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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Snow-Blind, by Katharine Newlin Burt
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Snow-Blind
+
+Author: Katharine Newlin Burt
+
+
+Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7520]
+Posting Date: July 24, 2009
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SNOW-BLIND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ketaki Chhabra and Wendy Crockett
+
+
+
+
+
+SNOW-BLIND
+
+By Katharine Newlin Burt
+
+
+Author Of The Branding Iron, Etc.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Under a noon sun the vast, flat country, buried deep in snow, lay like a
+paper hoop rimmed by the dark primeval forest; its surface shone with an
+unbearable brightness as of sun-struck glass, every crystal gleaming
+and quivering with intense cold light. To the north a single blunt, low
+mountain-head broke the evenness of the horizon line.
+
+Hugh Garth seemed to leap through paper like a tiny active clown as he
+dropped down into the small space shoveled clear in front of his hidden
+cabin door. The roof was weighted with drift, so that a curling mass
+like the edge of a wind-crowded wave about to break hung low over the
+eaves. Long icicles as thick as a man's arm stretched from roof to
+ground in a row of twisted columns. Under this overhanging cornice of
+snow near the door there was a sudden icy purple darkness.
+
+As Hugh plunged down into it, his face lost a certain rapt brightness
+and shadowed deeply. He let slip the load of fresh pelts from his back,
+drew his feet from the skis which he stuck up on their ends in the snow,
+and removed the fur cap from his head and the huge dark spectacles from
+his eyes. Then, crouching, he went in at the low, ill-hung door. It
+stuck to its sill, and he cursed it; all his movements expressed the
+anger of frustration. He slammed the door behind him.
+
+Buried in drifts, the cabin was dim even at this bright hour of noon.
+The stove glowed in a corner with a subdued redness, its bulging cheeks
+and round mouth dully scarlet. The low room was pleasant to look at,
+for it had the beauty of brown bark and the salmon tints of old rough
+boards, and its furniture, wrought painstakingly by an unskillful hand,
+had the charm of all handwork even when unskilled. Some of the chairs
+were rudely carved, one great throne especially, awkward, pretentious,
+and carefully ornate.
+
+There was, too, a solid table in the center of the floor; and on it a
+woman was setting heavy earthenware plates nicked and discolored. She
+was heavy and discolored herself, but like the stove, she too seemed
+to have a dull glow. She was no longer young, but she might still have
+encouraged her youthfulness to linger pleasantly; she was not in the
+least degree beautiful, but she might have fostered a charm that lurked
+somewhere about her small, compact body and in her square, dark face.
+Her hair of a sandy brown was stretched back brutally so that her
+bright, devoted eyes--gray and honest eyes, very deep-set beneath their
+brows--lacked the usual softness and mystery of women's eyes. Her lips
+were tight set; her chin held out with an air of dogged effort which
+seemed to possess no relation to her mechanical occupation, yet to have
+a strong habitual relation to her state of mind. She seemed, in fact,
+under a shell of self-control, to conceal an inner light, like a dimly
+burning dark-lantern. Her expression was dumb. She moved about like
+a deaf-mute. Indeed, her stillness and stony self-repression were
+extraordinary.
+
+A youth rose from a chair near the stove and greeted Hugh as he entered.
+
+"Hullo," he said. "How many did you get?"
+
+It was the eager questioning of a modest, affectionate boy who curbs his
+natural effervescence of greeting like a well-trained dog. The tone was
+astonishingly young, a quiet, husky boy-voice.
+
+"Damn you, Pete!" was snarled at him for answer. "Haven't you got my
+boot mended yet?"
+
+The boot, still lacking its heel, lay on the floor near the stove, and
+Hugh now picked it up and hurled it half across the room.
+
+"I have to get out into this ice chest of a wilderness and this flaming
+glare that cuts my eyeballs open, and work till the sweat freezes on my
+face, and then come home to find you loafing by the fire as if you were
+a house cat--purring and rubbing against my legs when I come in," he
+snarled. "Thanking me for a quiet nap and a saucer of milk, eh? You
+loafer! What do I keep you for? You gorge the bread and meat I earn
+by sweating and freezing, and you keep your sluggish mountain of bones
+covered. A year or two ago I'd have urged you along with a stick. I used
+to get some work out of you then. But you think you're too big for that,
+now, don't you? You fancy I'm afraid of your bigness, eh? Well, do you
+want me to try it out? What about it?"
+
+During the first part of his brother's speech, Pete had faced him, but
+in the middle he had turned his back and stood in front of one of the
+clumsy windows. He looked out now at a white wall of snow, above which
+shone the dazzle of the midday. He whistled very softly to himself and
+sank his hands deep into the pockets of his corduroys. He did not answer
+the snarling question, but his wide, quiet mouth, exquisitely shaped,
+ran into a smile and a dimple, deep and narrow, cut into his thin and
+ruddy cheek.
+
+Between the woman, who went on with her work as though no one had come
+into the room, and the silent smiling youth, Hugh Garth prowled the
+floor like a shadow thrown by a moving light.
+
+He was a man of forty-five, gray-haired, misshapen, heavy above the
+waist and light to meanness below; a man lame in one leg and with an
+ill-proportioned face, malicious, lined, lead-colored; a man who limped
+and leaped about the room with a fierce energy, the while his tongue,
+gifted with a rich and resonant voice, poured vitriol upon the silence.
+
+Suddenly the woman spoke. She turned back on the threshold of the
+kitchen door through which her work had been taking her to and fro
+during Garth's outbreak. Her voice was monotonous and smothered; it had
+its share in her unnatural self-repression.
+
+"Why don't you tell him to be quiet, Pete? You've been chopping wood
+since daybreak to make up for what he didn't do last week, and you only
+came in about ten minutes before he did. Why don't you speak out? You're
+getting to be pretty close to a man now, and it isn't suitable for you
+to let yourself be talked to that way. You always stand like a fool and
+take it from him."
+
+Pete turned. "Oh, well," he answered good-humoredly, "I guess maybe he's
+tired. Let up, Hugh, will you? I'll finish your boot after dinner."
+
+"The hell you will! You'll do it now!" Venting on his brother his anger
+at the woman's intervention, Garth swung his misshapen body around the
+end of the table and thrust an elbow violently against Pete's chest.
+The attack was so unexpected that Pete staggered, lost his balance, and
+stepping down into the shallow depression of a pebbled hearth, fell,
+twisting his ankle. The agony was sharp. After a dumb minute he lifted
+a white face and pulled himself up, one hand clutching the board mantel.
+"Now you've done it!" he said between his teeth. "How will you get your
+pelts to the station now? I won't be able to take them."
+
+There ensued a dismayed silence. The woman had come back from the
+kitchen and stood with a steaming dish in her hands. After the brief
+pause of consternation she set down the dish and went over to Pete.
+"Here," she said, "sit down and let me take off your moccasin and bathe
+your ankle before it begins to swell."
+
+Hugh Garth had seated himself in the thronelike chair at the head of the
+table. His expression was still defiant, indifferent, and lordly.
+"Come and eat your dinner, both of you," he commanded. "You've had your
+lesson, Pete. After this, I guess you'll do what I tell you to--not
+choose the work that happens to suit your humor. Don't, for God's sake,
+baby him, Bella. Don't start being a grandmother before you've ever been
+a sweetheart. You're too young for the one even if you're getting a bit
+too old for the other!"
+
+Bella flushed deep and hot. She went to her place, and Pete hobbled to
+his, opposite his brother. Between them the woman sat, dyed deep in her
+sudden unaccustomed wave of scarlet. Pete's whiteness too was stained in
+sympathy. But Hugh only chuckled. "As for the pelts," he said royally,
+"I'll take them down myself."
+
+Bella looked slowly up.
+
+"You think I don't mean it, I suppose?" Hugh demanded.
+
+They did not answer, but the eyes of the boy and the woman met. This
+silence and this dumb exchange of understanding infuriated Garth. He
+clinched his hands on the carved arms of his chair and leaned a little
+forward.
+
+"I'll take the pelts myself," he repeated boisterously. "I'm not afraid
+to be seen at the station. I'm sick of skulking. Buried here--with _my_
+talents--in this damn country, spending my days trapping and skinning
+beasts to keep the breath in our three useless bodies. Wouldn't death be
+better for a man like me? Easier to bear? Fifteen years of it! Fifteen
+years! My best years!" He stared over Pete's head. "In all that time no
+beauty to feed my starved senses, no work for my starved brain, no hope
+for my starved heart." The woman and the youth watched him still in
+silence. "That fox I killed this morning had a better life to lose than
+I."
+
+"It wouldn't be safe for you to go, Hugh," said Pete gently.
+
+"Why not--watchdog?"
+
+The sneer deepened the flush on Pete's face, but he answered with the
+same gentleness, fixing his blue eyes on his brother's.
+
+"Because not two months ago there was a picture of you tacked up in the
+post-office."
+
+Bella's face whitened, and Hugh's cheeks grew a shade more leaden.
+"T-two months ago!" he stammered painfully; "but that's not p-possible.
+They--they've given me up. They've f-forgotten me. They th-think I'm
+dead. After fifteen years? My God, Pete! Why didn't you tell me?" He
+pleaded the last with a shaken sort of sharpness, in pitiful contrast to
+the bombast of the preceding speech.
+
+"I didn't see the good of telling you. I was waiting until this trip to
+see if the picture was still there, and maybe to ask some questions."
+
+"What does it mean?" whispered Bella.
+
+"It means they've some fresh reason to hunt me--some fresh impulse--God
+knows what or why. How can we tell out here, buried in the snows of
+fifteen winters. Well!" He struck his hands down on the table edge and
+stood up. He drew his mouth into a crooked smile and looked at the other
+two as a naughty child looks at its doting but disapproving elders. The
+smile transfigured his ugliness. "I've a fancy to see that picture. Want
+to be reminded of what I looked like fifteen years ago. I was a handsome
+fellow then. I'm going to take the pelts."
+
+Pete looked dumbly up at him, his lips parted. Bella twisted her apron
+about her hands. Both seemed to know the hopelessness of protest. In the
+same anxious dumbness they watched Garth make ready for his trip. As he
+pulled his cap down close about his ears, Pete at last found his voice.
+
+"Hugh," he began doubtfully, "I wish you wouldn't risk it. We can get on
+without supplies until next trading-day, when I'll surely be all right."
+
+"Hold your tongue! I'm going," was the answer. "I tell you, the spirit
+of adventure has me. Who knows what I may meet with out there?" He flung
+back the door and, pointing with a long arm, stood silhouetted against
+the dazzle.
+
+"Beauty? Opportunity? Danger? Hope? Death? I shan't shirk it this time.
+I'll meet whatever comes. But--" He came back a step into the room. His
+harsh face melted to a shamefaced gentleness; his voice softened. "If
+they get me down there, if I _don't_ come back, you two try to think
+kindly of me, will you? I know what you think of me now. I know you
+won't see me as I am--no one but God will ever do me that kindness; but
+you two--be easy with me in your memories."
+
+Bella, her arms now twisted to their red elbows in her apron, took a
+few stiff steps across the floor. Her face was expressionless, her eyes
+lowered. Garth smiled at them both and went out, shutting the door. They
+heard him singing as he put on his skis:
+
+  A hundred men were riding,
+  A-hunting for Pierre.
+  They rode and rode, but nothing could they find.
+  They rode around by moonlight;
+  They rode around by day;
+  They rode and rode, but nothing could they find.
+
+Then came the sharp scraping of his runners across the surface of the
+snow on a level with the buried roof. It lessened from a hissing speech
+to a hissing whisper. It sighed away. Bella sat down abruptly on a
+chair, pulled in her chin like an unhappy child; her bosom lifted as
+though a sob would force its way out.
+
+"If he doesn't come back!" she murmured. "If he doesn't come back!" She
+was speaking to God.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Pete blinked, swallowed hard and began to talk fast and hopefully.
+
+"He'll come back. I don't believe he'll get halfway there, Bella," he
+reassured the woman. "He'll come to his senses. You know how moody he
+is. Come over here and doctor up my ankle, please. 'Make a fuss over me,
+Bell.' Isn't that what I used to say?"
+
+He coaxed until at last she came and knelt before him and removed his
+moccasin and heavy woolen sock. The strong white foot was like marble,
+but the ankle was swollen and discolored. Bella clicked her tongue. "He
+_is_ a brute, you know!" She laughed shortly. Since Garth's departure
+she had become almost a human being. The deaf-mute look had melted from
+her, and a sardonic humor emerged; her eyes cleared; she could even
+smile. "Why do we care so much for him, Pete--the two of us?"
+
+Pete winced under her touch and puckered his brows. "Because he's such a
+kid, I guess. He's always fretting after the moon."
+
+"Don't you ever get angry with him, Pete? He does treat you shameful
+sometimes."
+
+"N-no. Not often. He's always sorry and ashamed afterward. He'd like to
+be as kind as God. I believe if he could only fool us into thinking he
+_was_ God, he could act like Him--ouch, Bella! Go easy."
+
+"You're an awful smart boy, Pete. It's a sin you've never had any
+schooling."
+
+"Schooling! Gosh! I've had all the schooling I could digest. Hugh beat
+it into me. He's taught me all he had in his head and a whole lot he
+never ought to have had there, I guess. But _you've_ taught me most,
+Bella--that's the truth of it."
+
+"_Me_! I never knew anything. They saw to that. They never did anything
+for me at home but abuse me. Hugh Garth was the only relation I ever had
+in the world that spoke kind to me. Remember how I used to run over from
+my folks to tuck you into bed in your little room above the shop, Pete?
+No, you were too little."
+
+"Of course, I remember," the boy replied. "The ankle's fine now, Bella.
+Let up. I can't stand that rubbing. Let me stick the foot up on another
+chair. There--that's great. It doesn't hurt near so bad now. I remember
+Hugh's bookshop; yes, I do--honest! I remember sitting on the ladder and
+listening to him talk to the students when they came in. He always was
+a gorgeous talker, Bella. They used to stand around and listen to
+his yarns like kids to a fairy story. Just the same as you and I do
+now--when we can get him into a good humor. But, you know, he used to
+like strangers best--to talk to, I mean."
+
+Bella assented, bitterly. She had begun to clear the table of its almost
+untouched meal. "Because he could put it over better with a stranger. It
+isn't the _truth_ Hugh likes--about himself, or others."
+
+Pete had begun to whittle a piece of wood. He was a charming figure,
+slouching down in his chair, slim and graceful, his shapely golden
+head ruffled, his chin pressed against his chest. His expression
+was indescribably sweet and boyish, the shadow of anxiety and pain
+accentuating a wistful if determined cheerfulness. He was deliberately
+entertaining Bella, diverting her mind from its agony of apprehension.
+She saw through him, but like a sick child she took the entertainment
+languidly.
+
+"Now, _you're_ too dead bent on the truth, Bella. You know you are.
+You're a regular bear for the truth."
+
+"I can't see anything else," she said gloomily. "Things are just so to
+me--no blinking them."
+
+He put his head a little to one side and contemplated her. "What do you
+see when you look into the water-bucket, Bella?"
+
+"The water-bucket?" She flushed. "Just because you caught me prinking
+that once!"
+
+"Well, if you had a mirror, what would you see in it, then?"
+
+"An ugly old woman, Pete."
+
+"There! Your mind's just the wrong-side-out of Hugh's. He won't see
+himself ugly, and you won't see yourself pretty. I'm the only sane
+fellow in this house."
+
+"And you never in your life saw a pretty woman to remember her. Besides,
+you're too young." She said it with a tart sweetness and vanished into
+the kitchen.
+
+With her departure Pete's whittling ceased, his hands fell slack and he
+began to stare out through the snow-walled window. His anxiety for Hugh
+slipped imperceptibly into a vague pondering over his own youthfulness.
+That's what those two were always telling him, sometimes savagely,
+sometimes tenderly! "You're too young." What did it mean to him, anyhow,
+that he was "too young"? A desolation from which at times he suffered in
+secret overcame him.
+
+He was twenty-one or -two--or his memory lied. They had never celebrated
+his birthdays, but he was five or six years old when Hugh had been
+so suddenly, so unexplainably taken from the house, back there in the
+little Eastern college town where they had lived. It was a few months
+later that Bella--Cousin Bella, who worked at "the farm"--came for him,
+a furtive, desperate Bella with a bruised face--a Bella tight-strung for
+flight, for a breaking of the galling accustomed ties of her life, for a
+terrible plunge into unknown adventure. She had muttered to him, as
+she dressed him and bundled together a few of his belongings, that they
+"were going to Hugh"--only it was another name she used, a name since
+blotted from their lives.
+
+Hugh had sent for them. She was the only person in the world that Hugh
+could trust. But no one must know where they were going. They must be
+away by the time the man who took charge of the shop came back in the
+morning.
+
+Pete remembered the journey. He remembered the small frontier station
+where they left the train at last. He remembered that strange, far-flung
+horizon, streaked with dawn, and his first taste of the tangy, heady
+air. There had been a long, long drive and a parting with the friendly
+driver where Bella turned on to the trail through the woods. It had been
+dim and dark and terrible among the endless regiments of trees--mazy
+and green and altogether bewildering. And after vague hop-o'-my-thumb
+wanderings, he had a disconnected memory of Hugh--a wild, rugged,
+ragged, bearded Hugh who caught him up fiercely as though he had an
+ogrish hunger for the feel of little boys. It was night when they came
+to Hugh's hiding-place. For miles Pete had been carried in his
+brother's arms. Bella had limped behind them. There had been a ford,
+he remembered; the splashing water had roused Pete, and he stayed awake
+afterward until he found himself before a dancing fire of logs in a
+queer, dark, resinous-smelling house, very low, with unglazed windows.
