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THE SETTLER

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Title: The Settler Author: Herman Whitaker Release Date: September 14, 2013 [EBook #43450] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8

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The Settler

THE SETTLER

BY

HERMAN WHITAKER

AUTHOR OF "THE MYSTERY OF THE BARRANCA" "THE PLANTER" ETC.

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON

Title page

COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY HARPER & BROTHERS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO ALYSE

CONTENTS

CHAP.

1. The Park Lands

2. A Deputation

3. The Trail

4. The Coyote Snaps

5. Jenny

6. The Shadow

7. Mr. Flynn Steps into the Breach

8. When April Smiled Again

9. The Devil

10. Friction

11. The Frost

12. The Break

13. The Camp

14. The Red Teamster

15. Travail

16. A House-party

17. —And Its Finale

18. The Persistence of the Established

19. The Wages of Sin

20. —Is Death

21. Persecution

22. Denunciation

23. The Charivari

24. Without the Pale

25. The Sunken Grade

26. Winnipeg

27. The Nature of the Cinch

28. The Strike

29. The Bluff

30. Fire

31. Wherein the Fates Substitute a Change of Bill

32. The Trail Again

THE SETTLER

I

THE PARK LANDS

The clip of a cutting axe flushed a heron from the bosom of a reedy lake and sent him soaring in slow spirals until, at the zenith of his flight, he overlooked a vast champaign. Far to the south a yellow streak marked the scorched prairies of southern Manitoba; eastward and north a spruce forest draped the land in a mantle of gloom; while to the west the woods were thrown with a scattering hand over a vast expanse of rolling prairie. These were the Park Lands of the Fertile Belt—a beautiful country, rich, fat-soiled, rank with flowers and herbage, once the hunting-ground of Cree and Ojibway, but now passed to the sterner race whose lonely farmsteads were strewn over the face of the land. These presented a deadly likeness. Each had its log-house, its huge tent of firewood upreared against next winter's drift, and the same yellow strawstacks dotted their fenceless fields. One other thing, too, they had in common—though this did not lie to the eye of the heron—a universal mortgage, legacy of the recent boom, covered all.

At the flap of the great bird's wing a man stepped from the timber and stood watching him soar. He was a tall fellow, lean as a greyhound, flat-flanked, in color neither dark nor fair. His eyes were deep-set and looked out from a face that was burned to the color of a brick. His nose was straight and large, cheeks well hollowed; the face would have been stern but for the humor that lurked about the mouth. Taken together, the man was an excellent specimen of what he was—a young American of the settler type.

"Gone plumb out of sight," he muttered, rubbing his dazzled eyes. "An' he wasn't no spring chicken. Time to feed, I reckon."

A few steps carried him to his team, a rangy yoke of steers which were tied in the shade. Having fed them, he returned to his work and chopped steadily until, towards evening, his wagon was loaded with poplar rails. Then hitching, he mounted his load and "hawed" and "geed" his way through the forest. As he came out on the open prairie the metallic rattle of a mower travelled down the wind. Stopping, he listened, while a shadow deepened his tan.

"Comes from Morrill's big slough," he muttered, whipping up the oxen. "Who'll it be?"

Morrill, his near neighbor, was sick in bed, and the rattle could only mean that some one was trespassing on his hay rights—or rather the privilege which he claimed as such—for trespass such as he suspected was simply the outward sign of a change in the settlement's condition. In the beginning the first-comers had found an abundance of natural fodder growing in the sloughs, where, for lack of a water-shed, the spring thaws stored flood-waters. There was plenty then for all. But with thicker settlement anarchy ensued. New neighbors grabbed sloughs on unsettled lands, which old-timers had sealed to themselves, and so forced them to steal from one another. Morrill and the man on the wagon had "hayed" together for the last three seasons, which fact explained the significance he attached to the rattle of the alien mower.

"It's Hines!" he muttered when, five minutes later, he sighted the mower from the crown of a roll. "The son of a gun!"

The man was running the first swath around a mile-long slough which lay in the trough of two great rolls. It was a pretty piece of hay, thick, rank, and so long that one might have tied two spears together across a horse's back. Indeed, when the settler rattled down the bank and stopped his oxen they were hidden to the horns, which fact accounted for Hines not seeing them until his team brought against the load.

"Hullo!" he cried, startled. "Didn't expect to see you, Carter!"

"Don't reckon you did," the settler replied. The shadow was now gone from his face. Cool, cheerful, unconcerned, he sat in the mower's path, swinging an easy leg.

Hines gave him an uneasy glance. "Been cutting poles?" he asked, affecting nonchalance.

