going as a
+missionary into the Far North.  Why did he do it?  Was it a whim, or the
+excited imagination of youth, or that prompting which the young often
+have to make the world better?  Or was it a fine spirit of adventure with
+a good heart behind it?  Perhaps it was a little of all these; but there
+was also something more, and it was to his credit.
+
+Lazy as William Rufus Holly had been at school and college, he had still
+thought a good deal, even when he seemed only sleeping; perhaps he
+thought more because he slept so much, because he studied little and read
+a great deal.  He always knew what everybody thought--that he would never
+do anything but play cricket till he got too heavy to run, and then would
+sink into a slothful, fat, and useless middle and old age; that his life
+would be a failure.  And he knew that they were right; that if he stayed
+where he could live an easy life, a fat and easy life he would lead; that
+in a few years he would be good for nothing except to eat and sleep--no
+more.  One day, waking suddenly from a bad dream of himself so fat as to
+be drawn about on a dray by monstrous fat oxen with rings through their
+noses, led by monkeys, he began to wonder what he should do--the hardest
+thing to do; for only the hardest life could possibly save him from
+failure, and, in spite of all, he really did want to make something of
+his life.  He had been reading the story of Sir John Franklin's Arctic
+expedition, and all at once it came home to him that the only thing for
+him to do was to go to the Far North and stay there, coming back about
+once every ten years to tell the people in the cities what was being done
+in the wilds.  Then there came the inspiration to write his poem on Sir
+John Franklin, and he had done so, winning the college prize for poetry.
+But no one had seen any change in him in those months; and, indeed, there
+had been little or no change, for he had an equable and practical, though
+imaginative, disposition, despite his avoirdupois, and his new purpose
+did not stir him yet from his comfortable sloth.
+
+And in all the journey West and North he had not been stirred greatly
+from his ease of body, for the journey was not much harder than playing
+cricket every day, and there were only the thrill of the beautiful air,
+the new people, and the new scenes to rouse him.  As yet there was no
+great responsibility.  He scarcely realised what his life must be, until
+one particular day.  Then Sleeping Beauty waked wide up, and from that
+day lost the name.  Till then he had looked and borne himself like any
+other traveller, unrecognised as a parson or "mikonaree."  He had not had
+prayers in camp en route, he had not preached, he had held no meetings.
+He was as yet William Rufus Holly, the cricketer, the laziest dreamer of
+a college decade.  His religion was simple and practical; he had never
+had any morbid ideas; he had lived a healthy, natural, and honourable
+life, until he went for a mikonaree, and if he had no cant, he had not a
+clear idea of how many-sided, how responsible, his life must be--until
+that one particular day.  This is what happened then.
+
+From Fort O'Call, an abandoned post of the Hudson's Bay Company on the
+Peace River, nearly the whole tribe of the Athabasca Indians in
+possession of the post now had come up the river, with their chief,
+Knife-in-the-Wind, to meet the mikonaree.  Factors of the Hudson's Bay
+Company, coureurs de bois, and voyageurs had come among them at times,
+and once the renowned Father Lacombe, the Jesuit priest, had stayed with
+them three months; but never to this day had they seen a Protestant
+mikonaree, though once a factor, noted for his furious temper, his powers
+of running, and his generosity, had preached to them.  These men,
+however, were both over fifty years old.  The Athabascas did not hunger
+for the Christian religion, but a courier from Edmonton had brought them
+word that a mikonaree was coming to their country to stay, and they put
+off their stoical manner and allowed themselves the luxury of curiosity.
+That was why even the squaws and papooses came up the river with the
+braves, all wondering if the stranger had brought gifts with him, all
+eager for their shares; for it had been said by the courier of the tribe
+that "Oshondonto," their name for the newcomer, was bringing mysterious
+loads of well-wrapped bales and skins.  Upon a point below the first
+rapids of the Little Manitou they waited with their camp-fires burning
+and their pipe of peace.
+
+When the canoes bearing Oshondonto and his voyageurs shot the rapids to
+the song of the river,
+
+                   "En roulant, ma boule roulant,
+                    En roulant, ma boule!"
+
+with the shrill voices of the boatmen rising to meet the cry of the
+startled water-fowl, the Athabascas crowded to the high banks.  They
+grunted "How!" in greeting, as the foremost canoe made for the shore.
+
+But if surprise could have changed the countenances of Indians, these
+Athabascas would not have known one another when the missionary stepped
+out upon the shore.  They had looked to see a grey-bearded man like the
+chief factor who quarrelled and prayed; but they found instead a round-
+faced, clean-shaven youth, with big, good-natured eyes, yellow hair, and
+a roundness of body like that of a month-old bear's cub.  They expected
+to find a man who, like the factor, could speak their language, and they
+found a cherub sort of youth who talked only English, French, and
+Chinook--that common language of the North--and a few words of their own
+language which he had learned on the way.
+
+Besides, Oshondonto was so absent-minded at the moment, so absorbed in
+admiration of the garish scene before him, that he addressed the chief in
+French, of which Knife-in-the-Wind knew but the one word cache, which all
+the North knows.
+
+But presently William Rufus Holly recovered himself, and in stumbling
+Chinook made himself understood.  Opening a bale, he brought out beads
+and tobacco and some bright red flannel, and two hundred Indians sat
+round him and grunted "How!" and received his gifts with little comment.
+Then the pipe of peace went round, and Oshondonto smoked it becomingly.
+
+But he saw that the Indians despised him for his youth, his fatness, his
+yellow hair as soft as a girl's, his cherub face, browned though it was
+by the sun and weather.
+
+As he handed the pipe to Knife-in-the-Wind, an Indian called Silver
+Tassel, with a cruel face, said grimly:
+
+"Why does Oshondonto travel to us?"
+
+William Rufus Holly's eyes steadied on those of the Indian as he replied
+in Chinook: "To teach the way to Manitou the Mighty, to tell the
+Athabascas of the Great Chief who died to save the world."
+
+"The story is told in many ways; which is right?  There was the factor,
+Word of Thunder.  There is the song they sing at Edmonton--I have heard."
+
+"The Great Chief is the same Chief," answered the missionary.  "If you
+tell of Fort O'Call, and Knife-in-the-Wind tells of Fort O'Call, he and
+you will speak different words, and one will put in one thing and one
+will leave out another; men's tongues are different.  But Fort O'Call is
+the-same, and the Great Chief is the same."
+
+"It was a long time ago," said Knife-in-the-Wind sourly, "many thousand
+moons, as the pebbles in the river, the years."
+
+"It is the same world, and it is the same Chief, and it was to save us,"
+answered William Rufus Holly, smiling, yet with a fluttering heart, for
+the first test of his life had come.
+
+In anger Knife-in-the-Wind thrust an arrow into the ground and said:
+
+"How can the white man who died thousands of moons ago in a far country
+save the red man to-day?"
+
+"A strong man should bear so weak a tale," broke in Silver Tassel
+ruthlessly.  "Are we children that the Great Chief sends a child as
+messenger?"
+
+For a moment Billy Rufus did not know how to reply, and in the pause
+Knife-in-the-Wind broke in two pieces the arrow he had thrust in the
+ground in token of displeasure.
+
+Suddenly, as Oshondonto was about to speak, Silver Tassel sprang to his
+feet, seized in his arms a lad of twelve who was standing near, and
+running to the bank, dropped him into the swift current.
+
+"If Oshondonto be not a child, let him save the lad," said Silver Tassel,
+standing on the brink.
+
+Instantly William Rufus Holly was on his feet.  His coat was off before
+Silver Tassel's words were out of his mouth, and crying, "In the name of
+the Great White Chief!" he jumped into the rushing current.  "In the
+name of your Manitou, come on, Silver Tassel!" he called up from the
+water, and struck out for the lad.
+
+Not pausing an instant, Silver Tassel sprang into the flood, into the
+whirling eddies and dangerous current below the first rapids and above
+the second.
+
+Then came the struggle for Wingo of the Cree tribe, a waif among the
+Athabascas, whose father had been slain as they travelled, by a wandering
+tribe of Blackfeet.  Never was there a braver rivalry, although the odds
+were with the Indian-in lightness, in brutal strength.  With the
+mikonaree, however, were skill, and that sort of strength which the world
+calls "moral," the strength of a good and desperate purpose.  Oshondonto
+knew that on the issue of this shameless business--this cruel sport of
+Silver Tassel--would depend his future on the Peace River.  As he shot
+forward with strong strokes in the whirling torrent after the helpless
+lad, who, only able to keep himself afloat, was being swept down towards
+the rapids below, he glanced up to the bank along which the Athabascas
+were running.  He saw the garish colours of their dresses; he saw the
+ignorant medicine man, with his mysterious bag, making incantations; he
+saw the tepee of the chief, with its barbarous pennant above; he saw the
+idle, naked children tearing at the entrails of a calf; and he realised
+that this was a deadly tournament between civilisation and barbarism.
+
+Silver Tassel was gaining on him, they were both overhauling the boy; it
+was now to see which should reach Wingo first, which should take him to
+shore.  That is, if both were not carried under before they reached him;
+that is, if, having reached him, they and he would ever get to shore;
+for, lower down, before it reached the rapids, the current ran horribly
+smooth and strong, and here and there were jagged rocks just beneath the
+surface.
+
+Still Silver Tassel gained on him, as they both gained on the boy.
+Oshondonto swam strong and hard, but he swam with his eye on the struggle
+for the shore also; he was not putting forth his utmost strength, for he
+knew it would be bitterly needed, perhaps to save his own life by a last
+effort.
+
+Silver Tassel passed him when they were about fifty feet from the boy.
+Shooting by on his side, with a long stroke and the plunge of his body
+like a projectile, the dark face with the long black hair plastering it
+turned towards his own, in fierce triumph Silver Tassel cried "How!" in
+derision.
+
+Billy Rufus set his teeth and lay down to his work like a sportsman.  His
+face had lost its roses, and it was set and determined, but there was no
+look of fear upon it, nor did his heart sink when a cry of triumph went
+up from the crowd on the banks.  The white man knew by old experience in
+the cricket-field and in many a boat-race that it is well not to halloo
+till you are out of the woods.  His mettle was up, he was not the
+Reverend William Rufus Holly, missionary, but Billy Rufus, the champion
+cricketer, the sportsman playing a long game.
+
+Silver Tassel reached the boy, who was bruised and bleeding and at his
+last gasp, and throwing an arm round him, struck out for the shore.  The
+current was very strong, and he battled fiercely as Billy Rufus, not far
+above, moved down toward them at an angle.  For a few yards Silver Tassel
+was going strong, then his pace slackened, he seemed to sink lower in the
+water, and his stroke became splashing and irregular.  Suddenly he struck
+a rock, which bruised him badly, and, swerving from his course, he lost
+his stroke and let go the boy.
+
+By this time the mikonaree had swept beyond them, and he caught the boy
+by his long hair as he was being swept below.  Striking out for the
+shore, he swam with bold, strong strokes, his judgment guiding him well
+past rocks beneath the surface.  Ten feet from shore he heard a cry of
+alarm from above.  It concerned Silver Tassel, he knew, but he could not
+look round yet.
+
+In another moment the boy was dragged up the bank by strong hands, and
+Billy Rufus swung round in the water towards Silver Tassel, who, in his
+confused energy, had struck another rock, and, exhausted now, was being
+swept towards the rapids.  Silver Tassel's shoulder scarcely showed, his
+strength was gone.  In a flash Billy Rufus saw there was but one thing to
+do.  He must run the rapids with Silver Tassel-there was no other way.
+It would be a fight through the jaws of death; but no Indian's eyes had
+a better sense for river-life than William Rufus Holly's.
+
+How he reached Silver Tassel, and drew the Indian's arm over his own
+shoulder; how they drove down into the boiling flood; how Billy Rufus's
+fat body was battered and torn and ran red with blood from twenty flesh
+wounds; but how by luck beyond the telling he brought Silver Tassel
+through safely into the quiet water a quarter of a mile below the rapids,
+and was hauled out, both more dead than alive, is a tale still told by
+the Athabascas around their camp-fire.  The rapids are known to-day as
+the Mikonaree Rapids.
+
+The end of this beginning of the young man's career was that Silver
+Tassel gave him the word of eternal friendship, Knife-in-the-Wind took
+him into the tribe, and the boy Wingo became his very own, to share his
+home, and his travels, no longer a waif among the Athabascas.
+
+After three days' feasting, at the end of which the missionary held his
+first service and preached his first sermon, to the accompaniment of
+grunts of satisfaction from the whole tribe of Athabascas, William Rufus
+Holly began his work in the Far North.
+
+The journey to Fort O'Call was a procession of triumph, for, as it was
+summer, there was plenty of food, the missionary had been a success, and
+he had distributed many gifts of beads and flannel.
+
+All went well for many moons, although converts were uncertain and
+baptisms few, and the work was hard and the loneliness at times terrible.
+But at last came dark days.
+
+One summer and autumn there had been poor fishing and shooting, the
+caches of meat were fewer on the plains, and almost nothing had come up
+to Fort O'Call from Edmonton, far below.  The yearly supplies for the
+missionary, paid for out of his private income--the bacon, beans, tea,
+coffee and flour--had been raided by a band of hostile Indians, and he
+viewed with deep concern the progress of the severe winter.  Although
+three years of hard, frugal life had made his muscles like iron, they had
+only mellowed his temper, increased his flesh and rounded his face; nor
+did he look an hour older than on the day when he had won Wingo for his
+willing slave and devoted friend.
+
+He never resented the frequent ingratitude of the Indians; he said little
+when they quarrelled over the small comforts his little income brought
+them yearly from the South.  He had been doctor, lawyer, judge among
+them, although he interfered little in the larger disputes, and was
+forced to shut his eyes to intertribal enmities.  He had no deep faith
+that he could quite civilise them; he knew that their conversion was only
+on the surface, and he fell back on his personal influence with them.  By
+this he could check even the excesses of the worst man in the tribe, his
+old enemy, Silver Tassel of the bad heart, who yet was ready always to
+give a tooth for a tooth, and accepted the fact that he owed Oshondonto
+his life.
+
+When famine crawled across the plains to the doors of the settlement and
+housed itself at Fort O'Call, Silver Tassel acted badly, however, and
+sowed fault-finding among the thoughtless of the tribe.
+
+"What manner of Great Spirit is it who lets the food of his chief
+Oshondonto fall into the hands of the Blackfeet?" he said.  "Oshondonto
+says the Great Spirit hears.  What has the Great Spirit to say?  Let
+Oshondonto ask."
+
+Again, when they all were hungrier, he went among them with complaining
+words.  "If the white man's Great Spirit can do all things, let him give
+Oshondonto and the Athabascas food."