+He remembered, too, that Bella had burst out crying. That was the
+queerest memory of them all--that crying of Bella's.--Even now he could
+not understand exactly why she had cried so then.
+
+The frightened, furtive life they had all led since--the life of scared
+wild things--had left its mark on Pete. His fear for Hugh now threw him
+back into the half-forgotten state of apprehension which had been the
+atmosphere of all his little boyhood. He had not known then why strange
+men were creatures to be feared and shunned. In fact, he had never
+been told the reason for Hugh's flight. Only, bit by bit, he had pieced
+together hints and vague allusions until he knew that this strange,
+embittered, boasting poet of a brother had killed or had been accused of
+killing. In his loyal boy mind Hugh Garth was promptly acquitted. It was
+the world that was wrong--not Hugh. Yet to-day, after all the long years
+of carefulness, he had gone back to the cruelty of the world.
+
+Like a beast the boy's anxiety for his brother began to prowl about the
+walls of his mind. He imagined Hugh appearing at the trading-station. He
+pictured the curious glances of the Indians and the white natives.
+This limping, extravagant, energetic Hugh with his whitening hair and
+eyebrows and flaring hazel eyes--with his crooked nose and mouth,
+his magnificently desperate manner and his magnificently desperate
+voice--attention would inevitably fasten upon him anywhere; how much
+more in an empty land such as this! Pete fancied the inquiring looks
+turned from the man to the man's posted picture. It was no longer a
+faithful likeness, of course; still, it was a likeness. There was no
+other man in all the world like Hugh! He was made of odd, fantastic
+fragments, of ill-fitting parts--physically, mentally, spiritually. It
+was as if a soul had seen itself in a crooked mirror and had fashioned a
+form to match the distorted image. Hugh wouldn't, couldn't force himself
+to be inconspicuous. He would swagger; he would talk loud; his big,
+beautiful voice would challenge attention, create an audience. He would
+have some impossible, splendid tale to tell.
+
+Pete sat up straighter in his chair, gingerly rearranging the ankle, and
+lifted his blue and haunted eyes--the eyes of the North--to the window.
+
+The dazzle of noon had faded to a glow. The short winter day was nearly
+done. There would be a long violet twilight, and then, the blaze of
+stars.
+
+But for his aching ankle Pete would be sliding out on soundless skis,
+now poised for breathless flight down some long slope, now leaping
+fallen trees or buried ditches. He spent half of his wild young
+restlessness in such long night runs when, in a sort of ecstasy, he
+outraced the stifled longings of his exiled youth. But there would be
+no ski-running for several nights now. He was a prisoner, and at a time
+when imprisonment was hard to bear.
+
+If only there were some way of getting quick news of Hugh! Why had
+Bella and he let this thing happen? Why had they stood helplessly by and
+allowed the rash fool to go singing to his own destruction? They might
+have held him by force, if not by argument, long enough to bring him
+to his senses. They had been weak; they were always weak before Hugh's
+magnetic strength--always the audience, the following; Bella, for
+all her devastating tongue, no less than himself. And Hugh's liberty,
+perhaps his life, might be the price of their acquiescence.
+
+Straining forward in his chair, listening, there came to Pete, across
+the silence, the sound of skis.
+
+He rose and hopped to the door, flinging it wide. He could not see above
+the top of the drift which rose just beyond the roof to a height of nine
+or ten feet, but listening intently, he thought he recognized a familiar
+slight unevenness in the sliding of the skis.
+
+"Bella!" he shouted, his boy-voice ringing with relief. "Bella! Here's
+Hugh. He's come back."
+
+Bella was instantly at his side. They stood waiting in the doorway.
+Against the violet sky darkening above the blue wall of snow, a bulky
+figure rose, blotting out the light. It half slid, half tumbled down
+upon them, clumsy and shapeless.
+
+"Let us in," panted Hugh. "Let us in."
+
+Slipping his feet from the straps of his skis, he staggered past them
+and they saw that he was carrying a woman in his arms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+"Shut the door," Hugh whispered, and laid his burden down on a big
+black bear-hide near the stove. He knelt beside it. He had no eyes for
+anything else. Pete, hobbling to him, gazed curiously down, and Bella
+knelt opposite and drew away Hugh's mackinaw coat, with which he had
+wrapped his trove. It was not a woman whom they looked down upon, but
+a girl, and very young--perhaps not yet seventeen--a girl with cropped
+dark curly hair and a face so wan and blue and at the same time so
+scorched by the snow-glare that its exquisiteness of feature was all the
+more marked. Hugh's handkerchief was tied loosely across her eyes.
+
+"I heard her crying in the snow," he said with ineffable tenderness;
+"crying like a little bleating lamb with cold and pain and hunger
+and fright--the most pitiful thing in God's cruel trap of life. She's
+blind--snow-blind."
+
+Pete gave a sharp exclamation, and Bella gently removed the
+handkerchief. The small figure moaned and moved its head. The lids of
+her eyes were swollen and discolored.
+
+"Snow-blind," echoed Bella.
+
+"A bad case," said Hugh. "Get her some soup, Bella, and--perhaps, hot
+water--I don't know." He looked up helplessly.
+
+Bella went to the kitchen. She had regained her old look of dumbness.
+Beside the figure on the floor Pete touched one of the girl's small
+clenched hands. It was like ice. At the touch she moaned, and Hugh
+ordered sharply: "Let her alone." So the boy dragged himself up again
+and stood by the mantel, watching Hugh with puzzled and wondering eyes.
+
+"Think what she's been through," Hugh murmured, "that little delicate
+thing, wandering for two days, out in this cold--scared by the woods,
+blinded by the pain, starving. When I found her, you'd have thought
+she'd be afraid of a wild man like me, but she just lifted up her arms
+like a baby and dropped her head on my shoulder. She--she patted my
+cheek--"
+
+Bella brought the soup, and Hugh, raising the small black head on the
+crook of his arm, forced a spoonful between the clenched teeth. The girl
+swallowed and began again to whimper: "Oh, my eyes! My eyes! They hurt
+me so!" She turned her face against Hugh's chest and clung to him.
+
+"They'll be better soon," he soothed her; then fiercely to Bella: "Can't
+we do something? Don't you know what to do?"
+
+Again Bella went to the kitchen, moving like an automaton. Hugh coaxed
+and murmured, feeding the girl in spite of her pain. He managed to force
+a little of the soup down her throat, and a faint stain of color came
+back to her lips and cheeks. Bella presently reappeared with salve and
+lotion, and Hugh helped her hold the swollen lids apart, his big hands
+very skillful, while she gently washed out the eyes. Then they put the
+salve on her sun-scorched face. She sighed as though in some relief, and
+again snuggled against Hugh.
+
+"Don't go away, please," she pleaded in a sweet trickle of voice. "I'm
+scared to feel you gone. You're so warm. You're so strong. Will you talk
+to me again, please? Your voice is so comforting, so beau-ti-ful."
+
+So Hugh talked. The others drew away and watched and listened. They did
+not look at each other. For some reason Pete was ashamed to meet Bella's
+eyes. As usual, they were the audience, those two. They sat, each in a
+chair, the width of the room apart; below them, his grizzled head and
+warped face transfigured by its new tenderness, Hugh bent over the child
+in his arms. Pete held his tumult of curiosity, of interest, in leash.
+He could hear his heart pounding.
+
+"You're safe now, and warm," Hugh was murmuring. "No need to be scared,
+no need. I'll take care of you. Go to sleep. I'm strong enough to keep
+off anything. You're safe and snug as a little bird in its nest. That's
+right. Go to sleep."
+
+Pete's blue eyes dwelt on this amazing spectacle with curious wonder.
+This was a Hugh he had never seen before. For the first time in fifteen
+years, he realized, the man had forgotten himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+To Hugh Garth the girl told her story at last. She seemed to realize
+only dimly that there were two other living beings in this house, to
+her a house of darkness peopled only by voices--Pete's modest, rare boy
+speeches, Bella's brief, smothered statements. The great music of Hugh's
+utterance must indeed have filled her narrowed world. So it was to him
+she turned--he was always near her, sitting on the pelt beside the chair
+to which, after a day and night in Bella's bed, she was helped.
+
+She had a charming fashion of speech, rather slow motions of her lips,
+which had some difficulty with "r" and "s," a difficulty which she
+evidently struggled against conscientiously, and as she talked, she
+gesticulated with her slim little hands. She was a touching thing
+sitting there in Hugh's carved throne--he an abdicated monarch at her
+feet, knee in hand, grizzled head tilted back, hazel eyes raised to her
+and filled with adoration.
+
+"I am called Sylvie Doone," she said with that quaint struggle over
+the "S." "I was always miserable at home." She gave the quick sigh of
+a child. "You see, my father died when I was very little, and then my
+mother married again. We lived in the grimmest little town, hardly
+more than a dozen houses, beside a stream, up in Massachusetts--farming
+country, but poor farming, hard farming, the kind that twists the men
+with rheumatism, and makes the women all pinched and worn. Mother
+was like that. She died when I was thirteen. You see--there I was, so
+queerly fixed. I had to live with Mr. Pynche--there was no other home
+for me anywhere. And he kind of resented it. He had enough money not
+to need me for work--a sister of his did the housework better than I
+could--and yet he was poor enough to hate having to feed me and pay for
+my clothes. I was always feeling in the way, and a burden. There was
+nothing I could do.
+
+"Then I saw something about the movies in a magazine, and pictures of
+girls, not much better-looking than me, making lots of money. I borrowed
+some money from a drug-store clerk who wanted to keep company with
+me--I've paid it back--and I went to New York. I did get a job. But I'm
+not a good actress."
+
+She faltered over the rest--a commonplace story of engagements, of
+failures, until she found herself touring the West with a wretched
+theatrical troupe. "We were booked for a little town off there beyond
+your woods, and the train was stalled in a snowstorm. We got on a
+stage-coach, but it got stuck in a drift on one of those dreadful roads.
+I was freezing cold, and I thought I'd make a short cut through the
+woods. The road was running along the edge of a big forest of pines. I
+cut off while they were all working to dig out the horses.
+
+"Mr. Snaring said, 'Look out for the bears!' and I laughed and ran up
+what looked like a snow-buried trail. There was a hard crust. The woods
+were all glittering and so beautiful. I ran into them, laughing. I was
+so glad to get away by myself from those people into the woods where it
+was so silent and sort of solemn--like being in a church again. I can't
+think how I got so lost. I meant to come round back to the road, but
+before I knew it, I didn't know which way the road was. The pines were
+so dense, so all alike, they looked almost as if they kept sort of
+shifting about me. I tried to follow back on my footprints, but in
+some places snow had shaken down from the branches. And there were so
+many--so dreadfully many other tracks--of animals--" She put her hands
+over her face and shrank down in her chair.
+
+"Forget about them, Sylvie," Hugh admonished gently. "Even if there had
+been bears about, they wouldn't likely have bothered you any."
+
+"I can't bring myself to tell you about that time--I can't!"
+
+"Don't, then--only, how did you live through the night, my dear?"
+
+"I don't know--except that I never stayed still. I got out from the
+trees because I was afraid of bears, and I lost my hat. The sun was like
+fire shining up from underneath and down from up above. My eyes began
+to hurt almost at once, and by the time night came, it was agony. The
+darkness didn't seem to help me any either; the glare still seemed to
+come in under my lids. I couldn't sleep for the pain. I knew I'd
+freeze if I stood still, so I kept moving all night, trampling round in
+circles, I suppose. Next morning the terrible glare began again. Then
+everything went red. I was nearly crazy when you found me, Mr. Garth."
+
+"Please call me Hugh," he murmured, taking her hand in his. "I feel in a
+way that you belong to me now--I saved you from dying alone there in the
+cold and brought you back to my home. I've got jettison rights, Sylvie."
+She let him hold her hand, and flushed.
+
+"You'll never know what it felt like to hear your voice call to me, to
+feel you pulling me up. I'd only just dropped a few minutes before, but
+I'd never have struggled up. It would have been the end." She trembled
+in the memory, and he patted her hand. "I don't know why a man like
+you lives off here in this wild place, but thank God, you do live here!
+Though," she added with wistfulness, twisting her soft mouth, "though I
+can't ever quite see why God should care much for a Sylvie Doone." She
+touched the lids of her closed eyes. "I wonder why it doesn't worry me
+more not to be able to see. Now that the pain's gone, I don't seem to
+care much."
+
+"Thank God. Perhaps, though," he added half-grudgingly, "in a few days
+you'll see again."
+
+She smiled. "I'd just love to see _you_. You must be wonderful!"
+
+"What makes you think that?" he asked, his warped face glowing.
+
+"You're so strong and young, such thick hair, such finely shaped hands
+and such a voice." Sylvie's associates had been of a profession that
+deals perpetually in personalities. "If I'd been blind a long time, I
+suppose I could just run my hand over your face, and I'd know what you
+look like. But I can't tell a thing." She felt for his face and brushed
+it eagerly with her fingers, laughing at herself. "I just know that you
+have thick eyelashes and are clean-shaven. Is Bella your wife? And that
+big little boy your son?"
+
+He started. "No, she's a faithful thing, the boy's nurse. And the
+kid's my young brother--a great gawk of a boy for his age, a regular
+bean-pole."
+
+"It's so hard to tell anything about people if you can't see them. I
+wouldn't have thought he was so big. Is he about fourteen or fifteen? He
+speaks so low and gently; he might be any age."
+
+"And a man's height--pretty near too big to lick, though he needs it."
+
+"And Bella, what's she like?"
+
+"A dried-up mummy of a woman."
+
+The kitchen door creaked. Hugh started and shot a look over his
+shoulder. Bella stood on the kitchen threshold with an expressionless
+face and lowered eyelids.
+
+"Why did you jump?" asked Sylvie nervously.
+
+Hugh wet his lips with his tongue. "Nothing. The door creaked. Go on.
+Tell me more, child," he urged.
+
+"No. I want to hear about you now. Tell me your story."
+
+Hugh clenched his hands and flushed darkly. He glanced over his shoulder
+with a furtive look, but Bella had gone.
+
+"No one else rightly knows my story, Sylvie. Will you promise me never
+to speak of it, to Bella, to Pete, to any one?"
+
+"Of course, I promise." Her face beamed with the pride of a child
+entrusted with a secret.
+
+Then, lowering his voice and moving closer to her chair, he began a
+fictitious history, a history of persecuted and heroic innocence, of
+reckless adventure, of daring self-sacrifice. The girl listened with
+parted lips. Her cheeks glowed. And behind the door, Bella too listened,
+straining her ears.
+
+The murmur of Hugh's recital, rising now and then to some melodramatic
+climax, then dropping cautiously, rippled on, broken now and again by
+Sylvie's ejaculations. Behind the door Bella stood like a wooden block,
+colorless and stolid as though she understood not a syllable of what
+she heard. But after a rigid hour she faltered away, stumbled across the
+kitchen and out into the snow.
+
+There, in the broad light of the setting sun, Pete rhythmically bent and
+straightened over his saw. The tool sang with a hissing, ringing rhythm,
+and the young man drove it with a lithe, long swing of body, forward and
+back, forward and back, in alternate postures of untiring grace. The
+air was not cold. There was the cloudy softness premonitory of a spring
+storm; the sun glowed like a dying fire through a long, narrow rift in
+the shrouded west. Pete had thrown aside his coat and drawn in his belt.
+The collar of his flannel shirt was open and turned back; his head was
+bare. The bright gold of his short hair, the scarlet of his cheeks,
+the vivid blue of his brooding eyes, made shocks of color against the
+prevailing whiteness. Even the indigo of his overalls and the dark gray
+of his shirt stood out with a curious value of tint and texture. His
+bare hands and forearms glowed. He was whistling with a boy's vigor and
+a bird's sweetness.
+
+Bella caught Pete's arm as it bent for one of the strong forward sweeps.
+He stopped, let go of his saw, and turned to her, smiling.
+
+Then--the smile gone: "What's wrong?"
+
+Her eyes flamed in her pale, tense face. "We've got to stop it, Pete,"
+she said. "It's horrible!"
+
+"What? Don't stand out here with those bare arms, Bella." He was pulling
+his own shirt-sleeves down over his glistening bronze forearms as he
+spoke.
+
+"We can't talk in the house," she said, "and I've got to talk. I--Do you
+know what Hugh's doing--what he's telling that girl? What he's letting
+her believe?"
+
+Pete shook his head, but at the same time turned his blue eyes away from
+her toward the glowing west.
+
+"Lies," said Bella. She laughed a short, explosive laugh. "He's got his
+ideal audience at last--a blind one. She thinks he's young and handsome
+and heroic. Pete, she thinks he's a hero. She thinks he's buried himself
+out here for the sake of somebody else. Oh, it's a regular romance, and
+it's been going on for hours--it's still going on. By now he believes
+it all himself. He's putting in the details. And Sylvie: 'Oh!' she's
+saying, and 'Ah, Mr. Garth, how you must have suffered! How
+wonderful you are!' And--look at me Pete--do you want to know what we
+are--according to him--you and I?"
+
+He did not turn his eyes from the west, even when she shook his arm.
+
+"I'm a dried-up mummy of a woman--faithful?--yes, I'm faithful--an old
+servant. And you're a child, an overgrown bean-pole of a boy, fourteen
+or fifteen years old."
+
+The young man stood tall and still--a statue of golden youth in the
+golden light--the woman clutching at his arm, her face twisted, her eyes
+afire, all the colorlessness of her body and the suppressed flame of her
+spirit pitilessly apparent.
+
+"Look at me, Pete."
+
+"Well," he sighed gently, "what of it?" He looked down at her and
+smiled. "It's the first good time he's had for fifteen years. You know
+we don't make him happy. I don't grudge him his joy, Bella, do you?