"Yes. Corral needed raising a couple of rails," Carter carelessly answered.

Encouraged, Hines made an observation about the crops which the other answered, and so the talk drifted on until Hines, feeling that he had established a footing, said, "Well, I must be moving." But as he backed his horses to drive around, the steers lurched forward and again blocked the way.

"Pretty cut of hay this." Carter ignored the other's savage glance. "Ought to turn Morrill thirty tons, don't you reckon?"

Hines shuffled uneasily in the mower seat. "I didn't allow," he growled, "as Morrill would want hay this year?"

"No?" The monosyllable was subtly sarcastic.

Hines flushed. "What kin a dead man do with hay?" he snarled.

"Is Morrill dead?"

"No! But Doc Ellis tol' me at Stinkin' Water as he couldn't live through winter." He almost yelled it; opposition was galling his savage temper.

"So you thought you'd beat the funeral?" Carter jeered. "Savin' man! Well—he ain't dead yet?"

The challenge was unmistakable. But though brutal, ferocious as a wolf, Hines shared the animal's preferences for an easy prey. Corner him and he would turn, snarling, but his was the temper which takes no chances with an equal force. Now he lived up to his tradition. Viciously setting his teeth, he awaited the other's action.

But Carter was in no hurry. Leaning back on his load, he sprawled at ease, turning his eyes to the fathomless vault above. Time crept on. The oxen ceased puffing and cropped the grass about them, the horses switched impatience of the flies. The sun dropped and hung like a split orange athwart the horizon, the hollows blued with shadows, which presently climbed the knolls and extinguished their golden lights. Soon the last red ray kindled the forest, silver specks dusted the darkening sky, only the west blushed with the afterglow.

Hines tired first. "Quitting-time," he growled, backing his horses.

"Took you a long time to find it out," Carter drawled, giving the words a significance the other had not intended. "But grace is always waiting for the sinner. So long! But say!" he called after the disappearing figure, "if you hear any one inquiring after this slough, you can tell them as Merrill's goin' to cut it to-morrow."

Whipping up his oxen, he swung up the bank and headed south on Merrill's hay trail. Fresh from their rest, the steers stepped out to a lively rattling of chains, and in a quarter of an hour stopped of their own volition before his cabin.

As Carter entered, the sick man leaned on his elbow and looked up at his magnificent inches: he loomed like a giant in the gloom of the cabin. There was envy in the glance but no spite. It was the look the sick bestow on the rudely healthy. For Carter's physique was a constant reminder to Morrill of his own lost strength—he had been a college athlete, strong and well set-up, the kind of man to whom women render the homage of a second lingering glance. Three years ago, inherited lung trouble had driven him from the Eastern city in which he had laid the foundation of a pretty law practice, but the dry air and open life of the central plains had not checked the ravages of the disease. Still, though but the wraith of his former self, he had kept a brave face, and now he cheerfully answered Carter's greeting.

"Cast your eye over this," he said, holding out an open letter. "It's from my sister Helen."

Handling it as tenderly as though it were a feather from the wing of love, Carter held the letter to the lamp. It was written in a small, feminine hand which took all manner of flourishes unto itself as it ran along the lines. Carter regarded them with a look in which surprise struggled with respect. "Oh, shore!" he laughed at last. "Them curly cues is mighty pretty, Bert, but it would take too long for me to cipher 'em out. What's it all about?"

"She's coming out. Arrives in Lone Tree day after to-morrow."

"Phew!" Carter whistled. "Short notice."

He thoughtfully stroked his chin. Lone Tree lay sixty miles to the south and the Eastern mail-train came in at noon. But this was not the cause of his worry. His ponies could cover the distance within the time. But there was Hines. If he did not try the slough, others might. Morrill mistook his silence.

"I hate to ask you to go," he said, hesitatingly. "You've done so much for me."

"Done nothing," the big man laughed. "'Twasn't that. Jes' now I warned Hines off that big slough o' yours, an' I intended to begin cutting it to-morrow morning."

Morrill impulsively extended his hand. "You're a good fellow, Carter."

"Shucks!" the other laughed. "Ain't we two the only Yanks in these parts? But say! won't she find this a bit rough?"

Morrill glanced discontentedly at the log walls, the soap-boxes which served for seats, the home-made table, and the peg ladder that led to the loft above. Three years' hard work had rubbed the romance from his rough surroundings, but he remembered that it had once been there. "Oh, I don't know," he answered. "She'll like it. Has all the romantic notions about keeping home in a log-house, you see."

"Never had 'em," the other mused, "though mebbe that was on account of being born in one. What's bringing her out?"