+
+The missionary did not know of Silver Tassel's foolish words, but he saw
+the downcast face of Knife-in-the-Wind, the sullen looks of the people;
+and he unpacked the box he had reserved jealously for the darkest days
+that might come.  For meal after meal he divided these delicacies among
+them--morsels of biscuit, and tinned meats, and dried fruits.  But his
+eyes meanwhile were turned again and again to the storm raging without,
+as it had raged for this the longest week he had ever spent.  If it would
+but slacken, a boat could go out to the nets set in the lake near by some
+days before, when the sun of spring had melted the ice.  From the hour
+the nets had been set the storm had raged.  On the day when the last
+morsel of meat and biscuit had been given away the storm had not abated,
+and he saw with misgiving the gloomy, stolid faces of the Indians round
+him.  One man, two children, and three women had died in a fortnight.  He
+dreaded to think what might happen, his heart ached at the looks of gaunt
+suffering in the faces of all; he saw, for the first time, how black and
+bitter Knife-in-the-Wind looked as Silver Tassel whispered to him.
+
+With the colour all gone from his cheeks, he left the post and made his
+way to the edge of the lake where his canoe was kept.  Making it ready
+for the launch, he came back to the Fort.  Assembling the Indians, who
+had watched his movements closely, he told them that he was going through
+the storm to the nets on the lake, and asked for a volunteer to go with
+him.
+
+No one replied.  He pleaded-for the sake of the women and children.
+
+Then Knife-in-the-Wind spoke.  "Oshondonto will die if he goes.  It is a
+fool's journey--does the wolverine walk into an empty trap?"
+
+Billy Rufus spoke passionately now.  His genial spirit fled; he
+reproached them.
+
+Silver Tassel spoke up loudly.  "Let Oshondonto's Great Spirit carry him
+to the nets alone, and back again with fish for the heathen the Great
+Chief died to save."
+
+"You have a wicked heart, Silver Tassel.  You know well that one man
+can't handle the boat and the nets also.  Is there no one of you--?"
+
+A figure shot forwards from a corner.  "I will go with Oshondonto," came
+the voice of Wingo, the waif of the Crees.
+
+The eye of the mikonaree flashed round in contempt on the tribe.  Then
+suddenly it softened, and he said to the lad:  "We will go together,
+Wingo."
+
+Taking the boy by the hand, he ran with him through the rough wind to the
+shore, launched the canoe on the tossing lake, and paddled away through
+the tempest.
+
+The bitter winds of an angry spring, the sleet and wet snow of a belated
+winter, the floating blocks of ice crushing against the side of the boat,
+the black water swishing over man and boy, the harsh, inclement world
+near and far.  .  .  .  The passage made at last to the nets; the brave
+Wingo steadying the canoe--a skilful hand sufficing where the strength of
+a Samson would not have availed; the nets half full, and the breaking cry
+of joy from the lips of the waif-a cry that pierced the storm and brought
+back an answering cry from the crowd of Indians on the far shore.  .  .
+The quarter-hour of danger in the tossing canoe; the nets too heavy to be
+dragged, and fastened to the thwarts instead; the canoe going shoreward
+jerkily, a cork on the waves with an anchor behind; heavier seas and
+winds roaring down on them as they slowly near the shore; and at last, in
+one awful moment, the canoe upset, and the man and the boy in the water.
+.  .  .  Then both clinging to the upturned canoe as it is driven nearer
+and nearer shore....  The boy washed off once, twice, and the man with
+his arm round clinging-clinging, as the shrieking storm answers to the
+calling of the Athabascas on the shore, and drives craft and fish and man
+and boy down upon the banks; no savage bold enough to plunge in to their
+rescue.  .  .  .  At last a rope thrown, a drowning man's wrists wound
+round it, his teeth set in it--and now, at last, a man and a heathen boy,
+both insensible, being carried to the mikonaree's but and laid upon two
+beds, one on either side of the small room, as the red sun goes slowly
+down.  .  .  .  The two still bodies on bearskins in the hut, and a
+hundred superstitious Indians flying from the face of death.  .  .  .
+The two alone in the light of the flickering fire; the many gone to feast
+on fish, the price of lives.
+
+But the price was not yet paid, for the man waked from insensibility--
+waked to see himself with the body of the boy beside him in the red light
+of the fires.
+
+For a moment his heart stopped beating, he turned sick and faint.
+Deserted by those for whom he risked his life!  .  .  .  How long had he
+lain there?  What time was it?  When was it that he had fought his way to
+the nets and back again-hours maybe?  And the dead boy there, Wingo, who
+had risked his life, also dead--how long?  His heart leaped--ah!  not
+hours, only minutes maybe.  It was sundown as unconsciousness came on
+him--Indians would not stay with the dead after sundown.  Maybe it was
+only ten minutes-five minutes--one minute ago since they left him!.  .  .
+
+His watch!  Shaking fingers drew it out, wild eyes scanned it.  It was
+not stopped.  Then it could have only been minutes ago.  Trembling to his
+feet, he staggered over to Wingo, he felt the body, he held a mirror to
+the lips.  Yes, surely there was light moisture on the glass.
+
+Then began another fight with death--William Rufus Holly struggling to
+bring to life again Wingo, the waif of the Crees.
+
+The blood came back to his own heart with a rush as the mad desire to
+save this life came on him.  He talked to the dumb face, he prayed in a
+kind of delirium, as he moved the arms up and down, as he tilted the
+body, as he rubbed, chafed and strove.  He forgot he was a missionary,
+he almost cursed himself.  "For them--for cowards, I risked his life,
+the brave lad with no home.  Oh, God!  give him back to me!" he sobbed.
+"What right had I to risk his life for theirs?  I should have shot the
+first man that refused to go....  Wingo, speak!  Wake up!  Come back!"
+
+The sweat poured from him in his desperation and weakness.  He said to
+himself that he had put this young life into the hazard without cause.
+Had he, then, saved the lad from the rapids and Silver Tassel's brutality
+only to have him drag fish out of the jaws of death for Silver Tassel's
+meal?
+
+It seemed to him that he had been working for hours, though it was in
+fact only a short time, when the eyes of the lad slowly opened and closed
+again, and he began to breathe spasmodically.  A cry of joy came from the
+lips of the missionary, and he worked harder still.  At last the eyes
+opened wide, stayed open, saw the figure bent over him, and the lips
+whispered, "Oshondonto--my master," as a cup of brandy was held to his
+lips.
+
+He had conquered the Athabascas for ever.  Even Silver Tassel
+acknowledged his power, and he as industriously spread abroad the
+report that the mikonaree had raised Wingo from the dead, as he had sown
+dissension during the famine.  But the result was that the missionary had
+power in the land, and the belief in him was so great, that, when Knife-
+in-the-Wind died, the tribe came to ask him to raise their chief from the
+dead.  They never quite believed that he could not--not even Silver
+Tassel, who now rules the Athabascas and is ruled by William Rufus Holly:
+which is a very good thing for the Athabascas.
+
+Billy Rufus the cricketer had won the game, and somehow the Reverend
+William Rufus Holly the missionary never repented the strong language he
+used against the Athabascas, as he was bringing Wingo back to life,
+though it was not what is called "strictly canonical."
+
+
+
+
+
+THE HEALING SPRINGS AND THE PIONEERS
+
+He came out of the mysterious South one summer day, driving before him a
+few sheep, a cow, and a long-eared mule which carried his tent and other
+necessaries, and camped outside the town on a knoll, at the base of which
+was a thicket of close shrub.  During the first day no one in Jansen
+thought anything of it, for it was a land of pilgrimage, and hundreds
+came and went on their journeys in search of free homesteads and good
+water and pasturage.  But when, after three days, he was still there,
+Nicolle Terasse, who had little to do, and an insatiable curiosity, went
+out to see him.  He found a new sensation for Jansen.  This is what he
+said when he came back:
+
+"You want know 'bout him, bagosh!  Dat is somet'ing to see, dat man--
+Ingles is his name.  Sooch hair--mooch long an' brown, and a leetla beard
+not so brown, an' a leather sole onto his feet, and a grey coat to his
+anklesyes, so like dat.  An' his voice--voila, it is like water in a
+cave.  He is a great man--I dunno not; but he spik at me like dis,
+'Is dere sick, and cripple, and stay in-bed people here dat can't get
+up?' he say.  An' I say, 'Not plenty, but some-bagosh!  Dere is dat Miss
+Greet, an' ole Ma'am Drouchy, an' dat young Pete Hayes--an' so on.'
+'Well, if they have faith I will heal them,' he spik at me.  'From de
+Healing Springs dey shall rise to walk,' he say.  Bagosh, you not t'ink
+dat true?  Den you go see."
+
+So Jansen turned out to see, and besides the man they found a curious
+thing.  At the foot of the knoll, in a space which he had cleared, was a
+hot spring that bubbled and rose and sank, and drained away into the
+thirsty ground.  Luck had been with Ingles the Faith Healer.  Whether he
+knew of the existence of this spring, or whether he chanced upon it, he
+did not say; but while he held Jansen in the palm of his hand, in the
+feverish days that followed, there were many who attached mysterious
+significance to it, who claimed for it supernatural origin.  In any case,
+the one man who had known of the existence of this spring was far away
+from Jansen, and he did not return till a day of reckoning came for the
+Faith Healer.
+
+Meanwhile Jansen made pilgrimage to the Springs of Healing, and at
+unexpected times Ingles suddenly appeared in the town, and stood at
+street corners; and in his "Patmian voice," as Flood Rawley the lawyer
+called it, warned the people to flee their sins, and purifying their
+hearts, learn to cure all ills of mind and body, the weaknesses of the
+sinful flesh and the "ancient evil" in their souls, by faith that saves.
+
+"'Is not the life more than meat'" he asked them.  "And if, peradventure,
+there be those among you who have true belief in hearts all purged of
+evil, and yet are maimed, or sick of body, come to me, and I will lay my
+hands upon you, and I will heal you."  Thus he cried.
+
+There were those so wrought upon by his strange eloquence and spiritual
+passion, so hypnotised by his physical and mental exaltation, that they
+rose up from the hand-laying and the prayer eased of their ailments.
+Others he called upon to lie in the hot spring at the foot of the hill
+for varying periods, before the laying on of hands, and these also,
+crippled, or rigid with troubles' of the bone, announced that they were
+healed.
+
+People flocked from other towns, and though, to some who had been cured,
+their pains and sickness returned, there were a few who bore perfect
+evidence to his teaching and healing, and followed him, "converted and
+consecrated," as though he were a new Messiah.  In this corner of the
+West was such a revival as none could remember--not even those who had
+been to camp meetings in the East in their youth, and had seen the Spirit
+descend upon hundreds and draw them to the anxious seat.
+
+Then came the great sensation--the Faith Healer converted Laura Sloly.
+Upon which Jansen drew its breath painfully; for, while it was willing
+to bend to the inspiration of the moment, and to be swept on a tide of
+excitement into that enchanted field called Imagination, it wanted to
+preserve its institutions--and Laura Sloly had come to be an institution.
+Jansen had always plumed itself, and smiled, when she passed; and even
+now the most sentimentally religious of them inwardly anticipated the
+time when the town would return to its normal condition; and that
+condition would not be normal if there were any change in Laura Sloly.
+It mattered little whether most people were changed or not because one
+state of their minds could not be less or more interesting than another;
+but a change in Laura.  Sloly could not be for the better.
+
+Her father had come to the West in the early days, and had prospered by
+degrees until a town grew up beside his ranch; and though he did not
+acquire as much permanent wealth from this golden chance as might have
+been expected, and lost much he did make by speculation, still he had his
+rich ranch left, and it, and he, and Laura were part of the history of
+Jansen.  Laura had been born at Jansen before even it had a name.  Next
+to her father she was the oldest inhabitant, and she had a prestige which
+was given to no one else.
+
+Everything had conspired to make her a figure of moment and interest.
+She was handsome in almost a mannish sort of way, being of such height
+and straightness, and her brown eyes had a depth and fire in which more
+than a few men had drowned themselves.  Also, once she had saved a
+settlement by riding ahead of a marauding Indian band to warn their
+intended victims, and had averted another tragedy of pioneer life.
+Pioneers proudly told strangers to Jansen of the girl of thirteen who
+rode a hundred and twenty miles without food, and sank inside the
+palisade of the Hudson's Bay Company's fort, as the gates closed upon the
+settlers taking refuge, the victim of brain fever at last.  Cerebrospinal
+meningitis, the doctor from Winnipeg called it, and the memory of that
+time when men and women would not sleep till her crisis was past, was
+still fresh on the tongues of all.
+
+Then she had married at seventeen, and, within a year, had lost both her
+husband and her baby, a child bereaved of her Playmates--for her husband
+had been but twenty years old and was younger far than she in everything.
+And since then, twelve years before, she had seen generations of lovers
+pass into the land they thought delectable; and their children flocked to
+her, hung about her, were carried off by her to the ranch, and kept for
+days, against the laughing protests of their parents.  Flood Rawley
+called her the Pied Piper of Jansen, and indeed she had a voice that
+fluted and piped, and yet had so whimsical a note, that the hardest faces
+softened at the sound of it; and she did not keep its best notes for the
+few.  She was impartial, almost impersonal; no woman was her enemy, and
+every man was her friend--and nothing more.  She had never had an
+accepted lover since the day her Playmates left her.  Every man except
+one had given up hope that he might win her; and though he had been gone
+from Jansen for two years, and had loved her since the days before the
+Playmates came and went, he never gave up hope, and was now to return and
+say again what he had mutely said for years--what she understood, and he
+knew she understood.
+
+Tim Denton had been a wild sort in his brief day.  He was a rough
+diamond, but he was a diamond, and was typical of the West--its heart,
+its courage, its freedom, and its force; capable of exquisite gentleness,
+strenuous to exaggeration, with a very primitive religion; and the only
+religion Tim knew was that of human nature.  Jansen did not think Tim
+good enough--not within a comet shot--for Laura Sloly; but they thought
+him better than any one else.
+
+But now Laura was a convert to the prophet of the Healing Springs,
+and those people who still retain their heads in the eddy of religious
+emotion were in despair.  They dreaded to meet Laura; they kept away from
+the "protracted meetings," but were eager to hear about her and what she
+said and did.  What they heard allayed their worst fears.  She still
+smiled, and seemed as cheerful as before, they heard, and she neither
+spoke nor prayed in public, but she led the singing always.  Now the
+anxious and the sceptical and the reactionary ventured out to see and
+hear; and seeing and hearing gave them a satisfaction they hardly dared
+express.  She was more handsome than ever, and if her eyes glistened with
+a light they had never seen before, and awed them, her lips still smiled,
+and the old laugh came when she spoke to them.  Their awe increased.