+It can't last long, anyway. Fairy tales can't hurt her--Hugh
+believes--almost--in his own inventions. She'll be going back--her
+friends will be hunting for her. I'll let her think I'm a bean-pole of a
+boy if it makes him any happier to have me one. And why do you care?"
+
+She drew in her breath. "Oh, I don't suppose I care--so much," she said
+haltingly. "But--think of the girl."
+
+His eyes widened a little and fell. "The girl?"
+
+"She's falling in love with him!"
+
+Pete threw back his head and laughed aloud. "Oh, Bella, you know,
+_that's_ funny!"
+
+"It's not. It's tragic. It's horrible. You'll see. Watch her face."
+
+"I have watched it." He spoke dreamily. "It's a very pretty and sweet
+face."
+
+"Pete, Hugh's robbing _you_."
+
+"Me?"
+
+"Yes, you're young. You're ready for loving. This child--God sent her to
+you, to get you out of this desolation, to lead you back to loving and
+living, to give you what you ought to have--Life."
+
+It was as though she had struck him. He started and drew himself away.
+"Shut up, Bella," he said with boyish roughness and limped past her into
+the house.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+In these days Hugh must have known that his magic-making, as he led the
+little blind girl through the forest of his romancing, was at the mercy
+of those two that knew him for what he really was; except for queer,
+wild, threatening looks now and again, he gave no sign. He played his
+part magnificently, even trusting them to come in with help when they
+were given their cue. He had dominated them for so long that even they
+and the picture of him that they held in their minds were not so real
+as his dreams. It was a queer game, queer and breathless, played in this
+narrow space shut in by the white wilderness. And as the slow days went
+by, the low log house seemed to be filled more and more with smothered
+and conflicting emotions. A dozen times the whole extravaganza came near
+collapse; a dozen times Hugh saved it by a word, or Pete and Bella by a
+silence. Their parts were not easy, and although Pete still smiled,
+his young clear face grew whiter and more strained. Sylvie treated him
+always as though he were a child. She would pat his head and rumple his
+hair if he sat near her; once, suddenly, she kissed him lightly on the
+cheek, after he had moved the chair for her.
+
+"You're a dear, quiet boy," she said. "I frightened you to death, then,
+didn't I? Hasn't anyone ever kissed you before?" His cheek burned so
+that, touching it with her fingers, she laughed. "I've made you blush,
+poor kid! I know. Boys hate petting, don't they? You'll have to get used
+to it, Pete, because I mean to pet you--oh, a lot! You need some one
+to draw you out. These two people snub you too much. Boys of
+fourteen aren't quite children, after all, are they? Besides, they're
+interesting. I know. I was fourteen myself not such ages back. You're
+not cross, are you, Pete?"
+
+His eyes were misty, and his hands were cold. He could not understand
+his own emotion, his own pain. He muttered something and got himself
+away. She called him "sullen" and was angry with him, complaining to
+Hugh at supper that "Petey" had been "a bear" to her. Hugh simulated a
+playful annoyance and began to scold; then a sort of nervous fury came
+over him. He stamped and struck the table and snarled at Pete. The young
+man rose at his place and stared at his brother silently. There were two
+splotches of deep color on his cheeks. Sylvie protested: "Don't, please,
+be so angry with him. I was only teasing, just in fun. Bella, tell
+Hugh to stop. I had no business to kiss Pete. But I just wanted to pet
+something."
+
+Hugh's threatening suddenly stopped, and Pete sat down. In the
+strained silence Bella laughed. Her laughter had the sound of a snapped
+bow-string. Sylvie had pushed her chair back a little from the table and
+was turning her head quickly from one to the other of them. Her mouth
+showed a tremble of uncertainty. It was easy to see that she sensed a
+tension, a confusion. Hugh leaned forward and broke into a good-humored
+rattle of speech, and as Pete and Bella sat silent, Sylvie gradually was
+reassured. Near the end of the meal she put out her hand toward Pete.
+
+"Please don't be so cross with me, Pete! Give me a shake for
+forgiveness."
+
+He touched her hand, his eyes lowered, and drew his fingers away. She
+laughed.
+
+"How shy you are--a wild, forest thing! I'll have to civilize you."
+
+"Leave him alone," admonished Hugh softly, "leave him alone."
+
+As he said this, he did not look at Sylvie, but gazed somberly at Pete.
+It was a strange look, at once appealing and threatening, pitiful and
+dangerous. Pete fingered his fork nervously. Finally Bella stood up and
+began to clear the table with an unaccustomed clatter of noisy energy.
+
+"How long are you going to keep it up, Pete?" she asked him afterward.
+He was helping her wash the dishes, drying them deftly with a piece of
+flour-sacking.
+
+"Since we've let it begin, we'll have to go on with it to a finish," he
+answered coldly. "After all"--he paused, polished a platter and turned
+away to put it on its shelf--"he's not doing anything so dreadful--just
+twisting the facts a little. I _am_ an ignorant lout. I might as well be
+fourteen, for all I know."
+
+"And I _am_ a mummy of a woman?"
+
+In pity for her he made to put his arm about her. "Don't be a goose,
+Bella," he said, but she flung his hand from her. "Why does it make you
+so sore and angry?" he asked wistfully. "Hugh is not pretty to look
+at, but perhaps Sylvie sees him better than we do--in a way; and if she
+learns to love him while she's blind, then, when she sees him, if she
+ever sees him--"
+
+"Chances are she never will. If her eyes don't get better soon, they
+likely never will."
+
+"Isn't it horrible?"
+
+"You don't seem to think so. So long's she has Hugh to paint pictures
+for her, what does she need eyes for? What's to come of it, Pete? She's
+falling in love with the fine figure of a hero he's made her believe he
+is. But how can he marry her?"
+
+"Couldn't he go off somewhere else and marry her and start again?
+Honest, I think if Hugh had some one who thought he was a god, he'd
+likely enough be one. He--he lives by--illusion--isn't that the word?
+It's kind of easy to be noble when some one you love believes you to be,
+isn't it? That's Hugh; he--"
+
+Bella threw down her rag, turned fiercely upon him and gripped his
+shoulders.
+
+"Are you a man or a child?" she said. "You love this girl yourself!"
+
+"No!" he cried and broke from her and went limping out into the frosty
+night with its comfortless glitter of stars.
+
+As soon as his ankle was stronger, Pete spent all day and most of the
+night on his skis, trying to outrun the growing shadow of his misery.
+Hugh's work fell on his shoulders. He had not only his accustomed
+chores, the Caliban duties of woodchopping and water-carrying, the
+dressing of wild meat, the dish-drying and heavier housework, the
+repairs about the cabin--but he had the trapping. In Hugh's profound
+new absorption he seemed to have forgotten the necessity for making a
+livelihood. During the first years of their exile they had lived on his
+savings, ordering their supplies by the mail, which left them at the
+foot of that distant trail leading into the forest. Thence Hugh, under
+shelter of night, would carry them--lonely, terrible journeys that taxed
+even his strength. When Pete grew big enough to load, he was sent to the
+trading-station, and Hugh became an expert trapper. The savings were
+not entirely spent, but they were no longer touched; the pelts brought a
+livelihood.
+
+Pete had had his instructions concerning his behavior at the
+trading-station; many years before, he had stammered a legend of a
+sickly father who had died, who was buried back there by the lonely
+cabin where he and his "mother" chose to live. Bella and Hugh had even
+dug up a mound for which they had fashioned a rude cross. It could
+be seen, in summer, from the living-room window--that mock grave more
+terrible in its suggestions than a real grave ever could have been.
+There was also a hiding-place under the boards of the floor. No one
+had ever seen the grave or driven Hugh into hiding. It was not an
+inquisitive country, and its desolation was forbidding. Pete had learned
+to discourage the rare sociability of the other traders.
+
+Now, however, the young man had not only to trade his pelts but to trap
+them, and for this business of trapping which was distasteful to him, he
+had not a tithe of Hugh's skill. His bundle of pelts brought him a sorry
+supply of necessities. He was ashamed, himself, and having dumped the
+burden from his shoulders to the kitchen floor would hurry into the
+other room, not to see Bella's expression when she opened her bundles.
+
+To-night Pete was tired; the load had not been heavy, but the snow was
+beginning to soften under the mild glowing of an April sun, and his skis
+had tugged at his feet and gathered a clogging mass. His body ached,
+and there was a sullen and despairing weight upon his spirit. A mob
+of rebels danced in his heart. He watched Hugh's face, saw the flaring
+adoration of his eyes, thought that Sylvie must feel the scorch of them
+on her cheek, so close. In his own eyes there showed a brooding fire.
+
+Bella broke into the room.
+
+"Look here," she said, "you'd better get to trapping again, Hugh Garth.
+Pete's pelts don't bring a quarter of what we need--especially these
+days."
+
+Sylvie quivered as though a wound had been touched. "Oh, you mean me,"
+she said, "I know you mean me. I'm making trouble. I'm eating too much.
+I'll go. Pete, has anybody been asking about me at the post-office,
+trying to find me? They _must_ be hunting for me." She had stood up and
+was clasping and unclasping her hands. Hugh and Pete protested in one
+breath: "Nonsense, Sylvie!"
+
+And Pete went on with: "There hasn't been anyone asking about you,
+but--so much the better for us. You're safe here, and comfortable,
+aren't you? And--Hugh, _you_ tell her what it means to us to have her
+here."
+
+It was more of a speech than he had made since Sylvie's arrival, and it
+was not just the speech, in tone or manner, of a fourteen-year-old boy.
+There was a new somber note in his voice, too--some of the youthful
+quality had gone out of it. Sylvie took a step toward him, to thank
+him, perhaps, perhaps to satisfy, by laying her hand upon him, a sudden
+bewilderment; but in her blindness she stumbled on the edge of the
+hearth, and to save her from falling, Pete caught her in his arms.
+For an instant he held her close, held her fiercely, closer and more
+fiercely than he knew, and Sylvie felt the strength of him and heard the
+pounding of his heart. Then Hugh plucked her away with a smothered oath.
+He put her into a chair, crushed her hand in one of his, and turned upon
+Bella.
+
+"Go back into the kitchen," he ordered brutally; "trapping's not your
+business. You mind your cooking."
+
+"Be careful, Hugh!" Bella's whisper whistled like a falling lash, "I'll
+not stand that tone from you. Be careful!"
+
+"Oh," pleaded Sylvie, "why do you all quarrel so? Off here by yourselves
+with nobody else to care, I'd think you would just love each other. I
+love you all--yes, I do, even you, Bella, though I know you hate _me_.
+Bella, _why_ do you hate me? Why does it make you so angry to have me
+here? Does it make your work so much harder? I'll soon be better; I'm
+learning to feel my way about. I'll be able to help you. I should think
+you'd be glad to have a girl in the house--another woman. I'm sorry to
+be a nuisance, really I am. I'd go if I could."
+
+The lonely, deep silence, always waiting to fall upon them, shut down
+with suddenness at the end of her sweet, tearful quaver of appeal. For
+minutes no one spoke. Then Pete followed Bella out of the room. She
+had not answered Sylvie's beseeching questions, but had only stood with
+lowered head, her face working, her hands twisting her dress. She had
+run out just as her face cramped as though for tears.
+
+When the other two had gone, Hugh captured both of Sylvie's hands in
+his. "You don't mean that, do you?" he asked brokenly. "You don't mean
+you'd go away if you could, Sylvie!"
+
+At Hugh's voice she started and the color rushed into her cheeks. "If I
+make you quarrel, if I'm a nuisance, if Pete and Bella hate me so!"
+
+"But I"--he said--"I love you." He drew her head--she was sitting in her
+chair again--against his side. "No, don't smile at me like that; I don't
+mean the sort of love you think. I love you terribly. Can't you feel how
+I love you? Listen, close against my heart. Don't be frightened. There,
+now you know how I love you!"
+
+He rained kisses on her head resting droopingly against him.
+
+"How can a man like you love _me_?" she asked with wistful uncertainty.
+
+"A man like me?" Hugh groaned. "Ah, but I do--I do! You must stay with
+me always. Sylvie, somehow we will be married--you--and I!"
+
+"Now it frightens me," she whispered, "being blind. It does frighten
+me now. I want so terribly to see your face, your eyes. Oh, you mustn't
+marry a blind girl, a waif. You've been so noble, you've suffered so
+terribly. You ought to have some wonderful woman who would understand
+your greatness, would see all that you are."
+
+"Now," he sighed, "now I _am_ great--because you think I am; that's
+water to me--after a lifetime of thirst."
+
+"Hugh, _am_ I good enough for you?" She was sobbing and laughing at the
+same time.
+
+It was too much for him. He drew himself gently away. He whispered: "I
+can't bear being loved--being happy. I'll go out by myself for a bit
+alone. Sylvie, Sylvie! Every instant I--I worship _you_!" He threw
+himself down before her and pressed his face against her knees. She
+caressed the thick, grizzled hair. He stood up and then stumbled away
+from her, more blind than she, out of the house into the gathering
+night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+In the big, rudely carved chair Sylvie leaned back her head and pressed
+her hands to her unseeing eyes. She was not sorry that Hugh had left
+her, for she was oppressed and unnerved by her own emotions. Until he
+had kissed her hair, she had not known that she loved him--or rather
+loved an invisible presence that had enveloped her in an atmosphere of
+sympathy, of protection, that had painted itself, so to speak, in heroic
+colors and proportions against her darkness, that had revealed both
+strength and tenderness in touch and movement, and warm, deep voice.
+
+For until now Sylvie's life had been entirely lacking in protection and
+tenderness; she had never known sympathy--her natural romanticism had
+been starved. The lacks in her life Hugh had supplied the more lavishly
+because he was aided, in her blindness, by the unrestricted powers of
+her fancy. But now in all the fervor of this, Sylvie felt, also for
+the first time, the full bitterness of her blindness. If she could see
+him--if only once! If she could see him!
+
+And there came to Sylvie unreasonably, disconnectedly, a keen memory of
+Pete's embrace when he had caught her up from falling on the hearth.
+A boy of fourteen? Strange that he should be so strong, that his heart
+should beat so loud, that his arms should draw themselves so closely, so
+powerfully about her. What were they really like, these people who
+moved unseen around her and who exerted such great power over her sudden
+helplessness?
+
+She got up and began to walk to and fro restlessly, gropingly across the
+room. She wished now that Hugh would come back. He had been with her so
+constantly that she had grown utterly dependent upon him. The dense red
+fog that lay so thick about her, frightened her when Hugh was not
+there to keep her mind busy with his talk to paint pictures for her, to
+command her with his magnetic presence. She stood still and strained her
+eyes. She _must_ see again. If she tried hard, the red fog would surely
+lift. Happiness, and her new love, they would be strong enough to dispel
+the mist. There--already it was a shade lighter! She almost thought that
+she could make out the brightness of the fire. She went toward it and
+sat down on the bear-skin, holding out her tremulous, excited hands. And
+with a sudden impulse toward confidence she called: "Pete, O Pete! Come
+here a moment, please."
+
+He came, and she beckoned to him with a gesture and an upward, vaguely
+directed smile, to sit beside her. She was aware of the rigid reserve of
+his body holding itself at a distance.
+
+"Pete," she said wistfully, "what can I do to make you love me?"
+
+He uttered a queer, sharp sound, but said nothing.
+
+"Are you jealous?"
+
+"No, Sylvie," he muttered.
+
+"Oh, how I wish I could see you, Pete! I know then I'd understand
+you better. Pete, try to be a little more--more human. Tell me
+about yourself. Haven't you a bit of fondness for me? You see, I
+want--Pete--some day perhaps I'll be your sister--"
+
+"Then he has asked you to marry him?"
+
+He was usually so quiet that she was startled at this new tone.
+
+"Don't," she said. "Hush! We have only just found out. He went away
+because he couldn't bear his own happiness. Pete--" She felt for him and
+her hand touched his cheek. "Oh, Pete, your face is wet. You're crying."
+
+"No, I'm not," he denied evenly. "It was melting from the roof when I
+came in."
+
+She sighed. "You are so strange, Pete. Will you let me kiss you
+now--since you are going to be my big little brother?"
+
+"I can't," he whispered. "I can't."
+
+She laughed and crooked her arm about his neck, forcing his face down to
+hers. His lips were hard and cool.
+
+The face that Sylvie imagined a boy's face, shy and blushing, half
+frightened, half cross, perhaps a trifle pleased, was so white and
+patient a face in its misery that her blind tenderness seemed almost
+like an intentional cruelty. It was an intensity of feeling almost
+palpable, but Sylvie's mouth remained unburnt, though it removed itself
+with a pathetic little twist of disappointment.
+
+"You don't need to say anything," she said, "You've shown me how you
+feel. You can't like me. You are sorry I came. And I want so dreadfully
+for some one just now to talk to--to help me, to understand. It's all
+dark and wonderful and frightening. I wish I had a brother--"
+
+She bent her face to her knees and began to cry simply and passionately.
+At that Pete found it easy to forget himself. He put his arm very
+carefully about her, laying one of his hands on her bent head and
+stroking her hair.
+
+"You have a brother," he said. "Right here."
+
+The dark small silken head shook. "No. You don't like me."
+
+"I do--I do. Please tell me everything you feel like telling; I'd like
+awfully to help you, to understand, to listen to you. You see, you've
+been so much with Hugh, I haven't had a chance to know you as he does.
+And I guess--well--maybe I'm sort of shy."
+
+She lifted her head at that, took his stroking hand and held it in both
+of hers under her chin, as a little girl holds her pet kitten for the
+pleasure of its warmth. "You must get over being shy with me, Pete. We
+both love Hugh; we both admire him so. I'd so love to talk to you about
+him--"
+
+"Then do, Sylvie."