"Well, now that father's dead I'm all the kin she's got. He didn't leave anything worth mentioning, so Helen has to choose between a place in a store and keeping house for me. But say! your team's moving! Don't tell her I'm sick," he called, as Carter rushed for the door. "She'd worry, and think I was worse than I am."

"Couldn't very well," Carter muttered, as he ran after his team. "No, she really couldn't," he repeated, as he caught up and climbed upon his load. "Poor chap!—An' poor little girl!"

II

A DEPUTATION

Fifty miles in a day is big travel in the East, yet a team of northern ponies will, if the load be light, run it on three legs. The fourth, unless cinched with a kicking-strap, is likely to be in the buck-board half the time; but if the driver is good at dodging he need not use a strap.

Starting next morning at sunrise, Carter ran through the settlements, fed at the mission in the valley of the Assiniboin at noon, then, climbing out, he rattled south through the arid plains which cumber the earth from the river to Beaver Creek. There Vickery, the keeper of the stopping-house, yelled to him to put in and feed. He had not seen a man for two weeks, and his wells of speech were full to overflowing. But Carter shook denial. Far off a dark smudge rose from under the edge of the world—the smoke of the express, he thought. One would have believed it within a dozen miles, yet when, an hour later, he rattled into Lone Tree, it seemed no nearer than when first it impinged on the quivering horizon. This appearance, however, was deceptive as the first, for he had scarcely unhitched at the livery before an engine and two toy cars stole out from under the smudge.

"General manager's private car," the station agent answered Carter's inquiry. "The old man lays over here to talk with a deputation. It's over at the hotel now, feeding and liquoring up."

"The old grievance?" Carter asked.

The agent nodded. "That and others. They say we're coming their flesh and blood. You should hear old man Cummings orate on that. And they accuse us of exacting forty bushels of wheat out of every hundred we tote out to the seaboard."

"Wheat at forty-five, freight to Montreal at twenty-seven?" Carter mused. "Don't that pretty near size it, Hooper?"

"Is that our fault?" the agent ruffled, like an irate gobbler. "Did we freeze their wheat? Sound grain is worth sixty-eight, and if they will farm at the north pole they must expect to get frozen."

"And if you will railroad at the north pole," Carter suggested, "you ought to—"

"Get all that's coming to us," the agent finished. "But we don't. Our line runs through fifteen hundred miles of country that don't pay for axle-grease. We must make running expenses, and ought to pay a reasonable interest to our stockholders, though we haven't yet. The settled lands have to bear hauling charges on the unsettled. But these fellows don't see our side of it. Where would they be without the line, anyway? Now answer me that, Carter."

"Back East, landless, homeless, choring for sixteen a month an' board," Carter slowly answered. "I'm not bucking your railroad, Hooper. But here's the point—your people and the government sent out all sorts of lying literature an' filled these fellows with the idea that they were going to get rich quick; whereas this is a poor man's country an' will be for a generation to come. Five generations of farmers couldn't have built this line which one generation must pay for. There's the point. They've clapped a mortgage an' a fifteen-hundred-mile handicap on their future, an' the interest is going to bear their noses hard down on the grindstone. They'll make a living, but they ain't going to have much of a time. Their children's children will reap the profit off their sweat."

"No," the agent profanely agreed, "they ain't going to have a hell of a time." Having spent his mature years in one continuous wrangle over freights and rates, it was positively disconcerting to find a farmer who could appreciate the necessities of railroad economics, and after a thoughtful pause the agent said, "You ain't so slow—for a farmer."

"Thank you," Carter gravely answered. "Some day, if I'm good, I may rise to the heights of railroading."

The agent grinned appreciatively. "Coming back to the deputation, these fellows might as well tackle a grizzly as the old man. There's not enough of you to supply grease for a freight-train's wheels."

"Oh, I don't know," Carter gently murmured.

Ten minutes ago the agent would have hotly proved his point; now he replied, quite mildly: "If you think different, tag on to the deputation. Here it comes, all het-up with wrongs and whiskey."

"There's Bill Cummings!" Carter indicated an elderly man, very white of beard, very red of face, and transparently innocent in expression.

"He's bell-wether," the agent said, grinning. Then, as the approaching locomotive blew two sharp blasts, he added, "Blamed if the old man won't make mutton of the entire flock if they don't clear out of the way!"

A quick scattering averted the catastrophe while increasing the heat of the deputation. Very much disrumpled, it filed into the car, with Carter tagging on behind.