+This was "getting religion" with a difference.
+
+But presently they received a shock.  A whisper grew that Laura was in
+love with the Faith Healer.  Some woman's instinct drove straight to the
+centre of a disconcerting possibility, and in consternation she told her
+husband; and Jansen husbands had a freemasonry of gossip.  An hour, and
+all Jansen knew, or thought they knew; and the "saved" rejoiced; and the
+rest of the population, represented by Nicolle Terasse at one end and
+Flood Rawley at the other, flew to arms.  No vigilance committee was ever
+more determined and secret and organised than the unconverted civic
+patriots, who were determined to restore Jansen to its old-time
+condition.  They pointed out cold-bloodedly that the Faith Healer had
+failed three times where he had succeeded once; and that, admitting the
+successes, there was no proof that his religion was their cause.  There
+were such things as hypnotism and magnetism and will-power, and abnormal
+mental stimulus on the part of the healed--to say nothing of the Healing
+Springs.
+
+Carefully laying their plans, they quietly spread the rumour that Ingles
+had promised to restore to health old Mary Jewell, who had been bedridden
+ten years, and had sent word and prayed to have him lay his hands upon
+her--Catholic though she was.  The Faith Healer, face to face with this
+supreme and definite test, would have retreated from it but for Laura
+Sloly.  She expected him to do it, believed that he could, said that he
+would, herself arranged the day and the hour, and sang so much exaltation
+into him, that at last a spurious power seemed to possess him.  He felt
+that there had entered into him something that could be depended on,
+not the mere flow of natural magnetism fed by an outdoor life and a
+temperament of great emotional force, and chance, and suggestion--
+and other things.  If, at first, he had influenced Laura, some ill-
+controlled, latent idealism in him, working on a latent poetry and
+spirituality in her, somehow bringing her into nearer touch with her
+lost Playmates than she had been in the long years that had passed;
+she, in turn, had made his unrationalised brain reel; had caught him up
+into a higher air, on no wings of his own; had added another lover to her
+company of lovers--and the first impostor she had ever had.  She who
+had known only honest men as friends, in one blind moment lost her
+perspicuous sense; her instinct seemed asleep.  She believed in the man
+and in his healing.  Was there anything more than that?
+
+The day of the great test came, hot, brilliant, vivid.  The air was of
+a delicate sharpness, and, as it came toward evening, the glamour of an
+August when the reapers reap was upon Jansen; and its people gathered
+round the house of Mary Jewell to await the miracle of faith.  Apart
+from the emotional many who sang hymns and spiritual songs were a few
+determined men, bent on doing justice to Jansen though the heavens might
+fall.  Whether or no Laura Sloly was in love with the Faith Healer,
+Jansen must look to its own honour--and hers.  In any case, this
+peripatetic saint at Sloly's Ranch--the idea was intolerable;
+women must be saved in spite of themselves.
+
+Laura was now in the house by the side of the bedridden Mary Jewell,
+waiting, confident, smiling, as she held the wasted hand on the coverlet.
+With her was a minister of the Baptist persuasion, who was swimming with
+the tide, and who approved of the Faith Healer's immersions in the hot
+Healing Springs; also a medical student who had pretended belief in
+Ingles, and two women weeping with unnecessary remorse for human failings
+of no dire kind.  The windows were open, and those outside could see.
+Presently, in a lull of the singing, there was a stir in the crowd, and
+then, sudden loud greetings:
+
+"My, if it ain't Tim Denton!  Jerusalem!  You back, Tim!"
+
+These and other phrases caught the ear of Laura Sloly in the sick-room.
+A strange look flashed across her face, and the depth of her eyes was
+troubled for a moment, as to the face of the old comes a tremor at the
+note of some long-forgotten song.  Then she steadied herself and waited,
+catching bits of the loud talk which still floated towards her from
+without.
+
+"What's up?  Some one getting married--or a legacy, or a saw-off?  Why,
+what a lot of Sunday-go-to-meeting folks to be sure!" Tim laughed
+loudly.
+
+After which the quick tongue of Nicolle Terasse: "You want know?  Tiens,
+be quiet; here he come.  He cure you body and soul, ver' queeck--yes."
+
+The crowd swayed and parted, and slowly, bare head uplifted, face looking
+to neither right nor left, the Faith Healer made his way to the door of
+the little house.  The crowd hushed.  Some were awed, some were
+overpoweringly interested, some were cruelly patient.  Nicolle Terasse
+and others were whispering loudly to Tim Denton.  That was the only
+sound, until the Healer got to the door.  Then, on the steps, he turned
+to the multitude.
+
+"Peace be to you all, and upon this house," he said and stepped through
+the doorway.
+
+Tim Denton, who had been staring at the face of the Healer, stood for an
+instant like one with all his senses arrested.  Then he gasped, and
+exclaimed, "Well, I'm eternally--" and broke off with a low laugh,
+which was at first mirthful, and then became ominous and hard.
+
+"Oh, magnificent--magnificent--jerickety!" he said into the sky above
+him.
+
+His friends who were not "saved," closed in on him to find the meaning
+of his words, but he pulled himself together, looked blankly at them, and
+asked them questions.  They told him so much more than he cared to hear,
+that his face flushed a deep red--the bronze of it most like the colour
+of Laura Sloly's hair; then he turned pale.  Men saw that he was roused
+beyond any feeling in themselves.
+
+"'Sh!" he said.  "Let's see what he can do."  With the many who were
+silently praying, as they had been, bidden to do, the invincible ones
+leant forwards, watching the little room where healing--or tragedy--was
+afoot.  As in a picture, framed by the window, they saw the kneeling
+figures, the Healer standing with outstretched arms.  They heard his
+voice, sonorous and appealing, then commanding--and yet Mary Jewell did
+not rise from her bed and walk.  Again, and yet again, the voice rang
+out, and still the woman lay motionless.  Then he laid his hands upon
+her, and again he commanded her to rise.
+
+There was a faint movement, a desperate struggle to obey, but Nature and
+Time and Disease had their way.  Yet again there was the call.  An agony
+stirred the bed.  Then another great Healer came between, and mercifully
+dealt the sufferer a blow--Death has a gentle hand sometimes.  Mary
+Jewell was bedridden still--and for ever.
+
+Like a wind from the mountains the chill knowledge of death wailed
+through the window, and over the heads of the crowd.  All the figures
+were upright now in the little room.  Then those outside saw Laura Sloly
+lean over and close the sightless eyes.  This done, she came to the door
+and opened it, and motioned for the Healer to leave.  He hesitated,
+hearing the harsh murmur from the outskirts of the crowd.  Once again she
+motioned, and he came.  With a face deadly pale she surveyed the people
+before her silently for a moment, her eyes all huge and staring.
+
+Presently she turned to Ingles and spoke to him quickly in a low voice;
+then, descending the steps, passed out through the lane made for her by
+the crowd, he following with shaking limbs and bowed bead.
+
+Warning words had passed among the few invincible ones who waited where
+the Healer must pass into the open, and there was absolute stillness as
+Laura advanced.  Their work was to come--quiet and swift and sure; but
+not yet.
+
+Only one face Laura saw, as she led the way to the moment's safety--Tim
+Denton's; and it was as stricken as her own.  She passed, then turned,
+and looked at him again.  He understood; she wanted him.
+
+He waited till she sprang into her waggon, after the Healer had mounted
+his mule and ridden away with ever-quickening pace into the prairie.
+Then he turned to the set, fierce men beside him.
+
+"Leave him alone," he said, "leave him to me.  I know him.  You hear?
+Ain't I no rights?  I tell you I knew him--South.  You leave him to me."
+
+They nodded, and he sprang into his saddle and rode away.  They watched
+the figure of the Healer growing smaller in the dusty distance.
+
+"Tim'll go to her," one said, "and perhaps they'll let the snake get off.
+Hadn't we best make sure?"
+
+"Perhaps you'd better let him vamoose," said Flood Rawley anxiously.
+"Jansen is a law-abiding place!" The reply was decisive.  Jansen had its
+honour to keep.  It was the home of the Pioneers--Laura Sloly was a
+Pioneer.
+
+Tim Denton was a Pioneer, with all the comradeship which lay in the word,
+and he was that sort of lover who has seen one woman, and can never see
+another--not the product of the most modern civilisation.  Before Laura
+had had Playmates he had given all he had to give; he had waited and
+hoped ever since; and when the ruthless gossips had said to him before
+Mary Jewell's house that she was in love with the Faith Healer, nothing
+changed in him.  For the man, for Ingles, Tim belonged to a primitive
+breed, and love was not in his heart.  As he rode out to Sloly's Ranch,
+he ground his teeth in rage.  But Laura had called him to her, and:
+"Well, what you say goes, Laura," he muttered at the end of a long hour
+of human passion and its repression.  "If he's to go scot-free, then he's
+got to go; but the boys yonder'll drop on me, if he gets away.  Can't you
+see what a swab he is, Laura?"
+
+The brown eyes of the girl looked at him gently.  The struggle between
+them was over; she had had her way--to save the preacher, impostor though
+he was; and now she felt, as she had never felt before in the same
+fashion, that this man was a man of men.
+
+"Tim, you do not understand," she urged.  "You say he was a landsharp in
+the South, and that he had to leave-"
+
+"He had to vamoose, or take tar and feathers."
+
+"But he had to leave.  And he came here preaching and healing; and he is
+a hypocrite and a fraud--I know that now, my eyes are opened.  He didn't
+do what he said he could do, and it killed Mary Jewell--the shock; and
+there were other things he said he could do, and he didn't do them.
+Perhaps he is all bad, as you say--I don't think so.  But he did some
+good things, and through him I've felt as I've never felt before about
+God and life, and about Walt and the baby--as though I'll see them again,
+sure.  I've never felt that before.  It was all as if they were lost in
+the hills, and no trail home, or out to where they are.  Like as not God
+was working in him all the time, Tim; and he failed because he counted
+too much on the little he had, and made up for what he hadn't by what he
+pretended."
+
+"He can pretend to himself, or God Almighty, or that lot down there"--he
+jerked a finger towards the town--"but to you, a girl, and a Pioneer--"
+
+A flash of humour shot into her eyes at his last words, then they filled
+with tears, through which the smile shone.  To pretend to "a Pioneer"--
+the splendid vanity and egotism of the West!
+
+"He didn't pretend to me, Tim.  People don't usually have to pretend to
+like me."
+
+"You know what I'm driving at."
+
+"Yes, yes, I know.  And whatever he is, you've said that you will save
+him.  I'm straight, you know that.  Somehow, what I felt from his
+preaching--well, everything got sort of mixed up with him, and he was--
+was different.  It was like the long dream of Walt and the baby, and he a
+part of it.  I don't know what I felt, or what I might have felt for him.
+I'm a woman--I can't understand.  But I know what I feel now.  I never
+want to see him again on earth--or in Heaven.  It needn't be necessary
+even in Heaven; but what happened between God and me through him stays,
+Tim; and so you must help him get away safe.  It's in your hands--you say
+they left it to you."
+
+"I don't trust that too much."
+
+Suddenly he pointed out of the window towards the town.  "See, I'm right;
+there they are, a dozen of 'em mounted.  They're off, to run him down."
+
+Her face paled; she glanced towards the Hill of Healing.  "He's got an
+hour's start," she said; "he'll get into the mountains and be safe."
+
+"If they don't catch him 'fore that."
+
+"Or if you don't get to him first," she said, with nervous insistence.
+
+He turned to her with a hard look; then, as he met her soft, fearless,
+beautiful eyes, his own grew gentle.  "It takes a lot of doing.  Yet I'll
+do it for you, Laura," he said.  "But it's hard on the Pioneers."  Once
+more her humour flashed, and it seemed to him that "getting religion" was
+not so depressing after all--wouldn't be, anyhow, when this nasty job was
+over.  "The Pioneers will get over it, Tim," she rejoined.  "They've
+swallowed a lot in their time.  Heaven's gate will have to be pretty
+wide to let in a real Pioneer," she added.  "He takes up so much room--
+ah, Timothy Denton!" she added, with an outburst of whimsical merriment.
+
+"It hasn't spoiled you--being converted, has it?" he, said, and gave a
+quick little laugh, which somehow did more for his ancient cause with her
+than all he had ever said or done.  Then he stepped outside and swung
+into his saddle.
+
+It had been a hard and anxious ride, but Tim had won, and was keeping his
+promise.  The night had fallen before he got to the mountains, which he
+and the Pioneers had seen the Faith Healer enter.  They had had four
+miles' start of Tim, and had ridden fiercely, and they entered the gulch
+into which the refugee had disappeared still two miles ahead.
+
+The invincibles had seen Tim coming, but they had determined to make a
+sure thing of it, and would themselves do what was necessary with the
+impostor, and take no chances.  So they pressed their horses, and he saw
+them swallowed by the trees, as darkness gathered.  Changing his course,
+he entered the familiar hills, which he knew better than any pioneer of
+Jansen, and rode a diagonal course over the trail they would take.  But
+night fell suddenly, and there was nothing to do but to wait till
+morning.  There was comfort in this--the others must also wait, and the
+refugee could not go far.  In any case, he must make for settlement or
+perish, since he had left behind his sheep and his cow.
+
+It fell out better than Tim hoped.  The Pioneers were as good hunters as
+was he, their instinct was as sure, their scouts and trackers were many,
+and he was but one.  They found the Faith Healer by a little stream,
+eating bread and honey, and, like an ancient woodlander drinking from a
+horn--relics of his rank imposture.  He made no resistance.  They tried
+him formally, if perfunctorily; he admitted his imposture, and begged for
+his life.  Then they stripped him naked, tied a bit of canvas round his
+waist, fastened him to a tree, and were about to complete his punishment
+when Tim Denton burst upon them.
+
+Whether the rage Tim showed was all real or not; whether his accusations
+of bad faith came from so deeply wounded a spirit as he would have them
+believe, he was not likely to tell; but he claimed the prisoner as his
+own, and declined to say what he meant to do.
+
+When, however, they saw the abject terror of the Faith Healer as he
+begged not to be left alone with Tim--for they had not meant death,
+and Ingles thought he read death in Tim's ferocious eyes--they laughed
+cynically, and left it to Tim to uphold the honour of Jansen and the
+Pioneers.
+
+As they disappeared, the last thing they saw was Tim with his back to
+them, his hands on his hips, and a knife clasped in his fingers.
+
+"He'll lift his scalp and make a monk of him," chuckled the oldest and
+hardest of them.