+
+"I've never seen him," she sighed, "and you can see him all day long,
+Pete; will you try your best now to describe Hugh to me--every bit
+of him? Tell me the color of his eyes and the shape of his face
+and--everything. Tell me all you remember about him always."
+
+"I--I'm no good at that, Sylvie. A fellow you see all day long--why, you
+don't know what he looks like, 'specially if he's your own brother."
+
+"Well, you certainly know the color of his eyes."
+
+"He has hazel eyes--I think you'd call them--"
+
+"Yes?" she drank in his words eagerly, pressing his hand tighter in her
+excitement. "Go on. If only you were a girl, now, you'd do this so much
+better."
+
+"I--I--but I don't know what else to say, Sylvie. He is very strong."
+
+"Of course. I know that. Didn't he pick me up out of the snow and carry
+me home? He moved as though he had a feather on his arm. You are very
+strong too, Pete--_very_ strong. Are _your_ eyes hazel?"
+
+"No; blue."
+
+"I always liked blue eyes. I like to imagine that Hugh is just the
+Viking sort of man I dreamed about when I was a little girl. You think
+I'm a silly goose, don't you?"
+
+"Yes, rather."
+
+"Don't keep trying to pull your hand away, dear; you can't guess how it
+comforts me. I'm awfully alone here, and strange. I don't suppose you
+know how queer and frightening it's been--this getting lost and being
+brought here in the dark, and then--living on in the dark, just trusting
+my instincts, my intuitions, instead of my eyes. Voices tell a lot about
+people, don't they?--more than I ever dreamed they could. Pete, there is
+nothing in that--that splendid, generous thing Hugh did, the thing I
+am not to talk about, nothing to keep Hugh now from going back to
+the world--some place--that is, far away from where it happened--and
+beginning again, is there?"
+
+"I hope not, Sylvie."
+
+She sighed. "Of course it was wonderful. If he hadn't told me of it, I
+never should have known half of his greatness; yet I can't help wishing
+he were free. It's sad to think there will always be the memory of that
+dreadful suffering and danger in his life."
+
+"Very sad," said Pete.
+
+"How alone we both are--he and I! Bella, and you, Pete--don't be angry,
+please--I don't think you quite understand Hugh, quite appreciate him."
+
+"Perhaps not."
+
+"He has always been lonely. You are so young, and Bella is so
+stupid--stupid and cross."
+
+"No, she isn't, Sylvie. I know Bella a lot better than you do. She's not
+stupid or cross--"
+
+"Well, I like you to stick up for your old nurse. She certainly must
+have loved you a lot to bring you way out here and to stay here all
+these years to take care of you. I wonder where she'll go and what
+she'll do when Hugh and I get married. You're too old for a nurse
+now, Pete. Do you mind if I lean back against you that way? It's so
+comfortable. I'd be happier without Bella, Pete, you know."
+
+"Would you, Sylvie? Well, Bella and I will have to go away together
+somewhere, I guess."
+
+"I didn't say you, dear. I love you a lot--next best to Hugh. There's
+something awfully sweet about you--you great strong overgrown thing!
+Your heart goes _thump-thump-thump-thump_, as though it was as big as
+the sun.... I feel much better and happier now. Things have got steady
+again. Only--I wish Hugh would come back."
+
+Pete gave a strangled sigh.
+
+"He'll be back." And he began to draw himself away from her. "I think I
+hear him now, Sylvie."
+
+"Stay where you are," she laughed. "Don't be ashamed of being found with
+a sister leaning against you and holding your hand. Are you afraid of
+Hugh? I think sometimes he's rather hard with you--I'll have to speak
+to him about that. Oh"--in a sudden ecstasy--"how happy I am! I feel as
+light as the air. I want every one to be happy. Tell me when Hugh comes
+in how happy he looks, Pete--promise me, quick! There he is at the door
+now."
+
+"Yes," he whispered, "I promise. Let me go, please, Sylvie."
+
+He pulled himself away and stood up. At the instant, the door was opened
+and shut quickly, stealthily. It was Hugh, breathing hard, gray with
+fear.
+
+"They're coming," he said harshly. "Pete, they're after me. Men are
+coming across the flat."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+"Did they see you?" Pete demanded anxiously.
+
+"I don't think so." Hugh was breathing fast; he had evidently fled
+across the snow at top speed.
+
+"Get in, then, quick--out of sight." Pete was already tearing up boards
+above that long-waiting place of hiding. Hugh was about to step down
+into it when he glanced up and saw Sylvie. She was standing as the
+unseeing stand in moments of frightened bewilderment, her hands clasped,
+her head turning from side to side. "Look here," whispered Hugh, still
+absorbed in his own danger, "don't let them know that Sylvie just
+wandered in here. Don't let them start asking her any questions; it's
+too dangerous. Let her be--one of the family." He smiled maliciously.
+"Let her be your wife, Pete." Then, as though that picture had fired his
+love through its hint of jeopardy, he held out both arms suddenly: "Come
+here, Sylvie--lead her to me, Pete."
+
+The boy obeyed. But as her uncertain arms trembled about Hugh's
+shoulders Pete turned sharply away. He heard the quick, anxious murmur
+of their voices:
+
+"Hugh, dearest--are you afraid?" And his: "Trust me, little darling.
+Love me." A kiss.
+
+Then a sharp, whispered summons: "Quick, can't you, Pete? Get these
+boards down."
+
+When Pete turned, Hugh had dropped into the darkness, and Sylvie stood
+flushed and with her hands over her face.
+
+Bella had meantime been collecting the most characteristic of Hugh's
+belongings--those that could not be supposed to belong to Pete--and now
+thrust them down into the hiding-place. The boards were rearranged, the
+rug laid evenly over them. Then the three stood staring at one another,
+listening helplessly to the nearing sounds.
+
+"Oh, Pete," Sylvie gasped, "tell me what I must do--or what I ought to
+say."
+
+"Tell them," said Bella, "what Hugh told you--that you are Pete's wife.
+They'll be looking for a different household from that, and it will help
+to put them off."
+
+"But--but Pete won't look old enough."
+
+"Yes, he will. He looks older than you," Bella declared harshly. "You
+sit down and keep quiet; that's the best you can do; and for God's sake
+don't look so scared. There's a grave outside to show them, and nobody
+digs up a six-year-old grave. They won't find Hugh. Nobody's ever
+seen him. Don't shake so, Sylvie. They may not even be after him; this
+country has sheltered other outlaws, you know. Hush! I hear them. I'll
+be in the kitchen. Pete, be taking off your outdoor clothes. They'll
+have seen Hugh's tracks even if they haven't seen him, so somebody's
+got to have just come in. Be whistling and talking, natural and calm.
+Remember we're all at home, just quiet and happy--no reason to be
+afraid. That's it."
+
+Through her darkness Sylvie heard the knocking and Pete's opening of
+the door, the scraping of snow, the questions, the simplicity of Pete's
+replies.
+
+Then she was made known. "My wife, gentlemen!" And a moment later: "My
+mother!" And she heard Bella's greeting, loud and cheerful like that
+of a woman who is glad to see a visitor. Chairs were drawn up and
+cigarettes rolled and lighted. She smelt the sharp sweetness of the
+smoke. There was brief talk of the weather; Sylvie felt that while
+they talked, the two strangers searched the place and the faces of its
+inmates with cold, keen, suspicious eyes. She was grateful now for her
+blindness. There came a sharp statement:
+
+"We're looking for Ham Rutherford, the murderer." Sylvie's heart
+contracted in her breast.
+
+"Well, sir," laughed Pete, in his most boyish, light-hearted fashion,
+"that sounds interesting. But it's a new name to me."
+
+"It's an old case, however," said the man, the man who spoke more like
+an Easterner than the sheriff. "Fifteen years old! They've dug it up
+again back East. The daughter of the man that was killed came into some
+money and thinks she can't spend it any better than in hunting down her
+father's murderer. Now, we've traced Rutherford to this country, and
+pretty close to this spot. He made a getaway before trial, and he came
+out here fifteen years ago. About two years later he sent back East for
+his kid brother--he'd be about your age now, Mr.--what you say your name
+was?--Garth, Peter Garth. You'll have to excuse the sheriff; he's bound
+to search your place." Sylvie had heard the footsteps going through
+the three rooms. "A woman named Bertha Scrane, a distant cousin of
+Rutherford's to whom he'd been kind, brought the child out. Now,
+Missis--what's your name?"
+
+"Bella Garth," she said tranquilly. "I came out here with my husband,
+who died six years ago. He's buried out there under the snow. I've lived
+here with my son and my son's wife."
+
+"Yes. It's not the household we'd been expecting to find. It's a lonely
+place, Missis." He looked at Sylvie. "I should think you'd prefer going
+to some town."
+
+"We're used to it here now," Bella answered.
+
+"How'd your husband happen here, ma'am?"
+
+"His health was poor; he'd heard of this climate, and he wanted to try
+trapping. He got on first-rate until the illness came so bad on him, and
+Pete's done well ever since. We haven't suffered any."
+
+"No, I guess not. You don't look like you'd suffered."
+
+The talk went on, an awkward, half-disguised cross-questioning as
+to Bella's birthplace, her life before she came out, her husband's
+antecedents. She was extraordinarily calm, ready and reasonable with her
+replies.
+
+"Well, sir"--the sheriff strolled back into the room--"I reckon these
+aren't the parties we're after. But look a-here, this is a description
+of Ham Rutherford. Likely you might have had a glimpse of him since you
+came into the country. When he made his getaway he was about thirty-two,
+height five feet eight, ugly, black-haired, noticeable eyes, manner
+violent. He was deformed, one leg shorter, one shoulder higher than the
+other, mouth twisted, and a scar across the nose. He'd been hurt in a
+fire when he was a child--"
+
+Sylvie broke into a spontaneous ripple of mirth, the full measure of her
+relief. "Goodness," she said with utter spontaneity. "There's certainly
+never been a monster like that in this house, has there, Pete?"
+
+It did more than all that had gone before to convince the inquisitors.
+From that minute there was a distinct relaxation; the evening, indeed,
+turned to one of sociability.
+
+"We hate to inconvenience you, ma'am, but it seems like at this distance
+from town we've got to ask you for supper and a place to sleep."
+
+If it had not been for the thought of Hugh in hiding, that supper and
+the evening about the hearth would have been to Sylvie a pleasant one.
+The men, apparently laying aside all suspicion, were entertaining;
+their adventurous lives had bristled with exciting, moving, humorous
+experience. It was Sylvie herself, prompted by curiosity, believing
+as she did that the monster the sheriff had described bore no possible
+resemblance to the man she loved, who asked suddenly:
+
+"Do tell us about the man you're hunting for now--this Rutherford? Tell
+us about what he did."
+
+The Easterner gave her a look, and Bella, seeing it, chimed in: "Yes,
+sure. Tell us about his crime."
+
+Pete stood up and rolled another cigarette. Try as he might to steady
+his fingers, they trembled. He had never heard Hugh's story. He did
+not want to hear it. The very name of Rutherford that had, in what now
+seemed to him another age, belonged to Hugh and to him was terrible
+in his ears. A sickness of dread seized him. Fortunately the eyes of
+neither of the men were upon him. Sylvie had their whole attention.
+
+The detective spoke. "He was a storekeeper back in a university town,
+way East, where I came from. He kept a bookshop and had a heap of
+book-learning. I remember him myself, though I was a youngster. He was a
+wonderful, astonishing sort of chap, though as ugly as the devil; had a
+great gift of narration, never told the truth in his life, I guess, but
+that only made him all the more entertaining. And he had a temper--phew!
+Redhot! He'd fly out and storm and strike in all directions. That's
+what did for him. Some fool quarrel about a book it was, and the man,
+a frequenter of the shop, a scholar, a scientist, professor at the
+university, accused Rutherford of lying. Rutherford had a heavy brass
+paper-cutter in his hand. The professor had a nasty tongue in his head.
+Well, a tongue's no match for a paper-cutter. The professor said too
+much, called Rutherford a hump-backed liar and got a clip on the head
+that did for him."
+
+"It's an ugly story," said Sylvie. Bella and Pete retained their
+silence.
+
+"Murder ain't pretty telling, as a general thing," remarked the sheriff.
+
+"No, though I've heard of cases where a man was justified in killing
+another man--I mean to save some one he loved from dreadful suffering,"
+Sylvie replied.
+
+"Well, ma'am, I don't know about that. I've read stories that make it
+look that way, but in all my experience, it's the cowards and the fools
+that kill, and they do it because they're lower down, closer to the
+beast, or perhaps to an uncontrolled child, than most of us."
+
+"But there was a time," Bella said, with a smothered passion, "when an
+insult to a gentleman's honor had to be avenged."
+
+"Yes, ma'am," drawled the sheriff, "in them history days things was
+fixed up to excuse animal doin's, kind of neater and easier and more
+becomin' than they are now. Well, Mr. Garth, can we have our beds? We've
+kept these ladies up talkin' long enough. Your mother looks plum wore
+out."
+
+They slept in the bed usually shared by Pete and Hugh. Pete lay on the
+floor in the living-room not far from his brother's hiding-place--lay
+there rigid and feverish, staring at the night. Sylvie, at Bella's side,
+slept no better. Her imagination went over and over the story of Ham
+Rutherford's crime. She saw the little dark bookshop, the professor's
+thin, sneering face, the hideous anger of the cripple, the blow, the
+dead body, Rutherford's arrest. And when her brain was sick, it would
+turn for relief to the noble story of Hugh's self-sacrifice, only to be
+balked by a sense of unreality. What the detective had told, briefly
+and dryly, lived in her mind convincingly; but Hugh's romance, that had
+glowed on his tongue, now lay lifeless on her fancy. Back her mind would
+go to the bookshop, the gibing professor, the heavy paper-cutter.
+
+In the dawn she heard Bella get up with a deep-shaken sigh and go about
+her preparations for breakfast. But it was noon before the two men left.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+Hugh came up from his hiding-place like a man risen from the dead. They
+helped him to his chair before the fire; they poured coffee down him,
+rubbed his blue, stiff hands. He sat looking up pitifully, his eyes
+turning from one to the other of them like those of a beaten hound. All
+the masterfulness, all the bombast, had been crushed out of him; even
+the splendor of his flaring hazel eyes was dimmed--they were hollow,
+hopeless, old. For a long time he did not speak, only drank the coffee
+and submitted himself meekly to their ministrations; then at last he
+touched Sylvie with a trembling hand.
+
+"Sylvie," he whispered brokenly.
+
+"Hugh, dear, you're safe now; please speak; please laugh; you frighten
+me more than anything--why is he so silent, Pete? Bella, tell me what's
+wrong?"
+
+"He's been crouching there on the damp, cold ground for hours," said
+Bella, "not knowing what might happen." Her voice trembled; she passed a
+hand as shaking as her voice across Hugh's bent head. "You're safe now.
+You're safe now," she murmured.
+
+Hugh's teeth chattered, and he bent closer to the fire.
+
+"Ugh--it was cold down there," he said, "like a grave! Sylvie, come
+here." Just an echo of his old imperious fashion it was--though the
+look was that of a beggar for alms. "Give me those warm little hands of
+yours." She knelt close to him, rubbed his hands in hers, looking up at
+Pete with a tremulous mouth that asked for advice.
+
+"He'll be all right in a minute," said Pete. "You talk to him, Sylvie."
+
+"Yes, you talk--you talk. Do you remember how I talked to you when you
+were afraid of the bears--ah!" He drew her head savagely against his
+breast, folded his arms about it, stroked the hair. "Sylvie! Is it all
+right? Can it be--the same?"
+
+"Yes, yes, why not?"
+
+"Were you frightened?"
+
+"Not after the first. After they had described you, I knew that they
+were looking for the wrong man, and then I felt all right. I didn't
+know--poor Hugh!--how cold and cramped you were. What a shame that you
+took a false alarm and hid yourself! I don't believe there would have
+been a bit of danger if you'd stayed out. They'd never even heard of
+you, I suppose."
+
+Her talk, so gay, so strangely at cross-purposes with reality, was like
+a vivifying wine to him. The color came back into his face; a wild sort
+of relief lighted his eyes.
+
+"Then it didn't occur to you, Sylvie, that that brute might have been
+me--that the men might, after all, have been describing me--eh?" he
+asked, risking all his hope on one throw.
+
+She laughed, and, lifting herself a little in his arms, touched her soft
+mouth to his. "But, Hugh, you told me your story, don't you remember?
+And it is gloriously, mercifully different from Rutherford's."
+
+He put his chin on his fist and stared over her head into the fire.
+She felt the slackening of his embrace and searched his arms with
+questioning fingers. "Why are you cross, Hugh? Did I say anything to
+hurt you? Let's forget Ham Rutherford. I wonder where he is, poor,
+horrible wretch!"
+
+"Dead--dead--dead," Hugh muttered. "Dead and buried--or he ought to be.
+O God!" he groaned, and crushed her close against him; "I can't ask you
+to love me, Sylvie--to marry me. Now you know what it is like to love a
+man who must be afraid of other men. What right have I to ask any woman
+to share my life?"
+
+"But, Hugh--if I love you?"
+
+"And you do love me?" he asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+He laughed out at that, stood up, drawing her to stand beside him.
+"Bella--Pete," he called, "do you hear--you two?" He beckoned them
+close, laid a hand on them, drew first one, then the other toward
+Sylvie. "She loves me. She sees me as I am!" Suddenly he put his
+grizzled head on Sylvie's shoulder and wept. She felt her way back to
+the chair, sat down, and drew him to kneel with his arms about her, her
+head bent over him, her small hands caressing him. She looked at Pete
+for help, for explanations, but she could not see his pale, tormented
+face.