The general manager, who was smoking by an open window, tossed out his cigar as he rose. Not a tall man, power yet expressed itself in every movement of his thick-set body; it lurked in his keen gray glance; was given off like electrical energy in his few crisp words of welcome. From the eyes, placed well apart in the massive head, to the strong jaw his every feature expressed his graduation in the mastership of men; told eloquently of his wonderful record, his triumphs over man and nature. Beginning a section hand, he had filled almost every position in the gift of his road, driving spikes in early days with the same expertness he now evidenced in directing its enormous affairs—the road which had sprung from his own fertile imagination; the road which, from nothing, he had called into being. Where others had only discerned mountains, gulfs, cañons, trackless forest, he had seen a great trunk line with a hundred feeders—mills, mines, factories, farms, and steamships plying to the Orient for trade. And because his was the faith that moves mountains, the magnificent dream had taken form in wood and iron.

Purblind to all but their own interests, the settlers saw only the proximate result of that mighty travail—the palace-car with its luxurious fittings.

"We pay for this," Carter's neighbor growled.

"My, but I'd like his job!" another whispered. "Nothing to do but sit there and dictate a few letters."

A third gave the figures of the manager's salary, while a fourth added that it was screwed out of the farmers. So they muttered their private envy while Cummings voiced their public grievance. When surveys were run for the trunk line, settlers had swarmed in, pre-empting land on either side of the right of way, and when, to avoid certain engineering problems, the surveys were shifted south, they found themselves from fifty to sixty miles from a market. A branch had been promised—

"When settlement and traffic justify it." The manager cut the oration short.

He had listened quietly while Cummings talked of rights, lawsuits, and government intervention; now he launched his ultimatum on the following silence: "Gentlemen, our road is not run for fun, but profit, and though we should very much like to accommodate you, it is impossible under the circumstances. I am pleased to have met you, and"—the corners of the firm mouth twitched ever so slightly—"and I shall be pleased to meet you again when you can advance something more to our advantage than costs and suits. I bid you good-day."

Business-like, terse, devoid of feeling, the laconic answer acted upon the deputation like a blow in the face. Cummings actually recoiled, and his expression of sheep-like surprise, baffled wonder, innocent anger set Carter chuckling. He was still smiling as he shouldered forward.

"A minute, please."

The manager glanced at his watch. "I can't spare you much more."

"I won't need it," Carter answered, and so took up the case.

Humorously allowing that Cummings had stepped off with the wrong foot, that he and his fellows had no case in law, Carter went on, in short, crisp sentences, to give the number of settlers on the old survey, the acreage under cultivation and of newly broken ground, the lumbering outlook in the spruce forests north of the Park Lands, the number of tye-camps already there established, finishing with a brief description of the rich cattle country the proposed line would tap.

Ten minutes had added themselves to the first while he was talking, but the manager's gray glance had evinced no impatience. "Now," he commented, "we have something to go on. The settlements alone would not justify us in building, but with the lumber—and colonization prospects—" He mused a while, then, after expressing regrets for the haste that called him away, he said, "But if you will put all this and other information into writing, Mr. Carter, I'll see what we can do."

"He's big, the old man." Nodding at the black trail of smoke, the agent thus commented on his superior five minutes later. Then, indicating the deputation which was making its jubilant way back to the clapboard hotel, he said, "They ain't giving you all the credit, are they?"

Shrugging at the last remark, Carter answered the first. "He's a big man, shorely. But, bless you"—he flipped a thumb at the delegation—"they don't see it. Any of 'em is willing to allow that the manager has had chances that didn't fly by his particular roost—just as though the same opportunity hadn't been tweaking him by the nose this last twenty years. There it lay, loose, loose enough for people to break their shins on, till this particular man picked it up. He's big. Puts me in mind of them robber barons you read of in history. Big, powerful chaps, who trod down everything that came in their own way while dealing out a rough sort of justice. There's a crowd"—he looked at the agent interrogatively—"that haven't had what's coming to them. In their times moral suasion, as the parsons call it, hadn't been invented and folks were a heap blooded. A little bleeding once in a while kept down the temperature, and I've always allowed that the barons prevented a sight more murder than they did." Then, nailing his point, he finished: "The historians fixed a cold deck for them like the one they'll deal this general manager. But you can't stop the world. She waggles in spite of them, and it's the big men that make her go. But there! I must eat. What does your ticker say of the express?"

"Half an hour late. You'll just have nice time." And as he watched the tall figure swinging across the tracks, the agent gave words to a thought that was even then in the general manager's mind—"There's a division superintendent going to seed on a farm."