+
+"Dat Tim will cut his heart out, I t'ink-bagosh!" said Nicolle Terasse,
+and took a drink of white-whiskey.  For a long time Tim stood looking at
+the other, until no sound came from the woods, whither the Pioneers had
+gone.  Then at last, slowly, and with no roughness, as the terror-
+stricken impostor shrank and withered, he cut the cords.
+
+"Dress yourself," he said shortly, and sat down beside the stream, and
+washed his face and hands, as though to cleanse them from contamination.
+He appeared to take no notice of the other, though his ears keenly noted
+every movement.
+
+The impostor dressed nervously, yet slowly; he scarce comprehended
+anything, except that he was not in immediate danger.  When he had
+finished, he stood looking at Tim, who was still seated on a log plunged
+in meditation.
+
+It seemed hours before Tim turned round, and now his face was quiet,
+if set and determined.  He walked slowly over, and stood looking at his
+victim for some time without speaking.  The other's eyes dropped, and
+a greyness stole over his features.  This steely calm was even more
+frightening than the ferocity which had previously been in his captor's
+face.  At length the tense silence was broken.
+
+"Wasn't the old game good enough?  Was it played out?  Why did you take
+to this?  Why did you do it, Scranton?"
+
+The voice quavered a little in reply.  "I don't know.  Something sort of
+pushed me into it."
+
+"How did you come to start it?"
+
+There was a long silence, then the husky reply came.  "I got a sickener
+last time--"
+
+"Yes, I remember, at Waywing."
+
+"I got into the desert, and had hard times--awful for a while.  I hadn't
+enough to eat, and I didn't know whether I'd die by hunger, or fever, or
+Indians--or snakes."
+
+"Oh, you were seeing snakes!" said Tim grimly.
+
+"Not the kind you mean; I hadn't anything to drink--"
+
+"No, you never did drink, I remember--just was crooked, and slopped over
+women.  Well, about the snakes?"
+
+"I caught them to eat, and they were poison-snakes often.  And I wasn't
+quick at first to get them safe by the neck--they're quick, too."
+
+Tim laughed inwardly.  "Getting your food by the sweat of your brow--and
+a snake in it, same as Adam!  Well, was it in the desert you got your
+taste for honey, too, same as John the Baptist--that was his name, if I
+recomember?"  He looked at the tin of honey on the ground.
+
+"Not in the desert, but when I got to the grass-country."
+
+"How long were you in the desert?"
+
+"Close to a year."
+
+Tim's eyes opened wider.  He saw that the man was speaking the truth.
+
+"Got to thinking in the desert, and sort of willing things to come to
+pass, and mooning along, you, and the sky, and the vultures, and the hot
+hills, and the snakes, and the flowers--eh?"
+
+"There weren't any flowers till I got to the grass-country."
+
+"Oh, cuss me, if you ain't simple for your kind!  I know all about that.
+And when you got to the grass-country, you just picked up the honey, and
+the flowers, and a calf, and a lamb, and a mule here and there, 'without
+money and without price,' and walked on--that it?"
+
+The other shrank before the steel in the voice, and nodded his head.
+
+"But you kept thinking in the grass-country of what you'd felt and said
+and done--and willed, in the desert, I suppose?"
+
+Again the other nodded.
+
+"It seemed to you in the desert, as if you'd saved your own life a
+hundred times, as if you'd just willed food and drink and safety to come;
+as if Providence had been at your elbow?"
+
+"It was like a dream, and it stayed with me.  I had to think in the
+desert things I'd never thought before," was the half-abstracted answer.
+
+"You felt good in the desert?"  The other hung his head in shame.
+
+"Makes you seem pretty small, doesn't it?  You didn't stay long enough,
+I guess, to get what you were feeling for; you started in on the new
+racket too soon.  You never got really possessed that you was a sinner.
+I expect that's it."
+
+The other made no reply.
+
+"Well, I don't know much about such things.  I was loose brought up; but
+I've a friend"--Laura was before his eyes--"that says religion's all
+right, and long ago as I can remember my mother used to pray three times
+a day--with grace at meals, too.  I know there's a lot in it for them
+that need it; and there seems to be a lot of folks needing it, if I'm to
+judge by folks down there at Jansen, specially when there's the laying-on
+of hands and the Healing Springs.  Oh, that was a pigsty game, Scranton,
+that about God giving you the Healing Springs, like Moses and the rock!
+Why, I discovered them springs myself two years ago, before I went South,
+and I guess God wasn't helping me any--not after I've kept out of His way
+as I have.  But, anyhow, religion's real; that's my sense of it; and you
+can get it, I bet, if you try.  I've seen it got.  A friend of mine got
+it--got it under your preaching; not from you; but you was the accident
+that brought it about, I expect.  It's funny--it's merakilous, but it's
+so.  Kneel down!" he added, with peremptory suddenness.  "Kneel,
+Scranton!"
+
+In fear the other knelt.
+
+"You're going to get religion now--here.  You're going to pray for what
+you didn't get--and almost got--in the desert.  You're going to ask
+forgiveness for all your damn tricks, and pray like a fanning-mill for
+the spirit to come down.  You ain't a scoundrel at heart--a friend of
+mine says so.  You're a weak vessel, cracked, perhaps.  You've got to
+be saved, and start right over again--and 'Praise God from whom all
+blessings flow!'  Pray--pray, Scranton, and tell the whole truth,
+and get it--get religion.  Pray like blazes.  You go on, and pray out
+loud.  Remember the desert, and Mary Jewell, and your mother--did you
+have a mother, Scranton--say, did you have a mother, lad?"
+
+Tim's voice suddenly lowered before the last word, for the Faith Healer
+had broken down in a torrent of tears.
+
+"Oh, my mother--O God!" he groaned.
+
+"Say, that's right--that's right--go on," said the other, and drew back a
+little, and sat down on a log.  The man on his knees was convulsed with
+misery.  Denton, the world, disappeared.  He prayed in agony.  Presently
+Tim moved uneasily, then got up and walked about; and at last, with a
+strange, awed look, when an hour was past, he stole back into the shadow
+of the trees, while still the wounded soul poured out its misery and
+repentance.
+
+Time moved on.  A curious shyness possessed Tim now, a thing which he had
+never felt in his life.  He moved about self-consciously, awkwardly,
+until at last there was a sudden silence over by the brook.
+
+Tim looked, and saw the face of the kneeling man cleared, and quiet and
+shining.  He hesitated, then stepped out, and came over.
+
+"Have you got it?" he asked quietly.  "It's noon now."
+
+"May God help me to redeem my past," answered the other in a new voice.
+
+"You've got it--sure?"  Tim's voice was meditative.  "God has spoken to
+me," was the simple answer.  "I've got a friend'll be glad to hear that,"
+he said; and once more, in imagination, he saw Laura Sloly standing at
+the door of her home, with a light in her eyes he had never seen before.
+
+"You'll want some money for your journey?" Tim asked.
+
+"I want nothing but to go away--far away," was the low reply.
+
+"Well, you've lived in the desert--I guess you can live in the grass-
+country," came the dry response.  "Good-bye-and good luck, Scranton."
+
+Tim turned to go, moved on a few steps, then looked back.
+
+"Don't be afraid--they'll not follow," he said.  "I'll fix it for you all
+right."
+
+But the man appeared not to hear; he was still on his knees.
+
+Tim faced the woods once more.
+
+He was about to mount his horse when he heard a step behind him.  He
+turned sharply--and faced Laura.  "I couldn't rest.  I came out this
+morning.  I've seen everything," she said.
+
+"You didn't trust me," he said heavily.
+
+"I never did anything else," she answered.
+
+He gazed half-fearfully into her eyes.  "Well?" he asked.  "I've done my
+best, as I said I would."
+
+"Tim," she said, and slipped a hand in his, "would you mind the religion
+--if you had me?"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LITTLE WIDOW OF JANSEN
+
+Her advent to Jansen was propitious.  Smallpox in its most virulent form
+had broken out in the French-Canadian portion of the town, and, coming
+with some professional nurses from the East, herself an amateur, to
+attend the sufferers, she worked with such skill and devotion that the
+official thanks of the Corporation were offered her, together with a tiny
+gold watch, the gift of grateful citizens.  But she still remained on at
+Jansen, saying always, however, that she was "going East in the spring."
+
+Five years had passed, and still she had not gone East, but remained
+perched in the rooms she had first taken, over the Imperial Bank, while
+the town grew up swiftly round her.  And even when the young bank manager
+married, and wished to take over the rooms, she sent him to the right-
+about from his own premises in her gay, masterful way.  The young manager
+behaved well in the circumstances, because he had asked her to marry him,
+and she had dismissed him with a warning against challenging his own
+happiness--that was the way she had put it.  Perhaps he was galled the
+less because others had striven for the same prize, and had been thrust
+back, with an almost tender misgiving as to their sense of self-
+preservation and sanity.  Some of them were eligible enough, and all were
+of some position in the West.  Yet she smiled them firmly away, to the
+wonder of Jansen, and to its satisfaction,  for was it not a tribute to
+all that she would distinguish no particular unit by her permanent
+favour?  But for one so sprightly and almost frivolous in manner at
+times, the self-denial seemed incongruous.  She was unconventional enough
+to sit on the side-walk with a half-dozen children round her blowing
+bubbles, or to romp in any garden, or in the street, playing Puss-in-the-
+ring; yet this only made her more popular.  Jansen's admiration was at
+its highest, however, when she rode in the annual steeplechase with the
+best horsemen of the province.  She had the gift of doing as well as of
+being.
+
+"'Tis the light heart she has, and slippin' in and out of things like a
+humming-bird, no easier to ketch, and no longer to stay," said Finden,
+the rich Irish landbroker, suggestively to Father Bourassa, the huge
+French-Canadian priest who had worked with her through all the dark weeks
+of the smallpox epidemic, and who knew what lay beneath the outer gaiety.
+She had been buoyant of spirit beside the beds of the sick, and her words
+were full of raillery and humour, yet there was ever a gentle note behind
+all; and the priest had seen her eyes shining with tears, as she bent
+over some stricken sufferer bound upon an interminable journey.
+
+"Bedad!  as bright a little spark as ever struck off the steel," added
+Finden to the priest, with a sidelong, inquisitive look, "but a heart no
+bigger than a marrowfat pea-selfishness, all self.  Keepin' herself for
+herself when there's manny a good man needin' her.  Mother o' Moses, how
+manny!  From Terry O'Ryan, brother of a peer, at Latouche, to Bernard
+Bapty, son of a millionaire, at Vancouver, there's a string o' them.  All
+pride and self; and as fair a lot they've been as ever entered for the
+Marriage Cup.  Now, isn't that so, father?"
+
+Finden's brogue did not come from a plebeian origin.  It was part of his
+commercial equipment, an asset of his boyhood spent among the peasants on
+the family estate in Galway.
+
+Father Bourassa fanned himself with the black broadbrim hat he wore, and
+looked benignly but quizzically on the wiry, sharp-faced Irishman.
+
+"You t'ink her heart is leetla.  But perhaps it is your mind not so big
+enough to see--hein?"  The priest laughed noiselessly, showing white
+teeth.  "Was it so selfish in Madame to refuse the name of Finden--
+n'est-ce pas?"
+
+Finden flushed, then burst into a laugh.  "I'd almost forgotten I was one
+of them--the first almost.  Blessed be he that expects nothing, for he'll
+get it, sure.  It was my duty, and I did it.  Was she to feel that Jansen
+did not price her high?  Bedad, father, I rose betimes and did it, before
+anny man should say he set me the lead.  Before the carpet in the parlour
+was down, and with the bare boards soundin' to my words, I offered her
+the name of Finden."
+
+"And so--the first of the long line!  Bien, it is an honour."  The priest
+paused a moment, looked at Finden with a curious reflective look, and
+then said: "And so you t'ink there is no one; that she will say yes not
+at all--no?"
+
+They were sitting on Father Bourassa's veranda, on the outskirts of the
+town, above the great river, along which had travelled millions of bygone
+people, fighting, roaming, hunting, trapping; and they could hear it
+rushing past, see the swirling eddies, the impetuous currents, the
+occasional rafts moving majestically down the stream.  They were facing
+the wild North, where civilisation was hacking and hewing and ploughing
+its way to newer and newer cities, in an empire ever spreading to the
+Pole.
+
+Finden's glance loitered on this scene before he replied.  At length,
+screwing up one eye, and with a suggestive smile, he answered: "Sure,
+it's all a matter of time, to the selfishest woman.  'Tis not the same
+with women as with men; you see, they don't get younger--that's a point.
+But"--he gave a meaning glance at the priest--"but perhaps she's not
+going to wait for that, after all.  And there he rides, a fine figure of
+a man, too, if I have to say it!"
+
+"M'sieu' Varley?" the priest responded, and watched a galloping horseman
+to whom Finden had pointed, till he rounded the corner of a little wood.
+
+"Varley, the great London surgeon, sure!  Say, father, it's a hundred to
+one she'd take him, if--"
+
+There was a curious look in Father Bourassa's face, a cloud in his eyes.
+He sighed.  "London, it is ver' far away," he remarked obliquely.
+
+"What's to that?  If she is with the right man, near or far is nothing."
+
+"So far--from home," said the priest reflectively, but his eyes furtively
+watched the other's face.
+
+"But home's where man and wife are."
+
+The priest now looked him straight in the eyes.  "Then, as you say, she
+will not marry M'sieu' Varley--hein?"
+
+The humour died out of Finden's face.  His eyes met the priest's eyes
+steadily.  "Did I say that?  Then my tongue wasn't making a fool of me,
+after all.  How did you guess I knew--everything, father?"
+
+"A priest knows many t'ings--so."
+
+There was a moment of gloom, then the Irishman brightened.  He came
+straight to the heart of the mystery around which they had been
+maneuvering.  "Have you seen her husband--Meydon--this year?  It isn't
+his usual time to come yet."
+
+Father Bourassa's eyes drew those of his friend into, the light of a new
+understanding and revelation.  They understood and trusted each other.
+
+"Helas!  He is there in the hospital," he answered, and nodded towards
+a building not far away, which had been part of an old Hudson's Bay
+Company's fort.  It had been hastily adapted as a hospital for the
+smallpox victims.
+
+"Oh, it's Meydon, is it, that bad case I heard of to-day?"
+
+The priest nodded again and 'pointed.  "Voila, Madame Meydon, she is
+coming.  She has seen him--her hoosban'."
+
+Finden's eyes followed the gesture.  The little widow of Jansen was
+coming from the hospital, walking slowly towards the river.
+
+"As purty a woman, too--as purty and as straight bewhiles.  What is the
+matter with him--with Meydon?" Finden asked, after a moment.
+
+"An accident in the woods--so.  He arrive, it is las' night, from Great
+Slave Lake."