+
+After a while Hugh was calm and sat at her feet, smoking. But he was
+unnaturally silent, and his eyes brooded upon her haggardly.
+
+It was several days before Hugh regained his old vigor and buoyancy;
+then it came to life like an Antaeus flung down to mother earth. His
+hour of doubt, of self-distrust, of compunction, was whirled away like
+an uprooted tree on the flood of his happiness. He flung reason and
+caution to the four winds; he dared Bella or Pete to betray him, he
+played his heroic part with boisterous energy; his tongue wagged like a
+tipsy troubadour's. What an empty canvas, a palette piled with rainbow
+tints, a fistful of clean brushes would be to an artist long starved for
+his tools, such was Sylvie's mind to Hugh. She was darkness for him to
+scrawl upon with light; she was the romantic ear to his romantic tongue;
+she was the poet reader for his gorgeous imagery. He had not only the
+happiness of the successful lover, but even more, the happiness of the
+successful creator. What he was creating was the Hugh that might have
+been.
+
+With Sylvie clinging to his hand, he now went out singing--the three of
+them together, great Hugh and happy artist Hugh all but welded into
+one man for her and for her love. Those were splendid days, days of
+fantastic happiness. Hugh's joy, his sense of freedom, gave him a
+tenfold gift of fascination.
+
+Yet one day--one of those dim, moist spring days more colorful to Hugh's
+heart than any of his days--there cut into his consciousness like a
+hard, thin edge, a sense of a little growing change in Sylvie. It had
+been there--the change,--slightly, dimly there, ever since the sheriff's
+visit. It was not that she doubted Hugh--such a suspicion would have
+struck him instantly aware and awake--but that she had become in some
+way uncertain of herself, restless, depressed, afraid. And it was always
+his love-making that brought the reaction, a curious, delicate, inner
+recoil, so delicate and slight, so deep beneath the threshold of her
+consciousness, that in the blind glory of his self-intoxication he
+missed it altogether--might, indeed, have gone on missing it, as she
+would have gone on ignoring or repressing it, if it had not been for
+their kiss on the mountain-top.
+
+This was one of Hugh's madnesses; he would take Sylvie up a mountain and
+show her his kingdom, show her himself as lord of the wilderness. He had
+been there before many times, to the top of their one mountain, always
+under protest from Bella and Pete. It was a bare rock exposed to half
+the world and all the eyes of Heaven; and for a man in hiding, a man who
+lived, yet whose name was carved above a grave, it was a very target for
+untoward accident. Some trader or trapper down in the forest might look
+up and behold the misshapen figure black and bold, against the sky.
+Yet there was never so mighty a Hugh as when he stood there defiant and
+alone. Now he wanted Sylvie to sense that tragic magnificence.
+
+So they went out, Hugh's arm about her, as strange a pair of lovers as
+ever tempted the spring--the great, scarred, uncouth, gray cripple and
+the slim, unseeing girl, groping and clinging, absolutely shut off from
+any contact with reality as long as this man should interpret creation
+for her. Sylvie turned back to wave at Pete, whom they had left standing
+in the doorway.
+
+"I'll be hunting for you if you stay out late," he called--to which Hugh
+shouted back: "You hunting for us! Don't fancy I can't take care of this
+child, myself."
+
+"Both of them blind!" Pete muttered to himself in answer.
+
+They were moving rather slowly across the rough, sagebrush-covered flat,
+and presently Hugh led Sylvie into the fragrant silence of the forest
+trail. To her it was all scent and sound. Hugh whispered to her what
+this drumming meant and that chattering and that sudden rattle almost
+under their feet.
+
+They had to go slowly, Sylvie touching the trees here and there, along
+her side of the trail. He lifted her over logs and fallen trees, and
+sometimes, before he set her down, he kissed her. Then Sylvie would turn
+her head shyly, and he would laugh. Thus they made slow, sweet progress.
+
+"I see more in the woods with your eyes than I ever could with my own,"
+she told him.
+
+"I have eyes for us both," he answered. "That's why God gave me the eyes
+I have, because He knew the use I'd be making of them."
+
+"Is this the trail Pete follows to the trading-station?" she asked. "I
+wish you could take me there, Hugh, or--would you let him take me?"
+
+He tightened his arm. "I can't bear to have you out of my sight," he
+answered.
+
+She sighed. "It seems so queer that they haven't tried to find me. Do
+you suppose they think that I'm dead? Did Pete mail my letter to Miss
+Foby, I wonder?"
+
+"What does Miss Foby matter?" he asked jealously. "What does anything
+matter to you but--me? Here we leave Pete's trail and I take you
+straight up the mountain, dear one. We'll rest now and then; when we get
+to the rocky place just below the top, I'll carry you. Are you happy?
+I always feel as if my heart melted with the snow when spring comes--a
+wild, free, tumbling feeling of softness and escape."
+
+She sighed. "Yes--if only I could see. I miss my eyes out of doors more
+than in the house. Does snow-blindness really last so long? Perhaps it
+was the nervous shock and the exhaustion as much as the glare. I am sure
+it all will just go suddenly some day. I stare and stare sometimes, and
+I feel as if I might see--almost."
+
+He frowned. "You mustn't miss anything when you have me, Sylvie. Do you
+suppose I miss anything, now that I have you? My career, my old friends,
+my old life, my liberty, the world? That for everything!" He snapped his
+fingers. "If only I have you."
+
+"You love me so much," she answered, as though she were oppressed, "it
+frightens me sometimes."
+
+"When you are wholly mine--" he began. "Well, wait till we get to the
+top of the mountain; there I'll tell you all my plans. They're as big
+and beautiful as the world. I feel, with your love, that I can move
+mountains. I can fashion the world close to my heart's desire. We'll
+leave this blank spot and go to some lovely, warm, smiling land where
+the water is turquoise and the sky aquamarine--"
+
+"And perhaps my sight will come back." It was almost a prayer.
+
+He did not answer. They had come to a sharp sudden ascent. He took her
+in his arms, scrambled across the tumbled rocks, and set her down beside
+him on the great granite crest that rose like the edge of a gray wave.
+The clean, wild wind smote her and shook her and pressed back her hair
+and dress. She clung to him.
+
+"Is it steep? Are we on the edge of a cliff, Hugh? I'm not afraid!"
+
+"We're on the very top of the world," he told her breathlessly, his
+voice filled with a sense of awe, "our world, Sylvie, I'm master here.
+There's no greater mind than my own in all that dark green circle. It's
+pines, pines, pines to the edge of the earth, Sylvie, an ocean of purple
+and green--silver where the wind moves, treading down, like Christ
+walking on the water. And the sky is all gray, like stone."
+
+"Can you see the flat, the cabin?"
+
+"The flat, yes--a round green spot, way down there behind us. The cabin?
+No. That's in a hollow, you may be sure, well out of sight. I'm an
+outlaw, dearest, remember. There's a curve of the river, like a silver
+elbow. And Sylvie, up above us, an eagle is turning and turning in a
+huge circle. He thinks he's king. But, Sylvie, it's our world--yours and
+mine. This is our marriage."
+
+She drew back. "What do you mean?"
+
+"Haven't you a feeling for such images? We'll go before a parson--don't
+be afraid. Would I frighten you, Sylvie? I love you too much for that.
+Why, Sylvie, what's wrong?"
+
+When his lips, clinging and compelling, had left hers, she bent her face
+to his arm and began to cry.
+
+"Oh, I don't know. I don't know.... But please don't kiss me like that,
+not like that!"
+
+He released her and half turned, but her hands instantly hunted for him,
+found him and clung.
+
+"Hugh, don't be angry. Be patient with me. Try to understand. Perhaps
+it's because I am in the dark. I do love you. I do. But you must wait.
+Soon it will be spring for me, too. You don't understand? You're angry?
+But I can't explain it any better."
+
+"You can lay your hand on me," he said hoarsely. "God knows I'm real
+enough." And he thought so! "My love for you is here like a granite
+block, Sylvie."
+
+"I know. It is the one thing in the darkness that is real. I know
+you--your love, splendid and strong and brave. Wait just a little, Hugh.
+Try to be patient. Suddenly it will all come right. The fog will lift.
+Then we'll really be on top of the mountain." She laughed, but rather
+sadly.
+
+"I will always hate this mountain-top," he said. "I used to love it. I
+was so close to happiness, and now you've snatched it out of my reach."
+He drew in sobbing breaths.
+
+"No--it's myself I'm keeping from happiness, not you," she answered.
+"I know it will come right, but you must not hurry me. Dear Hugh, be
+patient." She found his hand and raised it, a dead weight, to her lips.
+"Please be patient. Let's go down out of this wind. I can't see your
+world, and I'm cold."
+
+So, in silence--a dull gray silence Hugh led her down into the valley.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+They came down the hill rapidly and carelessly. Hugh, stung by pain and
+anger, threw himself over the rocks, and Sylvie was too proud to show
+her timidity or to ask for help. She crept and climbed up and down,
+saving herself with groping hand, letting one foot test the distances
+before she put the other down. At last the rattle of his progress
+sounded so far below that she quavered: "Aren't you going to wait for
+me, Hugh?"
+
+He stopped short, and for a moment watched her silently; then, smitten
+by the pathos of her progress--a little child, she seemed, against the
+mountain toppling so close behind her--he came swinging up to her and
+gave her his hand.
+
+"You _need_ me, anyway, don't you?" he asked with a tender sort of
+roughness.
+
+She couldn't answer because she didn't want him to know that he had
+made her cry. She kept her face turned from him and hurried along at his
+side.
+
+"Why do you go so fearfully fast?" she was forced at last to protest.
+
+"Because I want to get down from this accursed mountain. I want to get
+down into the woods again where I was happy."
+
+"Hugh"--she pulled at his arm--"you are only a child after all."
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+"Well--" She stopped. "Go home alone, then. I'll be no worse off than
+when you found me the first time. Pete will come out and hunt for me.
+He has a far sweeter temper than you, Hugh, and doesn't think only of
+himself."
+
+He swung away at that, resting his hand against a big rock to clear
+a hole; then, seeing her about to step down into it, he pivoted back,
+caught her up bodily in his arms, and, laughing, ran with her down the
+hill, bounding over the rocks, leaping over the crevices, while she
+clung to him in fright.
+
+"You silly child!" he cried. "This is the way I'll take you home. Now
+I've got you, and I'll punish you well, too." She clung to him and
+begged him to stop. She was frightened by their rash, plunging progress,
+by his speech. She struggled. "Let me down. I won't be carried like this
+against my will. Hugh, let me down!"
+
+"All right!" He fairly flung her from him on a grassy spot. He was about
+to leave her when a rushing rattle sounded above them. The boulder
+he had twice used to turn his own weight upon was charging down the
+hillside! Just in time he caught Sylvie, threw her to one side and fell
+prone, helpless, in the path of the slide. He cried out, flinging up his
+arm, and, as though his cry had been of magic, the boulder faltered and
+stopped. A root half buried just above his body had made a hollow and a
+ledge; it had rocked the rolling fragment back up on its haunches, so to
+speak, and balanced it to a stop.
+
+"Hugh! Hugh!" sobbed Sylvie. "What was it? Are you hurt?"
+
+She crept up to him.
+
+"No," Hugh told her, breathing heavily. "It was a rolling rock."
+
+"How did you stop it? You must be hurt, crushed, bruised."
+
+"My arm's wrenched--not badly." He had in fact wrenched it slightly.
+
+"Your poor arm! You were so quick, so strong. You didn't think of your
+own life. And I've been so cruel. Hugh, Hugh, kiss me."
+
+Hugh took his reward, none the less sweet to his strange nature, in that
+it was only potentially earned. And joy, like a warm flood, crept up
+again to his heart. He sat on the hillside and held his small love
+close. One of his arms moved stiffly, and he groaned a little. She
+rubbed it for him.
+
+"You'd better come home and let Bella and me fix it. It may be badly
+hurt. You're sure it isn't broken?" she asked.
+
+"Quite sure."
+
+"Lean on me! I'll help you down. You can tell me where to step."
+
+"Nonsense," he laughed, his very blood singing warm with relief. "A
+strained arm won't hurt my walking apparatus. We had a lover's quarrel,
+didn't we? And the boulder was peacemaker. Bless the boulder!"
+
+"Don't joke, dear. You saved my life at the risk of your own. Are
+you always doing insane, generous, dangerous things? Think if you had
+been--" She shivered.
+
+"Do you suppose my life is worth anything to me without yours, Sylvie?"
+He bent his head and kissed her again, but he had learned his lesson,
+and there was restraint and timidity in that kiss.
+
+"The sun's come out," cried Sylvie.
+
+"Yes, it's splendidly bright. There's a clean slit in the sky; there at
+the western edge the dark gray cap is being lifted inch by inch, the way
+a boy lifts his cap to see the butterfly he's caught. All's gold behind
+it, Sylvie, burning gold. The rocks are like bright copper. And the
+pines, they're incandescent, phosphorescent green--"
+
+"If I could only see it!"
+
+Down near the pines a tall, still figure stood watching them. It was
+Pete, and his smile, usually so frank and sweet, had now a sardonic
+twist. As they came down out of their sun into his shadow, he spoke with
+a drag to his syllables.
+
+"Hullo," he said. "That was a narrow escape you had, you two!"
+
+The voice might have been a pistol-shot for the start it gave to Hugh.
+
+"Why, it's Pete. We must be late, Pete," Sylvie called joyously. "Did
+you see how Hugh saved my life? He threw himself down before the rock
+and stopped it. He's hurt his poor arm. The great stone was right on top
+of us, and he threw me out of the way and set his own strength against
+it. I couldn't see the rock, Pete, but it felt like a mountain."
+
+"It was big enough to smash you both," said Pete.
+
+He looked at Hugh, whose eyes glared in a strained, shamed face. The
+older man's fingers worked nervously; he opened his lips and closed them
+again. It was easy to understand the travail of his mind, unwilling
+to forego the imaginary bit of heroism, and yet abashed by the boy's
+awareness of the lie.
+
+Pete gave one short laugh; then, springing suddenly across a fallen tree
+that separated them, he caught Sylvie up into his arms.
+
+"You can't carry her with a wrenched arm," he said, half gayly, half
+tauntingly, "and at the best rate she can go, it will be night before we
+get her home. I'm strong. I'll carry her myself."
+
+Sylvie laughed protesting that she was being treated like a doll, and
+resigned herself to Pete's swift, smooth stride. It was as though she
+were skimming through space, so quietly did his moccasined feet press
+the pine-needled earth, so exquisitely did his young strength save her
+from any jar. He whistled softly through his teeth as he ran in long,
+swift strides. And as he did not speak to her, she lay silent, yet
+strangely peaceful and happy. Hugh was left far behind. The forest
+fragrance moved cool and resinous against her face.
+
+"I feel as if we could go on and on forever," she said with a sigh,
+"forever and ever and ever."
+
+"We will," he answered through his teeth, hardly pausing in his
+whistling for the odd reply. "We will."
+
+But for all that, he set her gently and suddenly down, and she knew that
+she stood again at the cabin door.
+
+"Pete, where are you?" she asked.
+
+But he had disappeared, still in utter silence, like a genie whose task
+is done.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+"What did he say to you? What did he say to you?" asked Hugh again and
+again.
+
+Sylvie laughed at him.
+
+"He didn't say anything--hardly a word, except that he pretended he was
+going on forever. He said: 'We will, we will.' That's absolutely all,
+Hugh. Don't be so silly. What _could_ he say?"
+
+"I don't know," Hugh answered. "He might have made fun of me."
+
+"Fun of you! After saving my life! I'd have boxed his ears! No, no,
+Peter wouldn't do that. He's afraid of me."
+
+She was so proud of this that Hugh, perforce, laughed. It was after
+supper, and they had walked a little way from the cabin. They were
+standing just above the river on a little hillock topped with three big
+pines. The dusk was thick about them; stars pricked the soft sky. Sylvie
+was wrapped in Hugh's coat, and they were linked by their hands hanging
+at their sides. Every one but Sylvie had been very silent at supper, but
+she had told her story of Hugh's heroism again and again until finally
+even Hugh had grumbled at "the fuss."
+
+"What makes you think anyone could be afraid of you?" He smiled down at
+the small dark head which did not reach his shoulder.
+
+"He's afraid I'll kiss him. Don't grip my hand that way; it hurts. You
+couldn't be jealous of a boy! Besides, I _don't_ kiss him any more. I
+never have kissed him but that once--no, twice, when I told him that I
+was going to be his sister."
+
+"You told him that?" Hugh's voice had an odd anxiety. "How did he take
+it?"
+
+"I don't think he was very enthusiastic. He loves you so much, Hugh; you
+are the very heart of his universe, and I suppose he is jealous of your
+love for me. Since then he's avoided me and is as dumb as a fish when I
+talk to him. I think his body has outgrown his mind, Hugh."
+
+"Perhaps. I don't know," he answered.
+
+"And Bella is so silent, too. Hugh, it must have been a lonely life for
+you before I came. Those two people, though they love you so much, are
+not companionable. I think, Hugh, that they aren't able to understand
+you. You are so brilliant, and they are so dull; you are so articulate,
+and they are so dumb; you are so warm, so quick to see, to feel, to
+sympathize, while they are so slow and so cold. Dear Hugh, I'm glad I
+came. I am stupid myself, but I have enough intelligence to understand
+you--a little, haven't I, dear?"
+
+"So much more than enough!" The low speech with its tremor of humility
+was almost lost.
+
+"What a noise the river makes!" he said presently.
+
+"Yes. And the pines. The whole air is full of rushing and sighing and
+clapping and rattling. Sounds tell me so much now. They fill my whole
+life. It is very queer. Why, a voice means more to me now, I think, than
+a face ever did.... Is it a deep river, Hugh?"
+
+"Now it is--deep and dangerous. But it goes down very quickly when the
+snow at its source has melted. In summer it is a friendly little brook,
+and in the fall a mere trickle that hardly wets your shoe. I have a boat
+here tied to the root of one of these trees, a boat I made myself, to
+pole across when the stream is too deep for wading. I'll take you out in
+it when the flood's down; it wouldn't last fifteen minutes now. In
+the spring, Sylvie, a nymph comes down from the mountain, a wild white
+nymph. She has ice-green hair and frost-white arms; you can see her
+lashing the water, and if you listen, you can hear her sing and cry.
+Let's go in, dear; you're tired and cold--I can feel you shivering.
+We'll start a big fire, and I'll tell you how that nymph caught me
+once and nearly strangled me with her cold, wet arms. I was trying to
+save--you'll laugh when I tell you about it--a baby bear."
+
+Pete and Bella made room for them silently about the hearth where Pete
+had already built up a fire. Sylvie groped her way to the throne from
+which the other woman slipped half furtively and so noiselessly that
+Sylvie never guessed her usurpation.
+
+"Hugh is going to tell us a story," she said, and rested her head back
+so that her small chin pointed out and her slim neck was drawn up--"a
+wonderful story about the river and a bear. I hope it's a baby bear,
+Hugh, for you know how I feel about bears. I honestly think that being
+so afraid of seeing them is what made me blind!" She gave her small, shy
+laugh. "I thought I saw them everywhere I looked that day and night. It
+seems so long ago now, and yet it is not so many weeks. I can still hear
+Hugh's voice calling out to me across the snow. And now," she said, "the
+snow's all gone and none of you are strangers any more, and--Go on with
+your story, Hugh."
+
+Pete added a log to the fire so that the flames stretched up bravely
+and made a great fan of light against which they all seemed painted
+like ornamental figures, Hugh lounging along the rug to make a striking
+central figure. Bella was drawn up rigidly on a stiff, hard chair; she
+hemmed a long, coarse towel with her blunt, work-roughened fingers.
+
+Pete sat opposite Sylvie on the floor, his back against the corner of
+the fireplace, his knees drawn up in his hands, his head a little bent.
+He too--from under his long level brows--looked for the most part at
+Hugh, not devotedly, not wistfully, but with a somber wondering. It was
+only now and then, and as though he couldn't help it, that the blue,
+smouldering Northern eyes were turned to Sylvie on her throne. Then they
+would brighten painfully, and his lips would tighten so that the dimple,
+meant for laughter, cut itself like a touch of pain into his cheek. The
+firelight heightened his picturesqueness--the dull blue of his shirt,
+open at the round, smooth throat, the dark gold-brown of his corduroy
+trousers, against which the long, tanned hands, knit strongly together,
+stood out in the rosy, leaping light--beautifully painted against the
+background of old brown logs.
+
+Yet it was Hugh, after all, who dominated the room by right of his
+power, his magnetism, the very distortion of his spirit. Here in this
+lonely square of light and warmth, surrounded by a world of savage,
+lawless winds heightening the voices of vast loneliness, these three
+people were imprisoned by him, a Merlin of the West.
+
+He sat up to begin his story, pressing tobacco into his pipe. "Oh, it's
+not so much of a story, Sylvie. It was last spring when the river was
+high and I'd been out with my traps. I was coming home along the river
+edge, pretty tired, a big load on my back. I came around a bend of the
+river, and not far below me a little black bear, round as a barrel, was
+trying to scramble over the flood on a very shaky log. The mother was
+on the other side, but I didn't know that then. Well, there's nothing in
+God's world, Sylvie, so beguiling as a baby bear. This little fellow was
+scared by what he was doing, but he was bound he'd get across the river.
+He'd make a few steps; then he'd back up and half rise on his hind legs.
+I watched him a long time. Then he made up his mind he'd better make a
+dash for it. He began scrambling like a frantic kitten, and it was just
+in the most ticklish spot that he heard me and jumped and went rolling
+off into the river. I tell you, my heart came right up into my mouth."
+
+"Oh, _was_ he drowned?" wailed Sylvie.
+
+Hugh rose and stood with his back to the fire, dominating the room even
+more convincingly, with his vivid ugliness. Sylvie's face turned up to
+him like a white flower to the sun it lives by, without seeing. It was
+strange to watch the adoration, the worship on that small face, and at
+the same time to behold the grotesqueness toward which it was directed.
+Bella was listening with her lowered eyes and tightened lips. She was
+interested in spite of herself; and Pete's inscrutable face followed the
+story with absorption.
+
+"Well, in he rolled with a splash and went rattling down the current,
+turning over and over. Like a fool, I threw away my hides, ran down the
+bank and jumped in after him--that is, I meant to hold on to a branch
+and stand out in the water and catch him as he went by. But the nymph
+I told you about had her own plans. She wrapped her arms round me, and
+away we went, bear all. Oh, yes, I'd caught the cub all right, and he
+was about half drowned by that time--no fight left in him.
+
+"Well, for a bit it was a question whether the world wouldn't be quickly
+and well rid of us both, but we tumbled up against a root and scrambled
+out, and when I'd rested, I picked up limp and trembling Master Bear and
+went back for my hides. And while I was collecting them, I heard a sort
+of grumpy, grumbling sound, and I looked up--and, by Jove, Mother Bear
+was coming across that log with the longest steps you ever saw. That's
+when I ran to collect my gun--it was a little farther up the bank than
+my hides, worse luck!"
+
+Even Bella had forgotten her bitterness in listening, and Pete's parted
+lips were those of an excited child. Sylvie leaned forward in her chair,
+her cheeks tingling, her hands locked. Hugh had thrown himself into the
+action of his story; his face was slightly contorted as though sighting
+along a gun-barrel, his arm raised, the ungainliness of his deformity
+strongly accentuated. He was not looking at Sylvie; true to his nature
+and his habit, he had forgotten every one but that Hugh of adventure
+and of romance, the one companion of his soul. None of them was watching
+Sylvie, and when she gave a sharp, little cry, a queer start and then
+sat utterly still, Hugh accepted it--they all accepted it--as a tribute
+to his story-telling powers.
+
+But Sylvie, leaning her elbows on her knees, raised trembling hands to
+her eyes and hid them. She sat very still, very white, while the story
+went on, vividly imagined, picturesquely told. When it was over, and the
+mother bear, after a worthy struggle, defeated, Hugh looked about for
+his applause. It came, grudgingly from Bella, eagerly from Pete--and
+from Sylvie in a sudden extravagant clapping of hands, a ripple of high,
+excited laughter, and a collapse in her chair. She had fainted in a limp
+little heap.
+
+She came to in an instant, but seemed bewildered and, unprotesting,
+permitted herself to be carried to bed. She declared she felt quite well
+again and wanted only to be alone. She repeated this moaningly. "Oh, to
+be alone!"
+
+Hugh seated himself on the end of the bed and kissed her forehead and
+her hand, but it quivered under his lips and was drawn away.
+
+He came back into the living-room with a pale, bewildered face.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Next day there came out of that room a new Sylvie or rather a dozen new
+Sylvies: a flighty witch of a Sylvie who tempted her blindness with rash
+ventures about the rooms and even out of doors, who laughed at Hugh and
+led him on, and drew him out to his maddest improvisations, who treated
+Pete to snubs and tauntings that stung like so many little whips; and
+again a Sylvie who was still and timid and a trifle furtive, who
+rarely spoke, but sat with locked hands in an attitude of desperate
+concentration and seemed to be planning something secret and dangerous;
+and then there was a haughty, touch-me-not Sylvie; and a Sylvie who
+mysteriously wept. But all of these Sylvies showed an impetuous, new
+tenderness toward Bella.
+
+"I've been all wrong about you, Bella," she confessed. "I know you're
+not really old and ugly and cross at all. Let me touch your face."
+Bella, awkward and flushed, had no choice but to submit to the flick of
+the light, young fingers. "I'm learning the touch of the blind," Sylvie
+boasted. "Now, listen--isn't this right? You have thick, straight
+eyebrows and deep-set eyes; are they blue or brown, Bella, or bright
+gray?"
+
+"They're gray," said Pete.
+
+Hugh was watching from eyes sunk in a nervous, pallid face. He had come
+in from his traps in the midst of Sylvie's experiment.
+
+"And she has a nice, straight, strong, short nose, and a mouth that she
+holds too tight. Loosen your mouth, Bella; it might be very sweet if
+you gave it a chance. And she has a sharp chin--not pretty, your
+chin, but--look! If you'd soften your hair, pull it over your ears and
+forehead--Why do you brush it back that way? It _must_ be unbecoming.
+And, Bella, it's curly, or would be with a little freedom. What color is
+your hair?"
+
+"Gray--like my eyes," said Bella, scarlet now, and trying to draw
+herself away.
+
+"Is it really gray, Pete? Tell me the truth, if you can."
+
+"Her hair is a very light brown," said Pete, flushed as scarlet now as
+Bella; "sort of a grayish brown; you wouldn't notice any gray hairs,
+hardly."
+
+"Bella, I'm sure you don't look a day older than thirty-five. Your skin
+feels smooth and young. Why do you let Hugh call you an old woman? Poor
+Bella, I'm afraid you've spoiled those two boys?"
+
+Sylvie turned suddenly and imperiously upon the men, and Bella made
+her escape, not from the room, for she was too stirred, too full of an
+excited suspense, to bring herself to leave. From a far corner, near the
+window through which came the soft May wind, she watched them.
+
+"Now, Pete," said Sylvie, "it's your turn. If I'm to learn the touch of
+the blind, I must have practice. What can I make of you! Come here. Why
+don't you come?" She stamped her foot. "My, but you are badly trained.
+Really, Hugh, you ought to discipline him. Wait until I am your
+sister-in-law."
+
+Hugh started angrily. "Don't joke about that!" he threatened in a harsh,
+sudden voice.
+
+She turned toward him with quickness and bent her head sidelong as
+though listening intently for what else he might have to say. Her lips
+were set close and narrow. She had listened to him like this, almost
+breathlessly, ever since her sudden faintness, listened as though she
+would draw his very soul in through her ears.
+
+He too flushed. "It's life and death to me, Sylvie," he pleaded.
+
+"Life and death--life _or_ death," she repeated strangely. She stood,
+as if turning the speech over in her mind, then gave her head a quick
+little shake like a diver coming to the surface of deep water, and moved
+a step toward Pete. "Are you coming, boy, or not? I want to feel your
+face."
+
+"Do as she says," Hugh commanded harshly, and Pete came slowly to her
+and stood with his hands locked behind him, bending over the little
+figure. She put her hands on his shoulders and gave him a shake, and
+smiled.
+
+"Such a big, strong boy! Where's your face?" It winced and paled under
+her touch. His eyes fell, shifted, could not meet Hugh's, who watched
+with unsteady breathing and white lips.
+
+"Your face is as smooth as a girl's, Pete. What a wide, low forehead
+and crisp, short hair; it ripples back from your temples. You must be
+a pretty boy! A neat nose and a round, hard chin and--oh, Pete, Pete! I
+believe you have a dimple. How absurd! A great, long dimple like a slit
+in your right cheek. Why do you blink your eyes so? They're long eyes,
+with thick, short lashes. What a strong, round neck! I think I like your
+face."
+
+She patted his cheek, the pat more like a smart slap. He pulled away.
+"That's for disobedience. Come back. I'm not through with you. Where's
+your mouth? A big, long mouth. Pete, why does your mouth tremble?" Her
+hand fell from his lips, and she turned away. "Take me out for a walk,
+Hugh, please," she said. "This cabin is stuffy, now that the days are
+warm. I want to sit under the pines and listen to the river. You can
+tell me one of your wonderful stories about yourself."
+
+"What does it mean, Bella?" Pete asked breathlessly when Hugh had gone
+out, not so much leading the girl as hurrying after her to save her from
+the rashness of her impetuous progress. "What does it mean?" Pete was as
+white as paper.
+
+"I don't know." Bella came over from the window and stood by the
+fireplace, rolling her arms in her apron and shaking her head. "She's a
+crazy little witch. She'll drive us mad. Hugh is half mad now--have you
+noticed? She won't let him touch her. And you, poor boy! Pete, why don't
+you go away?"
+
+"I've thought about it," he said. "I--I can't." He flung himself down in
+Hugh's chair and rested his head in his hands.
+
+Bella bent over him. "Poor Pete! It's cruel for you--and," she added
+softly, uncertainly, "and for me."
+
+"For you too, Bella?" He looked up at her through tears.
+
+She nodded her head, and her face worked. "Perhaps you could take her
+back to her friends, Pete?"
+
+"And leave Hugh? Didn't you hear what he said, Bella? Life and death! It
+would kill him if she should go away with me. Or--he'd follow and kill
+me."
+
+"Yes," Bella assented somberly; "yes, he'd kill you. The devil is still
+living in his heart."
+
+"No. Sylvie will marry him. Hugh gets his will." Pete shook his head.
+"Wait a few days--you'll see. She's fighting against him now; I don't
+know why--some instinct. But though he tells her so many lies, he
+doesn't lie about one thing. He loves her. He does love her."
+
+"No! No!" Bella's passion, tearing its way through her long habit of
+repression, was almost terrifying. "He loves the image she has of him.
+If he knew that she could see him as I do, his love would shrivel up
+like a flower in a drought. Hugh can't love the truth. He can't love
+anything but his delusions. Pete, tell her the truth. For God's sake,
+tell her the truth. Give her back her eyesight. Let her know his name,
+his story--his _face_!"
+
+"Don't dare ask me, Bella!"
+
+"Why not?" She seemed to be out of breath, like a person who has been
+climbing in thin air. Her lips were dry.
+
+"Because--well, would you do it yourself?"
+
+"Ah! He would hate me, if I did. But you, Pete, when Sylvie loved
+you--and if she knew you, she would surely love you; any woman
+would--why, then you could bear Hugh's hatred. I have only him--only
+him."
+
+She locked her hands and lifted them to her forehead and was now making
+blind steps toward the kitchen door.
+
+Pete followed her, and turning her about, drew down the hands from her
+face.
+
+"Bella--_you_? Without saying a word? All these years?"
+
+Under the first pressure of sympathy that her agony had ever known, she
+could not speak. She bent her head for an instant against his arm,
+then moved away from him, groping through the kitchen door, back to her
+unutterable loneliness.
+
+Pete stood staring after her. A new Bella, this, not the cousin, the
+little cousin from the farm; not the nurse who had saved him from Hugh's
+hardness and told him limping fairy tales and doctored his hurts; not
+the accepted necessity, but a woman--a woman young, yes, young. In the
+instant when he had glimpsed her face, broken and quivering, the tight
+lips parted and the hair disarranged about flushed, quivering cheeks,
+the eyes deep with widened pupils, she had revealed beauty and
+passion--the two halves of youth. How blind, how blind Hugh had been,
+blind and selfish and greedy, drinking up the woman's heart, feeding
+upon her youth!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+"When you sit so silent, Pete," Sylvie said softly, "I sometimes wonder
+if you're not staring at me."
+
+"When I'm making a trap," he answered, smiling a little to himself and
+instinctively shifting his gaze, "I can't very well be staring at you,
+can I?"
+
+He was kneeling on the ground before the cabin door, she sitting on the
+low step under the shadow of the roof. Her chin rested on the backs of
+her hands, the limber wrists bent up a little, the sleeves slipped away
+from her slim, white wrists. Her face was brightly rosy, her lips very
+red--at once a little stern, yet very sweet.
+
+"Traps are cruel," she said.
+
+"I think so myself. But we have to make a living, don't we?"
+
+"Aren't you ashamed of yourself sometimes, Pete?"
+
+"For making traps, and catching live things in them?"
+
+"Yes. It's a sort of deceitful cruelty, catching the little blind,
+wandering wild things."
+
+"Blind?" he repeated blankly, then flushed.
+
+"Yes, blind. But it wasn't only that I meant."
+
+"What else ought I to be ashamed of?"
+
+"Of living on your brother." He winced sharply, but she went on coolly:
+"Of staying here in the wilderness. You are a big boy now. Many a boy of
+your age, even smaller and weaker, has gone out in the world to make his
+own way. There's no reason for _you_ to hide, is there? _You_ haven't
+sacrificed your life for anyone."
+
+"No," he answered doubtfully, "n-no; but, you see, Sylvie, some one has
+to take the skins. It isn't safe for Hugh."
+
+"Yes, of course. So that's what you'll do all your life--carry loads to
+and fro, between this cabin and the trading-station. But if Hugh goes
+away himself?"
+
+"Yes?" he asked breathlessly.
+
+His skillful hands paused in their fashioning of a snare.
+
+"You know, of course, that he wants to take me away with him, to marry
+me, to start life again."
+
+"And--and you will, Sylvie?"
+
+"Give me your advice," she said. She pressed her red lips together; her
+face was bent upon him as though she watched.
+
+"But," he stammered, "you tell me all the time, a dozen times a day,
+that I'm badly trained. What good's my advice?"
+
+"_Are_ you badly trained?"
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+"You are absurdly unselfish, Pete!" She moved a chip along the ground
+with her foot, but Pete failed to notice this curious seeing gesture.
+
+"Why? What do you mean?"
+
+She waited, waited until, in the sickness of his vague suspense, his
+hands had turned cold and the color had sucked itself in irregular
+heartbeats from his lips.
+
+At last she spoke deliberately. "You would lay down your life for your
+friend?" she said. It was almost a whisper.
+
+Pete's face went red and white and red again. Through the tumult of his
+heart he searched for loyal words.
+
+"I love Hugh--if that's what you mean," he said.
+
+"I love you?" she repeated softly, perversely. "Did you say 'Hugh' or
+'you,' Pete?"