+
+Finden sighed.  "Ten years ago he was a man to look at twice--before he
+did It and got away.  Now his own mother wouldn't know him--bad 'cess to
+him!  I knew him from the cradle almost.  I spotted him here by a knife-
+cut I gave him in the hand when we were lads together.  A divil of a
+timper always both of us had, but the good-nature was with me, and I
+didn't drink and gamble and carry a pistol.  It's ten years since he did
+the killing, down in Quebec, and I don't suppose the police will get him
+now.  He's been counted dead.  I recognised him here the night after I
+asked her how she liked the name of Finden.  She doesn't know that I ever
+knew him.  And he didn't recognise me-twenty-five years since we met
+before!  It would be better if he went under the sod.  Is he pretty sick,
+father?"
+
+"He will die unless the surgeon's knife it cure him before twenty-four
+hours, and--"
+
+"And Doctor Brydon is sick, and Doctor Hadley away at Winnipeg, and this
+is two hundred miles from nowhere!  It looks as if the police'll never
+get him, eh?"
+
+"You have not tell any one--never?"
+
+Finden laughed.  "Though I'm not a priest, I can lock myself up as tight
+as anny.  There's no tongue that's so tied, when tying's needed, as the
+one that babbles most bewhiles.  Babbling covers a lot of secrets."
+
+"So you t'ink it better Meydon should die, as Hadley is away and Brydon
+is sick-hein?"
+
+"Oh, I think--"
+
+Finden stopped short, for a horse's hoofs sounded on the turf beside the
+house, and presently Varley, the great London surgeon, rounded the corner
+and stopped his horse in front of the veranda.
+
+He lifted his hat to the priest.  "I hear there's a bad case at the
+hospital," he said.
+
+"It is ver' dangerous," answered Father Bourassa; "but, voila, come in!
+There is something cool to drink.  Ah yes, he is ver' bad, that man from
+the Great Slave Lake."
+
+Inside the house, with the cooling drinks, Varley pressed his questions,
+and presently, much interested, told at some length of singular cases
+which had passed through his hands--one a man with his neck broken, who
+had lived for six months afterward.
+
+"Broken as a man's neck is broken by hanging--dislocation, really--the
+disjointing of the medulla oblongata, if you don't mind technicalities,"
+he said.  "But I kept him living just the same.  Time enough for him to
+repent in and get ready to go.  A most interesting case.  He was a
+criminal, too, and wanted to die; but you have to keep life going if
+you can, to the last inch of resistance."
+
+The priest looked thoughtfully out of the window; Finden's eyes were
+screwed up in a questioning way, but neither made any response to
+Varley's remarks.  There was a long minute's silence.  They were all
+three roused by hearing a light footstep on the veranda.
+
+Father Bourassa put down his glass and hastened into the hallway.  Finden
+caught a glimpse of a woman's figure, and, without a word, passed
+abruptly from the dining-room where they were, into the priest's study,
+leaving Varley alone.  Varley turned to look after him, stared, and
+shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"The manners of the West," he said good-humouredly, and turned again to
+the hallway, from whence came the sound of the priest's voice.  Presently
+there was another voice--a woman's.  He flushed slightly and
+involuntarily straightened himself.
+
+"Valerie," he murmured.
+
+An instant afterwards she entered the room with the priest.  She was
+dressed in a severely simple suit of grey, which set off to advantage her
+slim, graceful figure.  There seemed no reason why she should have been
+called the little widow of Jansen, for she was not small, but she was
+very finely and delicately made, and the name had been but an expression
+of Jansen's paternal feeling for her.  She had always had a good deal of
+fresh colour, but to-day she seemed pale, though her eyes had a strange
+disturbing light.  It was not that they brightened on seeing this man
+before her; they had been brighter, burningly bright, when she left the
+hospital, where, since it had been built, she had been the one visitor of
+authority--Jansen had given her that honour.  She had a gift of smiling,
+and she smiled now, but it came from grace of mind rather than from
+humour.  As Finden had said, "She was for ever acting, and never doin'
+any harm by it."
+
+Certainly she was doing no harm by it now; nevertheless, it was acting.
+Could it be otherwise, with what was behind her life--a husband who had
+ruined her youth, had committed homicide, had escaped capture, but who
+had not subsequently died, as the world believed he had done, so
+circumstantial was the evidence.  He was not man enough to make the
+accepted belief in his death a fact.  What could she do but act, since
+the day she got a letter from the Far North, which took her out to
+Jansen, nominally to nurse those stricken with smallpox under Father
+Bourassa's care, actually to be where her wretched husband could come
+to her once a year, as he had asked with an impossible selfishness?
+
+Each year she had seen him for an hour or less, giving him money,
+speaking to him over a gulf so wide that it seemed sometimes as though
+her voice could not be heard across it; each year opening a grave to look
+at the embalmed face of one who had long since died in shame, which only
+brought back the cruellest of all memories, that which one would give
+one's best years to forget.  With a fortitude beyond description she had
+faced it, gently, quietly, but firmly faced it--firmly, because she had
+to be firm in keeping him within those bounds the invasion of which would
+have killed her.  And after the first struggle with his unchangeable
+brutality it had been easier: for into his degenerate brain there had
+come a faint understanding of the real situation and of her.  He had
+kept his side of the gulf, but gloating on this touch between the old
+luxurious, indulgent life, with its refined vices, and this present
+coarse, hard life, where pleasures were few and gross.  The free Northern
+life of toil and hardship had not refined him.  He greedily hung over
+this treasure, which was not for his spending, yet was his own--as though
+in a bank he had hoards of money which he might not withdraw.
+
+So the years had gone on, with their recurrent dreaded anniversaries,
+carrying misery almost too great to be borne by this woman mated to the
+loathed phantom of a sad, dead life; and when this black day of each year
+was over, for a few days afterwards she went nowhere, was seen by none.
+Yet, when she did appear again, it was with her old laughing manner, her
+cheerful and teasing words, her quick response to the emotions of others.
+
+So it had gone till Varley had come to follow the open air life for four
+months, after a heavy illness due to blood-poisoning got in his surgical
+work in London.  She had been able to live her life without too great a
+struggle till he came.  Other men had flattered her vanity, had given her
+a sense of power, had made her understand her possibilities, but nothing
+more--nothing of what Varley brought with him.  And before three months
+had gone, she knew that no man had ever interested her as Varley had
+done.  Ten years before, she would not have appreciated or understood
+him, this intellectual, clean-shaven, rigidly abstemious man, whose
+pleasures belonged to the fishing-rod and the gun and the horse, and who
+had come to be so great a friend of him who had been her best friend--
+Father Bourassa.  Father Bourassa had come to know the truth--not from
+her, for she had ever been a Protestant, but from her husband, who,
+Catholic by birth and a renegade from all religion, had had a moment of
+spurious emotion, when he went and confessed to Father Bourassa and got
+absolution, pleading for the priest's care of his wife.  Afterwards
+Father Bourassa made up his mind that the confession had a purpose behind
+it other than repentance, and he deeply resented the use to which he
+thought he was being put--a kind of spy upon the beautiful woman whom
+Jansen loved, and who, in spite of any outward flippancy, was above
+reproach.
+
+In vital things the instinct becomes abnormally acute, and, one day, when
+the priest looked at her commiseratingly, she had divined what moved him.
+However it was, she drove him into a corner with a question to which he
+dare not answer yes, but to which he might not answer no, and did not;
+and she realised that he knew the truth, and she was the better for his
+knowing, though her secret was no longer a secret.  She was not aware
+that Finden also knew.  Then Varley came, bringing a new joy and interest
+in her life, and a new suffering also, for she realised that if she were
+free, and Varley asked her to marry him, she would consent.
+
+But when he did ask her, she said no with a pang that cut her heart in
+two.  He had stayed his four months, and it was now six months, and he
+was going at last-tomorrow.  He had stayed to give her time to learn to
+say yes, and to take her back with him to London; and she knew that he
+would speak again to-day, and that she must say no again; but she had
+kept him from saying the words till now.  And the man who had ruined her
+life and had poisoned her true spirit was come back broken and battered.
+He was hanging between life and death; and now--for he was going
+to-morrow--Varley would speak again.
+
+The half-hour she had just spent in the hospital with Meydon had tried
+her cruelly.  She had left the building in a vortex of conflicting
+emotions, with the call of duty and of honour ringing through a thousand
+other voices of temptation and desire, the inner pleadings for a little
+happiness while yet she was young.  After she married Meydon, there had
+only been a few short weeks of joy before her black disillusion came,
+and she had realised how bitter must be her martyrdom.
+
+When she left the hospital, she seemed moving in a dream, as one,
+intoxicated by some elixir, might move unheeding among event and accident
+and vexing life and roaring multitudes.  And all the while the river
+flowing through the endless prairies, high-banked, ennobled by living
+woods, lipped with green, kept surging in her ears, inviting her,
+alluring her--alluring her with a force too deep and powerful for weak
+human nature to bear for long.  It would ease her pain, it said; it would
+still the tumult and the storm; it would solve her problem, it would give
+her peace.  But as she moved along the river-bank among the trees, she
+met the little niece of the priest, who lived in his house, singing as
+though she was born but to sing, a song which Finden had written and
+Father Bourassa had set to music.  Did not the distant West know Father
+Bourassa's gift, and did not Protestants attend Mass to hear him play the
+organ afterwards?  The fresh, clear voice of the child rang through the
+trees, stealing the stricken heart away from the lure of the river:
+
+    "Will you come back home, where the young larks are singin'?
+     The door is open wide, and the bells of Lynn are ringin';
+          There's a little lake I know,
+          And a boat you used to row
+     To the shore beyond that's quiet--will you come back home?
+
+     Will you come back, darlin'?  Never heed the pain and blightin',
+     Never trouble that you're wounded, that you bear the scars of
+     fightin';
+          Here's the luck o' Heaven to you,
+          Here's the hand of love will brew you
+     The cup of peace--ah, darlin', will you come back home?"
+
+She stood listening for a few moments, and, under the spell of the fresh,
+young voice, the homely, heart-searching words, and the intimate
+sweetness of the woods, the despairing apathy lifted slowly away.  She
+started forwards again with a new understanding, her footsteps quickened.
+She would go to Father Bourassa.  He would understand.  She would tell
+him all.  He would help her to do what now she knew she must do, ask
+Leonard Varley to save her husband's life--Leonard Varley to save her
+husband's life!
+
+When she stepped upon the veranda of the priest's house, she did not know
+that Varley was inside.  She had no time to think.  She was ushered into
+the room where he was, with the confusing fact of his presence fresh upon
+her.  She had had but a word or two with the priest, but enough for him
+to know what she meant to do, and that it must be done at once.
+
+Varley advanced to meet her.  She shuddered inwardly to think what a
+difference there was between the fallen creature she had left behind in
+the hospital and this tall, dark, self-contained man, whose name was
+familiar in the surgeries of Europe, who had climbed from being the son
+of a clockmaker to his present distinguished place.
+
+"Have you come for absolution, also?" he asked with a smile; "or is it
+to get a bill of excommunication against your only enemy--there couldn't
+be more than one?"
+
+Cheerful as his words were, he was shrewdly observing her, for her
+paleness, and the strange light in her eyes, gave him a sense of anxiety.
+He wondered what trouble was on her.
+
+"Excommunication?" he repeated.
+
+The unintended truth went home.  She winced, even as she responded with
+that quaint note in her voice which gave humour to her speech.  "Yes,
+excommunication," she replied; "but why an enemy?  Do we not need to
+excommunicate our friends sometimes?"
+
+"That is a hard saying," he answered soberly.  Tears sprang to her eyes,
+but she mastered herself, and brought the crisis abruptly.
+
+"I want you to save a man's life," she said, with her eyes looking
+straight into his.  "Will you do it?"
+
+His face grew grave and eager.  "I want you to save a man's happiness,"
+he answered.  "Will you do it?"
+
+"That man yonder will die unless your skill saves him," she urged.
+
+"This man here will go away unhappy and alone, unless your heart
+befriends him," he replied, coming closer to her.
+
+"At sunrise to-morrow he goes."  He tried to take her hand.
+
+"Oh, please, please," she pleaded, with a quick, protesting gesture.
+"Sunrise is far off, but the man's fate is near, and you must save him.
+You only can do so, for Doctor Hadley is away, and Doctor Brydon is sick,
+and in any case Doctor Brydon dare not attempt the operation alone.  It
+is too critical and difficult, he says."
+
+"So I have heard," he answered, with a new note in his voice, his
+professional instinct roused in spite of himself.  "Who is this man?
+What interests you in him?"
+
+"To how many unknown people have you given your skill for nothing--your
+skill and all your experience to utter strangers, no matter how low or
+poor!  Is it not so?  Well, I cannot give to strangers what you have
+given to so many, but I can help in my own way."
+
+"You want me to see the man at once?"
+
+"If you will."
+
+"What is his name?  I know of his accident and the circumstances."
+
+She hesitated for an instant, then said, "He is called Draper--a trapper
+and woodsman."
+
+"But I was going away to-morrow at sunrise.  All my arrangements are
+made," he urged, his eyes holding hers, his passion swimming in his eyes
+again.
+
+"But you will not see a man die, if you can save him?" she pleaded,
+unable now to meet his look, its mastery and its depth.
+
+Her heart had almost leaped with joy at the suggestion that he could not
+stay; but as suddenly self-reproach and shame filled her mind, and she
+had challenged him so.  But yet, what right had she to sacrifice this man
+she loved to the perverted criminal who had spoiled her youth and taken
+away from her every dear illusion of her life and heart?  By every right
+of justice and humanity she was no more the wife of Henry Meydon than if
+she had never seen him.  He had forfeited every claim upon her, dragged
+in the mire her unspotted life--unspotted, for in all temptation, in her
+defenceless position, she had kept the whole commandment; she had, while
+at the mercy of her own temperament, fought her way through all, with a
+weeping heart and laughing lips.  Had she not longed for a little home
+with a great love, and a strong, true man?  Ah, it had been lonely,
+bitterly lonely!  Yet she had remained true to the scoundrel, from whom
+she could not free herself without putting him in the grasp of the law to
+atone for his crime.  She was punished for his crimes; she was denied the
+exercise of her womanhood in order to shield him.  Still she remembered
+that once she had loved him, those years ago, when he first won her heart
+from those so much better than he, who loved her so much more honestly;
+and this memory had helped her in a way.  She had tried to be true to it,
+that dead, lost thing, of which this man who came once a year to see her,
+and now, lying with his life at stake in the hospital, was the repellent
+ghost.
+
+"Ah, you will not see him die?" she urged.
+
+"It seems to move you greatly what happens to this man," he said, his
+determined dark eyes searching hers, for she baffled him.  If she could
+feel so much for a, "casual," why not a little more feeling for him?