+
+His face tightened; faint lines came about his mouth. "I said 'Hugh!'"
+
+"Ah--you love only him--nobody else in all the world?"
+
+Her young and wistful voice came to him like a fragrance. He struggled
+as though his spirit were fighting in deep water. He tried to remember
+Hugh. He rose up slowly to meet this passionate moment, and now he made
+a short step toward the waiting girl. She _was_ waiting, breathing fast.
+Pete's arms quivered at his sides.
+
+A hand gripped the quivering muscles and turned him about. Hugh had come
+up behind, without sound, on moccasined feet. His face was gray; his
+eyes were drawn into slits; his distorted mouth was trying to become a
+straight, hard line. The effort gave a twitch to the pale, lower lip.
+
+Sylvie stood up, singing as though in absent-minded idleness, and
+vanished into the house. It would have been difficult to tell whether or
+not she had heard Hugh's arrival.
+
+"What's the matter?" Pete stammered like a boy wakened from a dream to
+behold a lifted cane. "Let go my arm, Hugh. Your fingers cut."
+
+"Come away from the house," said Hugh coldly, tightening the iron grip
+as though Pete's wincing gave him satisfaction. "Come up here by the
+pines. I want to talk to you."
+
+"I'll come," said Pete. "Let go my arm."
+
+There was that in his voice that compelled obedience. Hugh's hand fell
+and knotted into a fist. Pete walked beside him up the abrupt slope of
+their hollow to the little hill above the river. Its noise was loud in
+the still, sunny air. There was no wind stirring. It was high noon. A
+sloping tent of shadow drooped from the pines and made a dark circle
+about their roots. In this transparent, purplish tent the brothers faced
+each other. Pete's lips were tremulous, and Hugh's distorted.
+
+"Now," said Hugh, breathing irregularly and speaking very low, "I'll
+tell you what I think of you."
+
+"No, Hugh, don't," Pete pleaded. "You'll say things you don't
+mean--unkind things, terrible things. I don't deserve it from you.
+You--you think that I--that I--"
+
+"Go on. Don't stop. Tell me what I think--I think--that you--that you--"
+
+It was an unbearable moment, an impossible atmosphere, for the
+revelation of a first love. Pete felt stripped and shamed.
+
+"You think that I was telling Sylvie, that Sylvie--that I--"
+
+Hugh lifted his hand and struck. The younger man sprang back, then
+forward, and was at his elder's throat. For an instant they struggled,
+silently, terribly, slipping on the red pine-needles. Then Pete gave a
+hard laugh. "Are we tigers?" he asked, and he pulled himself back and
+leaned, shaking, against a tree-trunk, gripping it with his hands. His
+blue eyes were cold and blazing in his white face, against which Hugh's
+blow had made a mark. "You won't strike me again," Pete said. All
+boyishness was gone from his hard, level voice. "Go on. Say what you
+like. I'll listen."
+
+"You liar!" stormed Hugh. "You cheat!"
+
+Pete laughed again.
+
+A certain quality in his bitter self-control flicked Hugh. He tried to
+emulate the young man's coolness.
+
+"I've trusted you," he began again; "and behind my back you have been
+trying to win the love of the woman who has promised to be my wife."
+
+"I have not."
+
+"You were not making love to her there, then, when I came up behind you?
+When you were so excited that you didn't hear me? when you were moving
+toward her--trembling all over? _I_ felt your arm!"
+
+Pete's eyes dropped, then lifted as though under a great weight.
+
+"And you say you're not a liar!"
+
+"I _am_ a liar, though not in the way you mean. We are all liars. We
+have caught that little blind girl in a trap. We have lied to her, all
+three of us--Bella and I, and you, Hugh--you have lied most of all."
+
+"She loves me," Hugh panted. "She knows me. She understands me."
+
+"Yes," Pete answered, trembling. "I've seen that. I've kept quiet. Bella
+and I have given you your happiness. Now you thank me by striking me and
+calling me a liar and a cheat!"
+
+Hugh, even in the midst of his bitter and suspicious rage, felt the
+justice of the reproach. He paused, looked about, then came close, put a
+hand on each of his brother's shoulders, searching the white, young face
+with his wild eyes.
+
+"I must have Sylvie," he groaned. "Pete, I must. You don't know; you
+can't know--" He dropped his grizzled head against Pete's neck, and his
+breath caught. "You don't know what I felt when I saw you there, when I
+thought--Tell me the truth, Pete. You are not going to take my love, my
+only joy, my one prize away from me?"
+
+After a long and difficult silence Pete put his arm half mechanically
+across the twisted, gasping back.
+
+"Of course not, Hugh. I--I couldn't. But I've had to play a part, and
+it's not come easy. You must have guessed how hard it's been, because
+you seem to have guessed how I--how Sylvie--Perhaps if I went away?"
+
+He was gripped again, shaken a little. "No, don't leave me. Wait. It
+won't be long. She will go away with me soon, as soon as she gets over
+a girl's timidity. Pete, she does love me. She does. Don't stand dumb;
+tell me that she does."
+
+"She does," Pete repeated tonelessly.
+
+"I'm sorry I struck you. I have a devil's temper. And I think of you as
+still a boy. I wanted to beat you. A few years ago I would have beaten
+you." He put this forward as though it were a reasonable excuse.
+
+"Yes." Pete smiled grimly. "I can remember your beatings." He drew
+himself away. "Shall we go back?"
+
+Hugh still held him, though at arm's length. "First I must have a
+promise from you." He spoke sternly.
+
+"What do you want?"
+
+"I want your promise to keep hands off, to hold your tongue to the end."
+
+"You won't trust me, then?"
+
+"Not since I watched you moving toward her, not since I felt your arm."
+
+Pete was silent. He studied the ground. There was a sullen look on his
+face, and his tightened mouth deepened the odd, incongruous dimple.
+
+"Well, perhaps you're right. I promise." He flashed up a blue
+desperation of young eyes as he asked: "How long will it last, Hugh?"
+
+"Not long. Not long. Surely not long."
+
+"I promise."
+
+"Give me your hand."
+
+They came back down from the hill.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+Pete looked forward with white-hot impatience to the day of his trip
+to the trading-station; twelve hours of relief, it would mean, from the
+worst pressure of his torment--twelve hours of merciful solitude in the
+old, voiceful friendliness of his forest trail. He started early, at the
+break of a sweet, singing dawn. The earth was elastic under his feet,
+the air tingling and mellow with a taste of growth; the flooded river
+chattered loudly like a creature half beside itself with joy. Pete
+came out of the dark and silent cabin in which he had made his tiptoe
+preparations, and lifted his face, letting the light, soft fingers of
+the wind, cooler and softer even than Sylvie's, smooth out the knots of
+suffering from his tired brain. He shook his shoulders before settling
+them under the load of pelts. He would, he swore, just for this day,
+be a boy again. He sprang lightly up from the hollow and strode forward
+with long, swift steps, swinging a companionable stick in his free hand.
+
+Loneliness and the dawn and love had made a poet of the young man, so
+that he had the release of poetry and forgot reality in its translation
+into a tale that is told. He thought of Sylvie, but he thought of her as
+a man thinks of a lovely memory. He went through the wood with his chin
+lifted, half smiling, almost happy, an integral part of the wild, glad,
+wistful spring.
+
+It was not until the afternoon when he was nearing the station--just, in
+fact, before he left the wood-trail for the rutted, frontier road--that
+his mind was caught as sharply as a cloth by a needle, by the light
+sound of following steps. In the solitude of that trail which his feet
+alone had worn, the sound brought him to a stop with a sense of terror
+and suspense. His mind leaped to Hugh, and for the first time in his
+loyal life Pete remembered, and remembering, felt a creeping on his
+skin, that this brother of his, who had grown harsh and jealous and
+suspicious, had been a murderer. The cold, unkindly memory slid along
+his senses like a snake. On the edge of the sloping road-bank, studded
+with little yellow flowers, just where the trees stopped, Pete set down
+his load and waited, instinctively bracing his body, drawing it back
+beneath the shelter of one of the big pines.
+
+The steps were light and swift and stealthy. In the purplish confusion
+of the distance, a tangled and yet ordered regiment of trunks and
+boughs, sun-splotches and shadow-blots, through which the uncertain
+trail seemed to rise like a slender thread of smoke to the pale, flecked
+sky, Pete made out a moving shape. It slipped in and out; it hesitated,
+hurried, paused, moved on. With a shudder of relief and of surprise,
+Pete saw it; out from behind the great, close trunks came Sylvie,
+her chin lifted, her hands stretched out on either side, brushing the
+swinging branches along the trail, her small head turning from this side
+to that, as though she listened in suspense.
+
+Pete called out her name and ran quickly to meet her. Forgetting
+his part of a dull, sullen boy, he spoke eagerly, catching her hand,
+watching the warm, happy blush flow in her cheeks.
+
+"Where were you?" she asked. She had stood to wait for him as soon as
+his voice reached her. "I couldn't see--I mean, I lost the sound of your
+steps. I've been following you for hours and hours and hours. I was so
+afraid of being lost again that I didn't dare drop too far behind."
+
+"But why didn't you call to me? Why have you come? Is anything wrong at
+home?"
+
+Her fingers moved uncertainly in his grasp, like the fingers of a shy
+child. "Nothing is wrong. I wanted to come with you. I wanted to go to
+the trading-station and the post-office. I didn't dare ask you to
+take me with you. I was afraid you'd send me home. I suppose I'll be a
+nuisance, but--Oh, Pete, please be nice to me and take care of me, won't
+you?" She paused, turned her face away from him and smiled. "After
+all, since you have called me your wife before witnesses, you ought to
+introduce me to your friends at the trading-station, oughtn't you? They
+might think it was queer that I should hide myself, now that the snow
+has gone."
+
+He dropped her hand. Suddenly he realized the consequences, the
+necessary effect upon Hugh of this willful venture of hers.
+
+"Does Hugh know where you are?" he asked painfully.
+
+"No. I ran away. I heard you getting ready, and I just felt that I
+couldn't bear to be left behind. I slipped out of bed so quietly that
+Bella didn't even stir, and I dressed just as quietly, and when you had
+gone half across the clearing, I ran out after you, listening to your
+steps. You see, I have the hearing, as well as the touch, of the blind."
+This was said with a cunning sort of recklessness; but Pete, absorbed in
+his anxiety, did not challenge the improbable statement. "Please don't
+be angry with me, Pete." She touched his hand where it hung at his side.
+"Can't I have my adventure? Let's call it _ours_."
+
+In spite of himself, the young man's pulse quickened, but his face and
+voice were stern.
+
+"Do you know that we'll be very late?" he said. "It will be midnight
+before we can possibly make it back to the cabin, if you can even do it
+at all. You'll have to spend the night somewhere at the station. What
+will they think? They will be anxious, Bella and Hugh."
+
+"But what can they think?" Her cheeks were unexplainably scarlet. "If I
+choose to trust you to take care of me, why should they grumble? And I
+won't have to spend the night. You don't know how strong I am. I'm
+very strong. I don't feel tired. We'll go back by moonlight. There's a
+beautiful moon."
+
+"It will be almost morning." He made a reckless gesture. "Well, it's too
+late to think of that now. Come on."
+
+He threw himself down the bank, held up his hands to catch hers, and
+swung her down beside him. The sun slanted warmly along the road and
+just ahead flickered the blue ripples of a lake.
+
+Sylvie moved quickly and easily beside him, barely touching his arm with
+her hand. She seemed definitely to decide to put away her childishness.
+She treated him as though she had forgotten his supposed youth; she
+talked straightforwardly, with a certain dignity, about her childhood,
+about her amusing and pitiful experience as a third-rate little actress,
+and she asked him a question now and then half diffidently, which
+he answered in stumbling, careful speech, always weighed upon by his
+promise, by the deception he must practice, by the dread of what must
+come. Nevertheless, minute by minute, his pulse quickened. This, God be
+thanked, would mean the end. The insufferable knot of circumstance,
+so fantastic, so extravagantly unlivable and unreal, would break, Hugh
+would tear the tangle of his making to tatters with angry hands when
+they got back. His difficult trust in Pete's promise would go down under
+the strain of these long and unexplained hours of Sylvie's absence in
+his company. It was the last act in the extravaganza, queer and painful,
+that had twisted them all out of their real shapes for the confusion of
+a blind waif. This adventure that Sylvie's impatience had planned would
+bring down the curtain. After all, no matter what came of it, Pete was
+glad. The color warmed his face; his blue eyes deepened; he smiled
+down at Sylvie beside him. For this hour she seemed to belong to him
+rightfully, naturally, by her own will. He let go of his inhibitions and
+resigned himself to Fate.
+
+When, on the far shore of the lake, the low walls of the trading-station
+came in sight, a double image, reflected faithfully with the strip of
+sand at its door, the low, level wall of pines behind and the blue,
+still sky above, Pete caught the girl's hand in his.
+
+"Here we are, Sylvie," he said. "Keep quiet and follow my lead.
+Remember, now, that I am supposed to be your husband and you my wife.
+Can you play that part?"
+
+She nodded, bending down her face so that he saw only the tip of her
+small, sunburnt chin. She was hatless; the sun struck blue, bright lines
+in her black hair.
+
+"I'll be careful, Pete."
+
+She pressed his hand, and he returned the pressure.
+
+The station was full of silent curiosity; a couple of squaws, a serious
+buck Indian, and a bearded trapper or two made little secret of their
+observation. In the far corner of the big, bare room, down one side
+of which ran a long and littered counter, there was another, even more
+interested spectator of the young couple's entrance. He sat at a
+small table under one of the high, unshaded windows, and from over
+a spread-out time-table he gave them a large and heavy share of
+his attention. He was a man of middle age and sturdy build, round,
+clean-shaven, dressed in Eastern outing clothes of dignified
+correctness. He put on a pair of glasses to peer closer at the two
+who came in hand in hand like adventuring children, with the lithe,
+half-fearful grace of wild things.
+
+A tall and sallow man behind the counter smiled under his long, ragged,
+blond mustache and made a gesture of polite greeting.
+
+"Well, you've sure kept us in the dark as to your movements, Peter
+Garth. We had no notion there was a bride in these parts until the
+sheriff brought us back word the other day. Ma'am, I'm glad to make your
+acquaintance." He glanced keenly and curiously at Sylvie's averted face.
+
+"I'd have been here before," she said, "but I've been suffering from
+snow-blindness."
+
+"Ah, that's bad sometimes. Your eyes are better now?"
+
+"Y-yes, I think so."
+
+"I can give you a first-class lotion, lady."
+
+Sylvie and he discussed the lotion while Pete stood, drawn up, proud
+and silent, his cheeks flushed, waiting to dispose of his pelts. The
+bartering prolonged itself in spite of his best endeavors. Sylvie seemed
+to have no sense of peril or anxiety. She insisted upon taking a bite of
+early supper, forced coffee and bread and meat upon her companion, and
+chatted affably. Pete saw that the Eastern stranger had riveted upon her
+his attention, that he observed every gesture, listened to every
+word, and while she ate, that he walked over and asked a few murmured
+questions of the trader, nodding his head, then shaking it over the
+answers as though they confirmed some suspicion or anxiety.
+
+At last Pete could bear the delay no longer. Gruffly he bade Sylvie come
+with him. He caught her hand and led her out, she looking back over her
+shoulder like a loath child. They had gone but a few yards along the
+beach trail when the sober, solid gentleman came out across the porch
+and waved his hand to them. Pete hastened his steps without replying.
+Then came a summons in a loud, full, authoritative voice: "Hi, there!
+One moment, please."
+
+It was already evening; the lake was ruffled rosily under a sunset
+light. Pete stopped and turned. He waited, pale, tightlipped, and
+formidable; Sylvie moved a little closer to him. This mysterious summons
+gave her a first little spasm of distrust and fear. The man's square
+body and square, serious face bore down upon them, freighted with
+incongruous judgments. He came sturdily, defying the unspoken threat of
+loneliness.
+
+He spoke when he came up to them--spoke with evident effort.
+
+"My friends," he said, "I am a minister of the gospel, and though
+my mission in this wilderness does not rightly include you in its
+ministrations, still, my conscience, the commands of my Master, will not
+allow me to neglect so obvious and urgent a call for spiritual aid."
+
+He cleared his throat. "Your name I didn't catch," he said doubtfully,
+and Pete did not supply the knowledge, "but I heard you introduce this
+young woman as your wife. I watched her very closely; I watched you,
+too, sir; I took the liberty of making some inquiries about you. I have
+had much and varied experience in the study of human nature." Here he
+put out a broad, clean hand with square finger-tips and lifted Sylvie's
+brown, unwilling left hand high from her side. "I am a minister of the
+gospel," he repeated. "In a land where such a symbol is thought much of,
+this woman has no wedding-ring. There is no register of your marriage
+here in the one spot where such a registration might have been most
+conveniently made--"
+
+Sylvie jerked away her fingers; Pete laid down his load and slowly drew
+his right hand into a terrible fist.
+
+"No, no!" The square-tipped fingers were lifted deprecatingly. "You must
+not be angry with me, my children. I am not here to judge you. I have
+no knowledge of your temptation, of your difficulties; you have met and
+loved in a wild and difficult land. I was not even sure of my surmise.
+Now, however; your silence and your anger confirm my opinion. I want
+only to offer you my services. Will you continue in your life and love
+as I have seen them to be, or will you, if only for the sake of other
+lives not yet your responsibility--perhaps, will you take advantage of
+this opportunity which God has now given you and let me make you indeed
+man and wife?"
+
+Pete's fist was still terrible, and his lips were gathering their words,
+when Sylvie unbelievably spoke.
+
+"Pete," she asked tremulously, and he felt her drawing even closer to
+his side, "Pete, don't you want--you _do_ want--I know--I mean, will
+you, would you--marry me?"
+
+He was dumb as a rock, and gray. His hand opened; he stared from her
+to the impossible intruder, the worker of the miracle, or rather for
+he felt like a beast trapped, the strange layer of the snare. For an
+instant the lake and the forest and the red sky turned in a great wheel
+before his eyes. Then he caught Sylvie's wrist almost brutally in his
+hand. "Be quiet!" he said; it was the savage speaking to his woman.
+"You've gone mad. Come with me. As for you, sir, my marrying or not
+marrying is none of your business--"
+
+The minister looked sadly up into the young man's white and rigid face.
+
+"God be with you!"
+
+He bowed, turned and walked back along the beach, hands locked behind
+his broad tweed back, his head bent.
+
+Pete tightened his grip on Sylvie's arm. "Come," he said to her as
+harshly as before. "We must hurry. It's nearly night."
+
+Sylvie set her small teeth tight, bent down her head, and followed him
+without a word. Their silence seemed to grow into a pressure, a weight.
+It bent Pete's shoulders and Sylvie's slender neck, and whitened their
+lips. All that they did not dare to say aloud bulked itself, huge and
+thunderous, before the combined consciousness which makes a strange
+third companion in such dual silences. They dared not pause, or look at
+each other, or move their strained lips for fear truth, the desperate,
+treacherous truth, would leap out and link them like a lightning-flash.
+The somber forest enveloped them. They moved through it as through a
+deep wall that opened by enchantment. The moon came up, gibbous and
+white and glittering, paler than silver; and the forest became streaked
+and mottled with its light. A soft, sudden wind tore the light and shade
+into eerie, dancing ribbons and tatters and shreds. There were such
+sounds as are not heard in daylight--moon sounds and cloud sounds and
+sounds of dark wind; branches talked and other small voices answered in
+anxious undertones. A moose rubbed his antlers and coughed. They heard
+his big body hulking through a swamp down there in a well of darkness.
+
+"I can't go so fast." Sylvie's shaken voice moved doubtfully. "I'm
+tired."
+
+She pulled at his arm and stopped. The whole forest seemed to sway and
+stir and urge them to haste and secrecy.
+
+"A storm's coming," Pete answered. "I can't carry you, Sylvie, unless I
+leave my load."
+
+"Do you think I'd let you carry me?" she answered through her set teeth.
+"I'd rather die here than let you lift me up in your arms. I'll go on
+till I drop. I don't care for the storm. But I can't walk so fast. How
+can you see? The moon isn't--can't be, I mean--very, very bright here in
+the woods."
+
+"The moon? There's a big storm-cloud just going to wipe it out. Listen!
+Don't you hear that thunder, that wind?"
+
+The storm blew its distant trumpets, shouted louder, trampled the world
+with great steps, crashed and came upon them with a wet, cold blast.
+They were stunned with noise, dazzled with flashes, smothered and beaten
+with long, wet whips. Under a big rocking pine which shouted with a
+hundred confused tongues they found a dangerous shelter. Not far from
+them a tree was struck, splitting their ears, half stunning them. When
+the worst was over, Pete drew Sylvie out relentlessly and started in
+the heavily falling rain. The storm was drawing away, but the night was
+still impenetrably black. They walked for a few groping yards when Pete
+gave a sudden desperate laugh and stopped.
+
+"What's the good of this! We're off the trail. We'll have to wait for
+the light. My God! How cold and wet and trembling you are." He threw
+down his pack, took off his coat, wet only on the outside, and wrapped
+it closely about her. She felt that he parted branches for her, and she
+knew that they were in a dry, still, scented place whose walls stirred
+and breathed. She sank down beside him on the smooth pine-needles
+and crept close. They were giddy, beaten and confused; they felt each
+other's trembling warmth; for greater comfort she tucked her hands under
+his arm. Her head dropped back against his shoulder so that her breath
+fell on his cheek. He felt the silent tears of her humiliation, hot and
+bitter and human after the cold, impersonal wetness of rain. It was as
+though a hand drew them together in the darkness; they moved numbly at
+the same instant, by the same impulse; then with a sort of convulsion
+they were in each other's arms. Cold, wet, tremulous, their lips met.
+The night became the beating of a heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+Hugh sat in his great carved chair, his hands laid out across the bulky
+arms, his head bent forward a little so that his eyes encompassed all
+the restless beauty of the fire. After nightfall, when the wind began
+to shake the cabin, he had built up the fire, and its light now fought
+ruddily against the whiteness of the moon. Hugh had not lighted his
+lamp, nor let Bella light it, but he told her to make some strong coffee
+and keep it hot on the stove. "When Sylvie comes in," he had said,
+"she'll be exhausted. We'll give her a hot drink and send her to bed,
+eh, Bella! The foolish child!" This had been said softly, but with a
+wild, half-vacant look which Bella could not meet.
+
+It was her belief that Pete and Sylvie had gone, not to return that
+night or any other night. In a desperate, still fashion she guarded this
+flaming conviction, peering up from long contemplations of it to learn
+whether there flickered any light of torment on Hugh's face. But all
+day, after the queer blankness of face and eyes with which he had first
+received her news of Sylvie's disappearance, he had been alternately gay
+and tranquil. All morning he had mended his boat, and in the afternoon
+he had cleaned his gun; and whenever he could cajole Bella into being
+his audience, he had talked. His talk was all of Sylvie, of her pretty
+childishness, her sweet, wayward ways, of her shyness, her timidity; and
+later, when supper was cleared away and he had throned himself in
+the center of that familiar circle of firelight, he had dropped his
+beautiful voice to a lower key and had boasted of Sylvie's love for him.
+
+Bella sat on a big log sawed to the height of a low stool. She sat with
+her face bent down between her hands as though she were saving her eyes
+from the fire, but those bright, devoted eyes never left Hugh's face,
+though sometimes they made of it but a blurred image set in the broken
+crystals of her tears.
+
+Thus, together, they heard the first rumble of the storm and saw the
+white squares of moonlight wiped from the floor as with a dark cloth.
+Next, the windows seemed to jump at them and jump away. "Lightning!"
+said Hugh. "She'll be afraid! Will Pete be able to comfort her? Will he,
+Bella?" Then, because she took courage to look into his face, she saw
+that his heart had been burnt all day, but that his faith, stronger than
+his fear, had kept the flame smothered, almost below his consciousness.
+
+While the storm raged across their roof, beat a brutal tattoo close
+above their deafened heads, pushed at the door, drove a pool of water
+under the threshold, Hugh walked up and down, to and fro, from fire
+to window, from door to wall, but not fast, rather with a sort of
+stateliness. Sometimes he looked sidelong at Bella's expressionless,
+listening face. At last he forced himself back to the chair and sat
+there, mechanically polishing the barrel of his gun, but his tongue
+still spoke the saga of illusion. It stopped when the storm dropped into
+the bottomless silence of dawn. Then there was only the dripping from
+their eaves. Hugh sat there, very white, his gun laid across his lap.
+Bella, as white, lifted her face.
+
+"They're coming," she whispered, and got stiffly to her feet.
+
+Hugh moved back into his chair, turning sidewise and gathering himself
+as though for a spring. His nervous hands clutched at his gun. Upon the
+silence the door opened, and Pete and Sylvie came into the room. Wet and
+storm-beaten and beautiful they were, with scarlet cheeks.
+
+Pete came quickly over to Hugh's chair; he let fall his pack and gazed
+resolutely down at his brother's face.
+
+"Sylvie had a fancy to come with me to the trading-station," he said.
+"She came out after me and didn't overtake me until just where the trail
+comes out into the road. We hurried back, but the storm caught us. It
+was pitch-black in the woods; we couldn't keep the trail. We had to
+wait for daylight. I hope you weren't too anxious about her,
+Hugh.--Bella"--he glanced over his shoulder--"could you make us some hot
+coffee and help Sylvie into some dry clothes? We are properly drenched,
+both of us."
+
+This speaker of terse, authoritative sentences was not the boy that had
+gone out that morning. That boy was gone forever.
+
+Hugh stood up and looked slowly from Sylvie, who had stayed near the
+door and held her head up like a queen, to Pete.
+
+"Where were you," he asked gently--"where were you while it stormed?"
+
+Pete moved toward the fire, holding out his hands. "Ugh!" he shivered,
+"I'm numb with cold."
+
+"Where were you," Hugh repeated, "during the storm?"
+
+Pete lifted his eyes slowly. They were bluer than the blue heart of a
+sapphire. "Under a pine-tree," he answered casually enough, and then,
+just as Hugh would have smiled, the color creeping up into his lips,
+Pete's young and honest blood poured over his forehead, engulfing him,
+blazing the truth across his face. Bella saw it and clenched her hands.
+Sylvie's cheeks, too, caught fire. Hugh turned from him, blinded by
+terror, saw Sylvie's trembling mouth in her dyed countenance, and turned
+back. He lifted the hand that had held, all this while, to the chair,
+and balled it into a fist.
+
+"Don't strike him," said Sylvie quietly, not moving from her place by
+the door. "Don't ever strike him again--_Ham Rutherford_!"
+
+Hugh's bones seemed to crumble; his knees bent; he leaned back against
+the chair, holding to it behind him with both hands. The gun clattered
+to the floor. In the silence Sylvie walked across the room and lifted
+her face. As if for the first time they saw her eyes, black and
+brilliant and young, sharpening the softness of her features. She looked
+at Hugh mercilessly, pitilessly.
+
+"I've been able to see you for a long time now, Ham Rutherford," she
+said. "And the instant I first saw you, I knew your name. Ever since the
+night you told me that story about the river, I've been watching you.
+You are a great and infamous liar! Yes, I know that you once killed a
+man for telling you that. Kill me if you like, for I am going to repeat
+it after him--a liar, hideous and deformed outside and in. I have no
+pity for a liar. Not even your physical misfortune shall shield you!
+You have made too great a mockery of it. You brought me here, blind, as
+helpless as one of the things you catch in your traps, and you played
+the hero with me. And you fed me with lies and lies and lies. I've eaten
+and drunk them until I'm sick. Now stand up and look at the truth. You
+are to eat that until _you_ are sick.--No, Bella; no, Pete; I'm going to
+speak; no one can stop me. I know you love him. How you can look at him
+and see him as he is and know what he has done and still love him, I
+can't understand. Now, Hugh Garth--the name you tried to make me love
+you by--I'll tell these people that love you, some of the beautiful
+fables with which you tried to win _my_ love. Maybe, then, they will
+begin to see you as you are. Here is the first: 'There was once a very
+noble youth who had a friend--'"
+
+"Don't!" Hugh groaned pitifully, his head bent before her.
+
+"Perhaps I won't; after all, it's not interesting unless you're fool
+enough, or blind enough, to be tricked into fancying it's the truth. But
+let me tell them some of the other things. This noble youth, this man
+sacrificed his life for his friend and bore the blame of that friend's
+guilt. He is as handsome as a Viking, the very ideal of a girl's
+imagination, strong and shapely and graceful. Has he a humped shoulder
+and a lame leg and a scarred face revealing his scarred soul? Answer
+me."
+
+Hugh flinched as though under a lash.
+
+Pete put out his hand uncertainly; his face was drawn with pain.
+"Sylvie--stop. You _must_ stop. You're too cruel. He did lie to you, but
+remember, that was because he--"
+
+The brilliant black eyes flashed back at him.
+
+"Because he loved me, you were going to say? When you love a woman, do
+you try to ruin her life? Do you creep up in the dark under cover of her
+blindness and touch her with some dreadful, poisonous wound? You
+don't know my horror of that man, Pete. Oh, he kissed--kissed me!" She
+shivered. "A murderer! Yes, a murderer. Oh, Ham Rutherford, if I could
+only _make_ you see yourself! If I could give you my eyes when they
+opened, and I saw Pete's beauty and Bella's sweetness and the horrible
+ugliness of you! And then, day by day--you see, I was afraid to let you
+know that I _had_ seen you. I was in terror of you, of what you might
+do to me. I was afraid of you all; you had all deceived me. Day by day
+I learned the utter distortion of you, mind, body, and soul. How could
+I help but--but--" She faltered and half turned to Pete, holding out
+her hands. Her indignation at the treachery practiced upon her, an anger
+that had grown in silence to unbearable heat, had spent itself in words.
+She was all for consolation now--for sympathy. But Pete stepped back
+from her. He was looking at Hugh, and his clear, young face was an open
+wound.
+
+Hugh pushed himself up and slowly lifted his face. It was then that he
+saw Sylvie's hands stretched out to Pete. He started--no one knew what
+the convulsive movement meant; but as he started--the gun tripped him.
+He caught it up carelessly, blindly. There was a flash--a crash. Pete
+leaped and bent, holding his arm. Blood spurted between his fingers,
+soaking his wet sleeve; and Sylvie, crying aloud, wrapped him in
+trembling, protective arms.
+
+"I'm not much hurt," he said half dazedly. "It--it was an accident. He
+didn't mean it. I was looking at him. The gun went off. He didn't shoot
+at me.... _Hugh_!"
+
+The man was staring straight ahead of him, and now he drew his hand
+across his eyes, the fingers crooked as though they tore a veil.
+
+"Now," he said, "I do see myself just as I am. Yes, I did shoot at you.
+Yes, I think I meant to kill you. I must have meant to kill you. That's
+the truth. For the second time I'm a murderer. Yet now, as God lives,
+even if I am down in the dust, I'll lay hold of my stars. I'm going to
+walk out of your lives so that they can shape themselves to their
+own good ends. Sylvie can shape yours with you, Pete." He hesitated a
+moment. "If a coward, a murderer, can say 'God bless you,' take that
+blessing!"
+
+He picked up his gun and shuffled across the floor, flinching aside from
+Bella as though he could bear no further touch or word, and went out of
+the door, letting in the brightness of the sunrise.
+
+Pete had sunk into a chair, faint from the shock and weakness of his
+wound; and Sylvie bent over him. For a minute, in great and bitter
+loneliness Bella stood and watched them; then she followed Hugh.
+
+He had put down his gun and gone slowly up from the hollow and was
+walking along the river-bank. He had the look of a man who strolls in
+meditation. When he came to his boat where it lay near the roots of the
+three big pines, he turned it over--he had been mending its bottom the
+morning of yesterday--and began to push it down toward the plunging
+stream. The glitter of morning took all the swirlings and ripplings
+and plungings of the swift water in its golden hands. Hugh steadied the
+boat. Above him on the bank Bella spoke quietly.
+
+"Hugh," she said, "look up at me. What are you going to do?"
+
+He lifted his face, still holding to the boat.
+
+"What are you going to do?" she repeated.
+
+"Why do you want to know? You've heard the truth."
+
+She came down the bank and stood beside him so close that her hair,
+loosened by the wind, was blown against his shoulder. She pressed it
+back and gazed into his eyes. The inner glow had worn through at last.
+She was all warmth, all flame now. She smiled with soft and parted lips.
+"Do you think that was the truth of you, my dear," she said, "_my_ truth
+of you? I have always seen you as you are. But"--she drew a big breath,
+like a climber who has reached the height--"but--I came to you, didn't
+I?"
+
+Hugh's eyes widened, the pupils swallowing her light. "You--you came to
+me? Not for Pete's sake?"
+
+"Never for his sake."
+
+"But, Bella--you laughed at me."
+
+"Yes, once, for your poor folly in trying to be what you are not. When
+have I ever laughed at what you are? It's what you are I've loved, my
+dear, just what you are--a tormented child. Only be honest with me,
+Hugh. Tell me what do you want: the moon now or--or all the truth?"
+
+"I want the truth--and the end," he said. "I'm going down the river."
+
+She glanced at the flood as though it were a brook. "I am going with you
+then. You must take me. My life has always been yours."
+
+He laid one of his hands on either of her cheeks so that her face was
+framed for him to read. It was flushed; the deep eyes were beautiful.
+
+"You--all these empty years! _You_, Bella." It was as though he saw her
+now for the first time. The revelation dazzled him. "I've gone thirsty,
+with wine at my elbow, until it's too late." He shook his shoulders.
+"Come with me, then, if you must."
+
+She stepped into the boat and sat in the stern, her hands folded in her
+lap, her eyes in their great and sudden beauty still fixed on his face.
+The wind blew her hair wildly in a long, streaming veil across her
+forehead, down her cheek, out over her shoulder. She was beautiful with
+the joy that was hers at last.
+
+Hugh stepped in and stood to push the boat out from the shore. His
+eyes never left hers. It was a deep, long look of which her soul drank,
+quenching its thirst. Very slowly the boat moved; then it turned. A hand
+seemed to grip it's prow. There was a mighty, confused roaring in their
+ears; the bank seemed to be snatched back from them. The sunlight, shone
+into Hugh's face. Suddenly he caught at his oar.
+
+"The river is not so high," he shouted; "the flood's going down." He
+looked away from her and back. "We have--just a chance. We'll leave it
+to the river. It may be the end of you and me--or, Bella, it may be the
+beginning."
+
+He steadied the boat with all his skill. It was drawn with frightful
+swiftness down the swollen stream.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before noon Sylvie and Pete moved slowly across the open space and went
+back along their forest trail. They walked like lovers, and Sylvie's
+arm helped to support him. Just before he stepped in among the trees he
+turned for a long, desolate, backward look.
+
+Now the hoop of green, once white as paper under the noon sun, and the
+level, circular rim of the forest are empty and silent except for the
+rattling of the river and the moving of the pines against the fixed,
+grave stars. The human tragedy--or was it comedy?--has burnt itself out
+like the embers of a camp-fire that will never again be kindled in that
+lonely spot.
+
+  THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Snow-Blind, by Katharine Newlin Burt
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