+Suddenly, as he drew her eyes to him again, there came the conviction
+that they were full of feeling for him.  They were sending a message, an
+appealing, passionate message, which told him more than he had ever heard
+from her or seen in her face before.  Yes, she was his!  Without a spoken
+word she had told him so.  What, then, held her back?  But women were a
+race by themselves, and he knew that he must wait till she chose to have
+him know what she had unintentionally conveyed but now.
+
+"Yes, I am moved," she continued slowly.  "Who can tell what this man
+might do with his life, if it is saved!  Don't you think of that?  It
+isn't the importance of a life that's at stake; it's the importance of
+living; and we do not live alone, do we?"
+
+His mind was made up.  "I will not, cannot promise anything till I have
+seen him.  But I will go and see him, and I'll send you word later what
+I can do, or not do.  Will that satisfy you?  If I cannot do it, I will
+come to say good-by."
+
+Her face was set with suppressed feeling.  She held out her hand to him
+impulsively, and was about to speak, but suddenly caught the hand away
+again from his thrilling grasp and, turning hurriedly, left the room.
+In the hall she met Father Bourassa.
+
+"Go with him to the hospital," she whispered, and disappeared through the
+doorway.
+
+Immediately after she had gone, a man came driving hard to bring Father
+Bourassa to visit a dying Catholic in the prairie, and it was Finden who
+accompanied Varley to the hospital, waited for him till his examination
+of the "casual" was concluded, and met him outside.
+
+"Can it be done?" he asked of Varley.  "I'll take word to Father
+Bourassa."
+
+"It can be done--it will be done," answered Varley absently.  "I do not
+understand the man.  He has been in a different sphere of life.  He tried
+to hide it, but the speech--occasionally!  I wonder."
+
+"You wonder if he's worth saving?"
+
+Varley shrugged his shoulders impatiently.  "No, that's not what I
+meant."
+
+Finden smiled to himself.  "Is it a difficult case?" he asked.
+
+"Critical and delicate; but it has been my specialty."
+
+"One of the local doctors couldn't do it, I suppose?"
+
+"They would be foolish to try."
+
+"And you are going away at sunrise to-morrow?"
+
+"Who told you that?"  Varley's voice was abrupt, impatient.
+
+"I heard you say so-everybody knows it.  .  .  .  That's a bad man
+yonder, Varley."  He jerked his thumb towards the hospital.  "A terrible
+bad man, he's been.  A gentleman once, and fell down--fell down hard.
+He's done more harm than most men.  He's broken a woman's heart and
+spoilt her life, and, if he lives, there's no chance for her, none at
+all.  He killed a man, and the law wants him; and she can't free herself
+without ruining him; and she can't marry the man she loves because of
+that villain yonder, crying for his life to be saved.  By Josh and by
+Joan, but it's a shame, a dirty shame, it is!"
+
+Suddenly Varley turned and gripped his arm with fingers of steel.
+
+"His name--his real name?"
+
+"His name's Meydon--and a dirty shame it is, Varley."
+
+Varley was white.  He had been leading his horse and talking to Finden.
+He mounted quickly now, and was about to ride away, but stopped short
+again.  "Who knows--who knows the truth?" he asked.
+
+"Father Bourassa and me--no others," he answered.  "I knew Meydon thirty
+years ago."
+
+There was a moment's hesitation, then Varley said hoarsely, "Tell me--
+tell me all."
+
+When all was told, he turned his horse towards the wide waste of the
+prairie, and galloped away.  Finden watched him till he was lost to view
+beyond the bluff.
+
+"Now, a man like that, you can't guess what he'll do," he said
+reflectively.  "He's a high-stepper, and there's no telling what
+foolishness will get hold of him.  It'd be safer if he got lost on the
+prairie for twenty-four hours.  He said that Meydon's only got twenty-
+four hours, if the trick isn't done!  Well--"
+
+He took a penny from his pocket.  "I'll toss for it.  Heads he does it,
+and tails he doesn't."
+
+He tossed.  It came down heads.  "Well, there's one more fool in the
+world than I thought," he said philosophically, as though he had settled
+the question; as though the man riding away into the prairie with a dark
+problem to be solved had told the penny what he meant to do.
+
+Mrs. Meydon, Father Bourassa, and Finden stood in the little waiting-room
+of the hospital at Jansen, one at each window, and watched the wild
+thunderstorm which had broken over the prairie.  The white heliographs of
+the elements flashed their warnings across the black sky, and the roaring
+artillery of the thunder came after, making the circle of prairie and
+tree and stream a theatre of anger and conflict.  The streets of Jansen
+were washed with flood, and the green and gold things of garden and field
+and harvest crumbled beneath the sheets of rain.
+
+The faces at the window of the little room of the hospital, however, were
+but half-conscious of the storm; it seemed only an accompaniment of their
+thoughts, to typify the elements of tragedy surrounding them.
+
+For Varley there had been but one thing to do.  A life might be saved,
+and it was his duty to save it.  He had ridden back from the prairie as
+the sun was setting the night before, and had made all arrangements at
+the hospital, giving orders that Meydon should have no food whatever till
+the operation was performed the next afternoon, and nothing to drink
+except a little brandy-and-water.
+
+The operation was performed successfully, and Varley had issued from the
+operating-room with the look of a man who had gone through an ordeal
+which had taxed his nerve to the utmost, to find Valerie Meydon waiting,
+with a piteous, dazed look in her eyes.  But this look passed when she
+heard him say, "All right!"  The words brought a sense of relief,
+for if he had failed it would have seemed almost unbearable in the
+circumstances--the cup of trembling must be drunk to the dregs.
+
+Few words had passed between them, and he had gone, while she remained
+behind with Father Bourassa, till the patient should wake from the sleep
+into which he had fallen when Varley left.
+
+But within two hours they sent for Varley again, for Meydon was in
+evident danger.  Varley had come, and had now been with the patient for
+some time.
+
+At last the door opened and Varley came in quickly.  He beckoned to Mrs.
+Meydon and to Father Bourassa.  "He wishes to speak with you," he said to
+her.  "There is little time."
+
+Her eyes scarcely saw him, as she left the room and passed to where
+Meydon lay nerveless, but with wide-open eyes, waiting for her.  The eyes
+closed, however, before she reached the bed.  Presently they opened
+again, but the lids remained fixed.  He did not hear what she said.
+
+                    ......................
+
+In the little waiting-room, Finden said to Varley, "What happened?"
+
+"Food was absolutely forbidden, but he got it from another patient early
+this morning while the nurse was out for a moment.  It has killed him."
+
+"'Twas the least he could do, but no credit's due him.  It was to be.
+I'm not envying Father Bourassa nor her there with him."
+
+Varley made no reply.  He was watching the receding storm with eyes which
+told nothing.
+
+Finden spoke once more, but Varley did not hear him.  Presently the door
+opened and Father Bourassa entered.  He made a gesture of the hand to
+signify that all was over.
+
+Outside, the sun was breaking through the clouds upon the Western
+prairie, and there floated through the evening air the sound of a child's
+voice singing beneath the trees that fringed the river:
+
+    "Will you come back, darlin'?  Never heed the pain and blightin',
+     Never trouble that you're wounded, that you bear the scars of
+     fightin';
+          Here's the luck o' Heaven to you,
+          Here's the hand of love will brew you
+     The cup of peace-ah, darlin', will you come back home?"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+WATCHING THE RISE OF ORION
+
+"In all the wide border his steed was the best," and the name and fame of
+Terence O'Ryan were known from Strathcona to Qu'appelle.  He had ambition
+of several kinds, and he had the virtue of not caring who knew of it.  He
+had no guile, and little money; but never a day's work was too hard for
+him, and he took bad luck, when it came, with a jerk of the shoulder and
+a good-natured surprise on his clean-shaven face that suited well his
+wide grey eyes and large, luxurious mouth.  He had an estate, half ranch,
+half farm, with a French Canadian manager named Vigon, an old prospector
+who viewed every foot of land in the world with the eye of the
+discoverer.  Gold, coal, iron, oil, he searched for them everywhere,
+making sure that sooner or later he would find them.  Once Vigon had
+found coal.  That was when he worked for a man called Constantine Jopp,
+and had given him great profit; but he, the discoverer, had been put off
+with a horse and a hundred dollars.  He was now as devoted to Terence
+O'Ryan as he had been faithful to Constantine Jopp, whom he cursed waking
+and sleeping.
+
+In his time O'Ryan had speculated, and lost; he had floated a coal mine,
+and "been had"; he had run for the local legislature, had been elected,
+and then unseated for bribery committed by an agent; he had run races at
+Regina, and won--he had won for three years in succession; and this had
+kept him going and restored his finances when they were at their worst.
+He was, in truth, the best rider in the country, and, so far, was the
+owner also of the best three-year-old that the West had produced.  He
+achieved popularity without effort.  The West laughed at his enterprises
+and loved him; he was at once a public moral and a hero.  It was a legend
+of the West that his forbears had been kings in Ireland like Brian
+Borhoime.  He did not contradict this; he never contradicted anything.
+His challenge to all fun and satire and misrepresentation was, "What'll
+be the differ a hundred years from now!"
+
+He did not use this phrase, however, towards one experience--the advent
+of Miss Molly Mackinder, the heiress, and the challenge that reverberated
+through the West after her arrival.  Philosophy deserted him then; he
+fell back on the primary emotions of mankind.
+
+A month after Miss Mackinder's arrival at La Touche a dramatic
+performance was given at the old fort, in which the officers of the
+Mounted Police took part, together with many civilians who fancied
+themselves.  By that time the district had realised that Terry O'Ryan
+had surrendered to what they called "the laying on of hands" by Molly
+Mackinder.  It was not certain, however, that the surrender was complete,
+because O'Ryan had been wounded before, and yet had not been taken
+captive altogether.  His complete surrender seemed now more certain to
+the public because the lady had a fortune of two hundred thousand
+dollars, and that amount of money would be useful to an ambitious man in
+the growing West.  It would, as Gow Johnson said, "Let him sit back and
+view the landscape o'er, before he puts his ploughshare in the mud."
+
+There was an outdoor scene in the play produced by the impetuous
+amateurs, and dialogue had been interpolated by three "imps of fame" at
+the suggestion of Constantine Jopp, one of the three, who bore malice
+towards O'Ryan, though this his colleagues did not know distinctly.  The
+scene was a camp-fire--a starlit night, a colloquy between the three,
+upon which the hero of the drama, played by Terry O'Ryan, should break,
+after having, unknown to them, but in sight of the audience, overheard
+their kind of intentions towards himself.
+
+The night came.  When the curtain rose for the third act there was
+exposed a star-sown sky, in which the galaxy of Orion was shown with
+distinctness, each star sharply twinkling from the electric power behind-
+a pretty scene evoking great applause.  O'Ryan had never seen this back
+curtain--they had taken care that he should not--and, standing in the
+wings awaiting his cue, he was unprepared for the laughter of the
+audience, first low and uncertain, then growing, then insistent,
+and now a peal of ungovernable mirth, as one by one they understood
+the significance of the stars of Orion on the back curtain.
+
+O'Ryan got his cue, and came on to an outburst of applause which shook
+the walls.  La Touche rose at him, among them Miss Molly Mackinder in the
+front row with the notables.
+
+He did not see the back curtain, or Orion blazing in the ultramarine
+blue.  According to the stage directions, he was to steal along the trees
+at the wings, and listen to the talk of the men at the fire plotting
+against him, who were presently to pretend good comradeship to his face.
+It was a vigorous melodrama with some touches of true Western feeling.
+After listening for a moment, O'Ryan was to creep up the stage again
+towards the back curtain, giving a cue for his appearance.
+
+When the hilarious applause at his entrance had somewhat subsided, the
+three took up their parable, but it was not the parable of the play.
+They used dialogue not in the original.  It had a significance which the
+audience were not slow to appreciate, and went far to turn "The Sunburst
+Trail" at this point into a comedy-farce.  When this new dialogue began,
+O'Ryan could scarcely trust his ears, or realise what was happening.
+
+"Ah, look," said Dicky Fergus at the fire, "as fine a night as ever I saw
+in the West!  The sky's a picture.  You could almost hand the stars down,
+they're so near."
+
+"What's that clump together on the right--what are they called in
+astronomy?" asked Constantine Jopp, with a leer.
+
+"Orion is the name--a beauty, ain't it?" answered Fergus.
+
+"I've been watching Orion rise," said the third--Holden was his name.
+"Many's the time I've watched Orion rising.  Orion's the star for me.
+Say, he wipes 'em all out--right out.  Watch him rising now."
+
+By a manipulation of the lights Orion moved up the back curtain slowly,
+and blazed with light nearer the zenith.  And La Touche had more than the
+worth of its money in this opening to the third act of the play.  O'Ryan
+was a favourite, at whom La Touche loved to jeer, and the parable of the
+stars convulsed them.
+
+At the first words O'Ryan put a hand on himself and tried to grasp the
+meaning of it all, but his entrance and the subsequent applause had
+confused him.  Presently, however, he turned to the back curtain, as
+Orion moved slowly up the heavens, and found the key to the situation.
+He gasped.  Then he listened to the dialogue which had nothing to do with
+"The Sunburst Trail."
+
+"What did Orion do, and why does he rise?  Has he got to rise?  Why was
+the gent called Orion in them far-off days?" asked Holden.
+
+"He did some hunting in his time--with a club," Fergus replied.  "He kept
+making hits, he did.  Orion was a spoiler.  When he took the field there
+was no room for the rest of the race.  Why does he rise?  Because it is a
+habit.  They could always get a rise out of Orion.  The Athens Eirenicon
+said that yeast might fail to rise, but touch the button and Orion would
+rise like a bird."
+
+At that instant the galaxy jerked up the back curtain again, and when the
+audience could control itself, Constantine Jopp, grinning meanly, asked:
+
+"Why does he wear the girdle?"
+
+"It is not a girdle--it is a belt," was Dicky Fergus's reply.  "The gods
+gave it to him because he was a favourite.  There was a lady called
+Artemis--she was the last of them.  But he went visiting with Eos,
+another lady of previous acquaintance, down at a place called Ortygia,
+and Artemis shot him dead with a shaft Apollo had given her; but she
+didn't marry Apollo neither.  She laid Orion out on the sky, with his
+glittering belt, around him.  And Orion keeps on rising."
+
+"Will he ever stop rising?" asked Holden.
+
+Followed for the conspirators a disconcerting moment; for, when the
+laughter had subsided, a lazy voice came from the back of the hall,
+"He'll stop long enough to play with Apollo a little, I guess."
+
+It was Gow Johnson who had spoken, and no man knew Terry O'Ryan better,
+or could gauge more truly the course he would take.  He had been in many
+an enterprise, many a brush with O'Ryan, and his friendship would bear
+any strain.
+
+O'Ryan recovered himself from the moment he saw the back curtain, and
+he did not find any fun in the thing.  It took a hold on him out of all
+proportion to its importance.  He realised that he had come to the
+parting of the ways in his life.  It suddenly came upon him that
+something had been lacking in him in the past; and that his want of
+success in many things had not been wholly due to bad luck.  He had been
+eager, enterprising, a genius almost at seeing good things; and yet
+others had reaped where he had sown.  He had believed too much in his
+fellow-man.  For the first time in his life he resented the friendly,
+almost affectionate satire of his many friends.  It was amusing, it was
+delightful; but down beneath it all there was a little touch of ridicule.
+He had more brains than any of them, and he had known it in a way; he had
+led them sometimes, too, as on raids against cattle-stealers, and in a
+brush with half-breeds and Indians; as when he stood for the legislature;
+but he felt now for the first time that he had not made the most of
+himself, that there was something hurting to self-respect in this prank
+played upon him.  When he came to that point his resentment went higher.
+He thought of Molly Mackinder, and he heard all too acutely the vague
+veiled references to her in their satire.  By the time Gow Johnson spoke
+he had mastered himself, however, and had made up his mind.  He stood
+still for a moment.
+
+"Now, please, my cue," he said quietly and satirically from the trees
+near the wings.
+
+He was smiling, but Gow Johnson's prognostication was right; and ere long
+the audience realised that he was right.  There was standing before them
+not the Terry O'Ryan they had known, but another.  He threw himself fully
+into his part--a young rancher made deputy sheriff, who by the occasional
+exercise of his duty had incurred the hatred of a small floating
+population that lived by fraud, violence, and cattle-stealing.  The
+conspiracy was to raid his cattle, to lure him to pursuit, to ambush him,
+and kill him.  Terry now played the part with a naturalness and force
+which soon lifted the play away from the farcical element introduced into
+it by those who had interpolated the gibes at himself.  They had gone a
+step too far.
+
+"He's going large," said Gow Johnson, as the act drew near its close,
+and the climax neared, where O'Ryan was to enter upon a physical struggle
+with his assailants.  "His blood's up.  There'll be hell to pay."
+
+To Gow Johnson the play had instantly become real, and O'Ryan an injured
+man at bay, the victim of the act--not of the fictitious characters of
+the play, but of the three men, Fergus, Holden, and Constantine Jopp, who
+had planned the discomfiture of O'Ryan; and he felt that the victim's
+resentment would fall heaviest on Constantine Jopp, the bully, an old
+schoolmate of Terry's.
+
+Jopp was older than O'Ryan by three years, which in men is little, but in
+boys, at a certain time of life, is much.  It means, generally, weight
+and height, an advantage in a scrimmage.  Constantine Jopp had been the
+plague and tyrant of O'Ryan's boyhood.  He was now a big, leering fellow
+with much money of his own, got chiefly from the coal discovered on his
+place by Vigon, the half-breed French Canadian.  He had a sense of dark
+and malicious humour, a long horse-like face, with little beady eyes and
+a huge frame.
+
+Again and again had Terry fought him as a boy at school, and often he had
+been badly whipped, but he had never refused the challenge of an insult
+when he was twelve and Jopp fifteen.  The climax to their enmity at
+school had come one day when Terry was seized with a cramp while bathing,
+and after having gone down twice was rescued by Jopp, who dragged him out
+by the hair of the head.  He had been restored to consciousness on the
+bank and carried to his home, where he lay ill for days.  During the
+course of the slight fever which followed the accident his hair was cut
+close to his head.  Impetuous always, his first thought was to go and
+thank Constantine Jopp for having saved his life.  As soon as he was able
+he went forth to find his rescuer, and met him suddenly on turning a
+corner of the street.  Before he could stammer out the gratitude that was
+in his heart, Jopp, eyeing him with a sneering smile, said drawlingly:
+
+"If you'd had your hair cut like that I couldn't have got you out, could
+I?  Holy, what a sight!  Next time I'll take you by the scruff, putty-
+face--bah!"
+
+That was enough for Terry.  He had swallowed the insult, stuttered his
+thanks to the jeering laugh of the lank bully, and had gone home and
+cried in shame and rage.
+
+It was the one real shadow in his life.  Ill luck and good luck had been
+taken with an equable mind; but the fact that he must, while he lived,
+own the supreme debt of his life to a boy and afterwards to a man whom he
+hated by instinct was a constant cloud on him.  Jopp owned him.  For some
+years they did not meet, and then at last they again were thrown together
+in the West, when Jopp settled at La Touche.  It was gall and wormwood to
+Terry, but he steeled himself to be friendly, although the man was as
+great a bully as the boy, as offensive in mind and character; but withal
+acute and able in his way, and with a reputation for commercial sharpness
+which would be called by another name in a different civilisation.  They
+met constantly, and O'Ryan always put a hand on himself, and forced
+himself to be friendly.  Once when Jopp became desperately ill there had
+been--though he fought it down, and condemned himself in every term of
+reproach--a sense of relief in the thought that perhaps his ancient debt
+would now be cancelled.  It had gone on so long.  And Constantine Jopp
+had never lost an opportunity of vexing him, of torturing him, of giving
+veiled thrusts, which he knew O'Ryan could not resent.  It was the
+constant pin-prick of a mean soul, who had an advantage of which he could
+never be dispossessed--unless the ledger was balanced in some inscrutable
+way.
+
+Apparently bent on amusement only, and hiding his hatred from his
+colleagues, Jopp had been the instigator and begetter of the huge joke of
+the play; but it was the brains of Dick Fergus which had carried it out,
+written the dialogue, and planned the electric appliances of the back
+curtain--for he was an engineer and electrician.  Neither he nor Holden
+had known the old antipathy of Terry and Constantine Jopp.  There was
+only one man who knew the whole truth, and that was Gow Johnson, to whom
+Terry had once told all.  At the last moment Fergus had interpolated
+certain points in the dialogue which were not even included at rehearsal.
+These referred to Apollo.  He had a shrewd notion that Jopp had an idea
+of marrying Molly Mackinder if he could, cousins though they were; and he
+was also aware that Jopp, knowing Molly's liking for Terry, had tried to
+poison her mind against him, through suggestive gossip about a little
+widow at Jansen, thirty miles away.  He had in so far succeeded that,
+on the very day of the performance, Molly had declined to be driven home
+from the race-course by Terry, despite the fact that Terry had won the
+chief race and owned the only dog-cart in the West.
+
+As the day went on Fergus realised, as had Gow Johnson, that Jopp had
+raised a demon.  The air was electric.  The play was drawing near to its
+climax--an attempt to capture the deputy sheriff, tie him to a tree, and
+leave him bound and gagged alone in the waste.  There was a glitter in
+Terry's eyes, belying the lips which smiled in keeping with the character
+he presented.  A look of hardness was stamped on his face, and the
+outlines of the temples were as sharp as the chin was set and the
+voice slow and penetrating.
+
+Molly Mackinder's eyes were riveted on him.  She sat very still, her
+hands clasped in her lap, watching his every move.  Instinct told her
+that Terry was holding himself in; that some latent fierceness and iron
+force in him had emerged into life; and that he meant to have revenge on
+Constantine Jopp one way or another, and that soon; for she had heard the
+rumour flying through the hall that her cousin was the cause of the
+practical joke just played.  From hints she had had from Constantine that
+very day she knew that the rumour was the truth; and she recalled now
+with shrinking dislike the grimace accompanying the suggestion.  She had
+not resented it then, being herself angry with Terry because of the
+little widow at Jansen.
+
+Presently the silence in the hall became acute; the senses of the
+audience were strained to the utmost.  The acting before them was more
+realistic than anything they had ever seen, or were ever likely to see
+again in La Touche.  All three conspirators, Fergus, Holden, and Jopp,
+realised that O'Ryan's acting had behind it an animal anger which
+transformed him.  When he looked into their eyes it was with a steely
+directness harder and fiercer than was observed by the audience.  Once
+there was occasion for O'Ryan to catch Fergus by the arm, and Fergus
+winced from the grip.  When standing in the wings with Terry he ventured
+to apologise playfully for the joke, but Terry made no answer; and once
+again he had whispered good-naturedly as they stood together on the
+stage; but the reply had been a low, scornful laugh.  Fergus realised
+that a critical moment was at hand.  The play provided for some dialogue
+between Jopp and Terry, and he observed with anxiety that Terry now
+interpolated certain phrases meant to warn Constantine, and to excite
+him to anger also.
+
+The moment came upon them sooner than the text of the play warranted.
+O'Ryan deliberately left out several sentences, and gave a later cue, and
+the struggle for his capture was precipitated.  Terry meant to make the
+struggle real.  So thrilling had been the scene that to an extent the
+audience was prepared for what followed; but they did not grasp the full
+reality--that the play was now only a vehicle for a personal issue of a
+desperate character.  No one had ever seen O'Ryan angry; and now that the
+demon of rage was on him, directed by a will suddenly grown to its full
+height, they saw not only a powerful character in a powerful melodrama,
+but a man of wild force.  When the three desperadoes closed in on O'Ryan,
+and, with a blow from the shoulder which was not a pretence, he sent
+Holden into a far corner gasping for breath and moaning with pain, the
+audience broke out into wild cheering.  It was superb acting, they
+thought.  As most of them had never seen the play, they were not
+surprised when Holden did not again join the attack on the deputy
+sheriff.  Those who did know the drama--among them Molly Mackinder--
+became dismayed, then anxious.  Fergus and Jopp knew well from the blow
+O'Ryan had given that, unless they could drag him down, the end must be
+disaster to some one.  They were struggling with him for personal safety
+now.  The play was forgotten, though mechanically O'Ryan and Fergus
+repeated the exclamations and the few phrases belonging to the part.
+Jopp was silent, fighting with a malice which belongs to only half-breed,
+or half-bred, natures; and from far back in his own nature the distant
+Indian strain in him was working in savage hatred.  The two were
+desperately hanging on to O'Ryan like pumas on a grizzly, when suddenly,
+with a twist he had learned from Ogami the Jap on the Smoky River, the
+slim Fergus was slung backward to the ground with the tendons of his arm
+strained and the arm itself useless for further work.  There remained now
+Constantine Jopp, heavier and more powerful than O'Ryan.
+
+For O'Ryan the theatre, the people, disappeared.  He was a boy again on
+the village green, with the bully before him who had tortured his young
+days.  He forgot the old debt to the foe who saved his life; he forgot
+everything, except that once again, as of old, Constantine Jopp was
+fighting him, with long, strong arms trying to bring him to the ground.
+Jopp's superior height gave him an advantage in a close grip; the
+strength of his gorilla-like arms was difficult to withstand.  Both were
+forgetful of the world, and the two other injured men, silent and awed,
+were watching the, fight, in which one of them, at least, was powerless
+to take part.
+
+The audience was breathless.  Most now saw the grim reality of the scene
+before them; and when at last O'Ryan's powerful right hand got a grip
+upon the throat of Jopp, and they saw the grip tighten, tighten, and
+Jopp's face go from red to purple, a hundred people gasped.  Excited men
+made as though to move toward the stage; but the majority still believed
+that it all belonged to the play, and shouted "Sit down!"
+
+Suddenly the voice of Gow Johnson was heard "Don't kill him--let go,
+boy!"
+
+The voice rang out with sharp anxiety, and pierced the fog of passion and
+rage in which O'Ryan was moving.  He realised what he was doing, the real
+sense of it came upon him.  Suddenly he let go the lank throat of his
+enemy, and, by a supreme effort, flung him across the stage, where Jopp
+lay resting on his hands, his bleared eyes looking at Terry with the fear
+and horror still in them which had come with that tightening grip on his
+throat.
+
+Silence fell suddenly on the theatre.  The audience was standing.  A
+woman sobbed somewhere in a far corner, but the rest were dismayed and
+speechless.  A few steps before them all was Molly Mackinder, white and
+frightened, but in her eyes was a look of understanding as she gazed at
+Terry.  Breathing hard, Terry stood still in the middle of the stage, the
+red fog not yet gone out of his eyes, his hands clasped at his side,
+vaguely realising the audience again.  Behind him was the back curtain in
+which the lights of Orion twinkled aggressively.  The three men who had
+attacked him were still where he had thrown them.
+
+The silence was intense, the strain oppressive.  But now a drawling voice
+came from the back of the hall.  "Are you watching the rise of Orion?"
+it said.  It was the voice of Gow Johnson.
+
+The strain was broken; the audience dissolved in laughter; but it was not
+hilarious; it was the nervous laughter of relief, touched off by a native
+humour always present in the dweller of the prairie.
+
+"I beg your pardon," said Terry quietly and abstractedly to the audience.
+
+And the scene-shifter bethought himself and let down the curtain.
+
+The fourth act was not played that night.  The people had had more than
+the worth of their money.  In a few moments the stage was crowded with
+people from the audience, but both Jopp and O'Ryan had disappeared.
+
+Among the visitors to the stage was Molly Mackinder.  There was a meaning
+smile upon her face as she said to Dicky Fergus:
+
+"It was quite wonderful, wasn't it--like a scene out of the classics--the
+gladiators or something?"
+
+Fergus gave a wary smile as he answered: "Yes.  I felt like saying Ave
+Caesar, Ave!  and I watched to see Artemis drop her handkerchief."
+
+"She dropped it, but you were too busy to pick it up.  It would have been
+a useful sling for your arm," she added with thoughtful malice.  "It
+seemed so real--you all acted so well, so appropriately.  And how you
+keep it up!" she added, as he cringed when some one knocked against his
+elbow, hurting the injured tendons.
+
+Fergus looked at her meditatively before he answered.  "Oh, I think we'll
+likely keep it up for some time," he rejoined ironically.
+
+"Then the play isn't finished?" she added.  "There is another act?  Yes,
+I thought there was, the programme said four."
+
+"Oh yes, there's another act," he answered, "but it isn't to be played
+now; and I'm not in it."
+
+"No, I suppose you are not in it.  You really weren't in the last act.
+Who will be in it?"
+
+Fergus suddenly laughed outright, as he looked at Holden expostulating
+intently to a crowd of people round him.  "Well, honour bright, I don't
+think there'll be anybody in it except little Conny Jopp and gentle Terry
+O'Ryan; and Conny mayn't be in it very long.  But he'll be in it for a
+while, I guess.  You see, the curtain came down in the middle of a
+situation, not at the end of it.  The curtain has to rise again."
+
+"Perhaps Orion will rise again--you think so?"  She laughed in satire;
+for Dicky Fergus had made love to her during the last three months with
+unsuppressed activity, and she knew him in his sentimental moments; which
+is fatal.  It is fatal if, in a duet, one breathes fire and the other
+frost.
+
+"If you want my opinion," he said in a lower voice, as they moved towards
+the door, while people tried to listen to them--"if you want it straight,
+I think Orion has risen--right up where shines the evening star--Oh, say,
+now," he broke off, "haven't you had enough fun out of me?  I tell you,
+it was touch and go.  He nearly broke my arm--would have done it, if I
+hadn't gone limp to him; and your cousin Conny Jopp, little Conny Jopp,
+was as near Kingdom Come as a man wants at his age.  I saw an elephant
+go 'must' once in India, and it was as like O'Ryan as putty is to dough.
+It isn't all over either, for O'Ryan will forget and forgive, and Jopp
+won't.  He's your cousin, but he's a sulker.  If he has to sit up nights
+to do it, he'll try to get back on O'Ryan.  He'll sit up nights, but
+he'll do it, if he can.  And whatever it is, it won't be pretty."
+
+Outside the door they met Gow Johnson, excitement in his eyes.  He heard
+Fergus's last words.
+
+"He'll see Orion rising if he sits up nights," Gow Johnson said.  "The
+game is with Terry--at last."  Then he called to the dispersing gossiping
+crowd: "Hold on--hold on, you people.  I've got news for you.  Folks,
+this is O'Ryan's night.  It's his in the starry firmament.  Look at him
+shine," he cried, stretching out his arm towards the heavens, where the
+glittering galaxy hung near the zenith.  "Terry O'Ryan, our O'Ryan--he's
+struck oil--on his ranch it's been struck.  Old Vigon found it.  Terry's
+got his own at last.  O'Ryan's in it--in it alone.  Now, let's hear the
+prairie-whisper," he shouted, in a great raucous voice.  "Let's hear the
+prairie-whisper.  What is it?"
+
+The crowd responded in a hoarse shout for O'Ryan and his fortune.
+Even the women shouted--all except Molly Mackinder.  She was wondering if
+O'Ryan risen would be the same to her as O'Ryan rising.  She got into her
+carriage with a sigh, though she said to the few friends with her:
+
+"If it's true, it's splendid.  He deserves it too.  Oh, I'm glad--I'm so
+glad."  She laughed; but the laugh was a little hysterical.
+
+She was both glad and sorry.  Yet as she drove home over the prairie she
+was silent.  Far off in the east was a bright light.  It was a bonfire
+built on O'Ryan's ranch, near where he had struck oil--struck it rich.
+The light grew and grew, and the prairie was alive with people hurrying
+towards it.  La Touche should have had the news hours earlier, but the
+half-breed French-Canadian, Vigon, who had made the discovery, and had
+started for La Touche with the news, went suddenly off his head with
+excitement, and had ridden away into the prairie fiercely shouting his
+joy to an invisible world.  The news had been brought in later by a
+farmhand.
+
+Terry O'Ryan had really struck oil, and his ranch was a scene of decent
+revelry, of which Gow Johnson was master.  But the central figure of it
+all, the man who had, in truth, risen like a star, had become to La
+Touche all at once its notoriety as well as its favourite, its great man
+as well as its friend, he was nowhere to be found.  He had been seen
+riding full speed into the prairie towards the Kourmash Wood, and the
+starlit night had swallowed him.  Constantine Jopp had also disappeared;
+but at first no one gave that thought or consideration.
+
+As the night went on, however, a feeling began to stir which it is not
+good to rouse in frontier lands.  It is sure to exhibit itself in forms
+more objective than are found in great populations where methods of
+punishment are various, and even when deadly are often refined.  But
+society in new places has only limited resources, and is thrown back on
+primary ways and means.  La Touche was no exception, and the keener
+spirits, to whom O'Ryan had ever been "a white man," and who so rejoiced
+in his good luck now that they drank his health a hundred times in his
+own whiskey and cider, were simmering with desire for a public reproval
+of Constantine Jopp's conduct.  Though it was pointed out to them by the
+astute Gow Johnson that Fergus and Holden had participated in the
+colossal joke of the play, they had learned indirectly also the whole
+truth concerning the past of the two men.  They realised that Fergus and
+Holden had been duped by Jopp into the escapade.  Their primitive sense
+of justice exonerated the humourists and arraigned the one malicious man.
+As the night wore on they decided on the punishment to be meted out by La
+Touche to the man who had not "acted on the square."
+
+Gow Johnson saw, too late, that he had roused a spirit as hard to appease
+as the demon roused in O'Ryan earlier in the evening.  He would have
+enjoyed the battue of punishment under ordinary circumstances; but he
+knew that Miss Molly Mackinder would be humiliated and indignant at the
+half-savage penalty they meant to exact.  He had determined that O'Ryan
+should marry her; and this might be an obstruction in the path.  It was
+true that O'Ryan now would be a rich man--one of the richest in the West,
+unless all signs failed; but meanwhile a union of fortunes would only be
+an added benefit.  Besides, he had seen that O'Ryan was in earnest, and
+what O'Ryan wanted he himself wanted even more strongly.  He was not
+concerned greatly for O'Ryan's absence.  He guessed that Terry had ridden
+away into the night to work off the dark spirit that was on him, to have
+it out with himself.  Gow Johnson was a philosopher.  He was twenty years
+older than O'Ryan, and he had studied his friend as a pious monk his
+missal.
+
+He was right in his judgment.  When Terry left the theatre he was like
+one in a dream, every nerve in his body at tension, his head aflame, his
+pulses throbbing.  For miles he rode away into the waste along the
+northern trail, ever away from La Touche and his own home.  He did not
+know of the great good fortune that had come to him; and if, in this
+hour, he had known, he would not have cared.  As he rode on and on
+remorse drew him into its grasp.  Shame seized him that he had let
+passion be his master, that he had lost his self-control, had taken a
+revenge out of all proportion to the injury and insult to himself.  It
+did not ease his mind that he knew Constantine Jopp had done the thing
+out of meanness and malice; for he was alive to-night in the light of
+the stars, with the sweet crisp air blowing in his face, because of an
+act of courage on the part of his schooldays' foe.  He remembered now
+that, when he was drowning, he had clung to Jopp with frenzied arms and
+had endangered the bully's life also.  The long torture of owing this
+debt to so mean a soul was on him still, was rooted in him; but suddenly,
+in the silent searching night, some spirit whispered in his ear that this
+was the price which he must pay for his life saved to the world, a
+compromise with the Inexorable Thing.  On the verge of oblivion and the
+end, he had been snatched back by relenting Fate, which requires
+something for something given, when laws are overridden and doom
+defeated.  Yes, the price he was meant to pay was gratitude to one of
+shrivelled soul and innate antipathy; and he had not been man enough to
+see the trial through to the end!  With a little increased strain put
+upon his vanity and pride he had run amuck.  Like some heathen gladiator
+he had ravaged in the ring.  He had gone down into the basements of human
+life and there made a cockpit for his animal rage, till, in the contest,
+brain and intellect had been saturated by the fumes and sweat of fleshly
+fury.
+
+How quiet the night was, how soothing to the fevered mind and body, how
+the cool air laved the heated head and flushed the lungs of the rheum of
+passion!  He rode on and on, farther and farther away from home, his back
+upon the scenes where his daily deeds were done.  It was long past
+midnight before he turned his horse's head again homeward.
+
+Buried in his thoughts, now calm and determined, with a new life grown up
+in him, a new strength different from the mastering force which gave him
+a strength in the theatre like one in delirium, he noticed nothing.  He
+was only conscious of the omniscient night and its warm penetrating
+friendliness; as, in a great trouble, when no words can be spoken, a cool
+kind palm steals into the trembling hand of misery and stills it, gives
+it strength and life and an even pulse.  He was now master in the house
+of his soul, and had no fear or doubt as to the future, or as to his
+course.
+
+His first duty was to go to Constantine Jopp, and speak his regret like a
+man.  And after that it would be his duty to carry a double debt his life
+long for the life saved, for the wrong done.  He owed an apology to La
+Touche, and he was scarcely aware that the native gentlemanliness in him
+had said through his fever of passion over the footlights: "I beg your
+pardon."  In his heart he felt that he had offered a mean affront to
+every person present, to the town where his interests lay, where his
+heart lay.
+
+Where his heart lay--Molly Mackinder!  He knew now that vanity had
+something to do, if not all to do, with his violent acts, and though
+there suddenly shot through his mind, as he rode back, a savage thrill at
+the remembrance of how he had handled the three, it was only a passing
+emotion.  He was bent on putting himself right with Jopp and with La
+Touche.  With the former his way was clear; he did not yet see his way as
+to La Touche.  How would he be able to make the amende honorable to La
+Touche?
+
+By and by he became somewhat less absorbed and enveloped by the
+comforting night.  He saw the glimmer of red light afar, and vaguely
+wondered what it was.  It was in the direction of O'Ryan's Ranch, but he
+thought nothing of it, because it burned steadily.  It was probably a
+fire lighted by settlers trailing to the farther north.  While the night
+wore on he rode as slowly back to the town as he had galloped from it
+like a centaur with a captive.
+
+Again and again Molly Mackinder's face came before him; but he resolutely
+shut it out of his thoughts.  He felt that he had no right to think of
+her until he had "done the right thing" by Jopp and by La Touche.  Yet
+the look in her face as the curtain came down, it was not that of one
+indifferent to him or to what he did.  He neared the town half-way
+between midnight and morning.  Almost unconsciously avoiding the main
+streets, he rode a roundabout way towards the little house where
+Constantine Jopp lived.  He could hear loud noises in the streets,
+singing, and hoarse shouts.  Then silence came, then shouts, and silence
+again.  It was all quiet as he rode up to Jopp's house, standing on the
+outskirts of the town.  There was a bright light in the window of a room.
+
+Jopp, then, was still up.  He would not wait till tomorrow.  He would do
+the right thing now.  He would put things straight with his foe before he
+slept; he would do it at any sacrifice to his pride.  He had conquered
+his pride.
+
+He dismounted, threw the bridle over a post, and, going into the garden,
+knocked gently at the door.  There was no response.  He knocked again,
+and listened intently.  Now he heard a sound-like a smothered cry or
+groan.  He opened the door quickly and entered.  It was dark.  In another
+room beyond was a light.  From it came the same sound he had heard
+before, but louder; also there was a shuffling footstep.  Springing
+forward to the half-open door, he pushed it wide, and met the terror-
+stricken eyes of Constantine Jopp--the same look that he had seen at
+the theatre when his hands were on Jopp's throat, but more ghastly.
+
+Jopp was bound to a chair by a lasso.  Both arms were fastened to the
+chair-arm, and beneath them, on the floor, were bowls into which blood
+dripped from his punctured wrists.
+
+He had hardly taken it all in--the work of an instant--when he saw
+crouched in a corner, madness in his eyes, his half-breed Vigon.  He
+grasped the situation in a flash.  Vigon had gone mad, had lain in wait
+in Jopp's house, and when the man he hated had seated himself in the
+chair, had lassoed him, bound him, and was slowly bleeding him to death.
+
+He had no time to think.  Before he could act Vigon was upon him also,
+frenzy in his eyes, a knife clutched in his hand.  Reason had fled, and
+he only saw in O'Ryan the frustrator of his revenge.  He had watched the
+drip, drip from his victim's wrists with a dreadful joy.
+
+They were man and man, but O'Ryan found in this grisly contest a vaster
+trial of strength than in the fight upon the stage a few hours ago.  The
+first lunge that Vigon made struck him on the tip of the shoulder, and
+drew blood; but he caught the hand holding the knife in an iron grasp,
+while the half-breed, with superhuman strength, tried in vain for the
+long brown throat of the man for whom he had struck oil.  As they
+struggled and twisted, the eyes of the victim in the chair watched them
+with agonised emotions.  For him it was life or death.  He could not cry
+out--his mouth was gagged; but to O'Ryan his groans were like a distant
+echo of his own hoarse gasps as he fought his desperate fight.  Terry was
+as one in an awful dream battling with vague impersonal powers which
+slowly strangled his life, yet held him back in torture from the final
+surrender.
+
+For minutes they struggled.  At last O'Ryan's strength came to the point
+of breaking, for Vigon was a powerful man, and to this was added a
+madman's energy.  He felt that the end was coming.  But all at once,
+through the groans of the victim in the chair, Terry became conscious of
+noises outside--such noises as he had heard before he entered the house,
+only nearer and louder.  At the same time he heard a horse's hoofs, then
+a knock at the door, and a voice calling: "Jopp!  Jopp!"
+
+He made a last desperate struggle, and shouted hoarsely.
+
+An instant later there were footsteps in the room, followed by a cry of
+fright and amazement.
+
+It was Gow Johnson.  He had come to warn Constantine Jopp that a crowd
+were come to tar and feather him, and to get him away on his own horse.
+
+Now he sprang to the front door, called to the approaching crowd for
+help, then ran back to help O'Ryan.  A moment later a dozen men had Vigon
+secure, and had released Constantine Jopp, now almost dead from loss of
+blood.
+
+As they took the gag from his mouth and tied their handkerchiefs round
+his bleeding wrists, Jopp sobbed aloud.  His eyes were fixed on Terry
+O'Ryan.  Terry met the look, and grasped the limp hand lying on the
+chair-arm.
+
+"I'm sorry, O'Ryan, I'm sorry for all I've done to you," Jopp sobbed.
+"I was a sneak, but I want to own it.  I want to be square now.  You can
+tar and feather me, if you like.  I deserve it."  He looked at the
+others.  "I deserve it," he repeated.
+
+"That's what the boys had thought would be appropriate," said Gow Johnson
+with a dry chuckle, and the crowd looked at each other and winked.  The
+wink was kindly, however.  "To own up and take your gruel" was the
+easiest way to touch the men of the prairie.
+
+A half-hour later the roisterers, who had meant to carry Constantine Jopp
+on a rail, carried Terry O'Ryan on their shoulders through the town,
+against his will.  As they passed the house where Miss Mackinder lived
+some one shouted:
+
+"Are you watching the rise of Orion?"
+
+Many a time thereafter Terry O'Ryan and Molly Mackinder looked at the
+galaxy in the evening sky with laughter and with pride.  It had played
+its part with Fate against Constantine Jopp and the little widow at
+Jansen.  It had never shone so brightly as on the night when Vigon struck
+oil on O'Ryan's ranch.  But Vigon had no memory of that.  Such is the
+irony of life.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Babbling covers a lot of secrets
+Beneath it all there was a little touch of ridicule
+What'll be the differ a hundred years from now
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NORTHERN LIGHTS, V4, BY PARKER ***
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