Having made up ten minutes, however, the train rolled in while Carter was still at dinner, and as—for some motive too subtle for even his own definition—he had not mentioned her coming, Miss Helen Morrill had become a subject of bashful curiosity to assembled Lone Tree before he came dashing across the tracks. Apart from his size, sunburn, and certain intelligence of expression, there was really nothing to distinguish this particular young man from the people who, at home, were not on her visiting-list, and if polite the girl turned rather a cold ear to a magnificently evolved and smoothly told set of lies as he escorted her over to the hotel. Morrill was busy with the hay, and as he, Carter, had to come to town for a mower casting he had agreed to bring her out. Her brother was well! A bit delicate! He dare not raise her hopes too high. Oh, he'd pull through! This clear northern air—and so forth.

That clear northern air! Glowing with color, infinite, flat, the prairies basked under the afternoon sun. From the car windows the girl had seen them unfolding: the great screeds of God on which he had written his wonders. Now nothing interposed between her and their vast expanse. Swimming in lambent light they reached out through the quivering distance till merged with the turquoise sky. After she had dined, Carter showed her, from the hotel veranda, the train from which she had dismounted, no larger than a toy, puffing defiance at a receding horizon. Other things he told her—curious facts, strange happenings drawled forth easily with touches of humor that kept her interested and laughing. Not until the moon's magic translated the prairie's golden sheen to ashes, and she unconsciously offered her hand as she rose to retire, did she realize how completely she had cancelled her first impression.

It was then that Lone Tree closed in on Carter with invitations to drink and requests for verification of a theory that the northern settlement was spreading itself on educational lines. "She's a right smart-looking girl," said the store-keeper, its principal exponent, "and Silver Creek is surely going to turn out some scholars."

But he clucked his sympathy when he heard the truth. "An' you say he's having hemerrages? Shore, shore! Here, come over to the store. That girl don't look like she'd been raised on sow-belly, an' sick folks is mighty picky in their eating."

So, by moonlight, the buck-board was loaded up with jams, jellies, fruits, and meats, the best in stock and of fabulous value at frontier prices. While the evil deed was being perpetrated neither man looked at the other. The store-keeper cloaked his villany by learned discourse of freight rates, while Carter spoke indifferently of crops. Only the parting hand-shake revealed each conspirator to the other.

III

THE TRAIL

"To make Flynn's for noon," Carter had said the preceding evening, "we shall have to be early on the trail." And there was approbation in his glance when he found Helen Morrill waiting upon the veranda.

"What pretty ponies!" she exclaimed, quickly adding, "Are they—tame?"

"Regular sheep," he reassured her.

However, she still dubiously eyed the "sheep," which were pawing the high heavens in beliance of their pacific character, until, catching the humorous twinkle in Carter's eye, she saw that he was gauging her courage. Then she stepped in. As they felt her weight the ponies plunged out and raced off down the trail; but Carter's arm eased her back to her seat, and when, flushed and just a little trembling, she was able to look back Lone Tree lay far behind, its grain-sheds looking for all the world like red Noah's arks on a yellow carpet. Over them, but beyond the horizon, hung a black smudge, mark of a distant freight-train. Wondering if one ever lost sight of things in this country of distances, she turned back to the ponies, which had now found a legitimate outlet for their energies, and were knocking off the miles at ten to the hour.

Carter drew a loose rein, but she noticed that even when talking he kept the team in the tail of his eye.

"Yes," he answered her question, "that Devil horse will bear watching, and Death, the mare, is just about as sudden. Why did I name her that?" He twinkled down upon her. "You mightn't feel complimented if I told."

"Well—if I must," he drawled when she pressed the question. "You see there's two things that can get away with a right smart man—death and woman. So, being a female—there! I told you that you wouldn't be complimented."

"Oh, I don't mind," she laughed. "Like curses, slights on my sex come home to roost, Mr. Carter. You are not dead yet."

"Nor married," he retorted.

This morning they had taken up their acquaintanceship where it was laid down the night before, but now something in his manner—it was not freedom; assurance would better describe it—caused a reversion to her first coldness.

"Doubtless," she said, with condescension, "some good girl will take pity on you."

He looked squarely in her eyes. "Mebbe—though the country isn't overstocked. Still, they've been coming in some of late."

The suddenness of it made her gasp. How dare he? Even if he had been a man of her own station! Turning, she looked off and away, giving him a cold, if pretty, shoulder, till instinct told her that he was making good use of his opportunities. But when she turned back he was discreetly eying the ponies, apparently lost in thought.

His preoccupation permitted minute study, and in five minutes she had memorized his every feature, from the clean profile to the strong chin and humorous mouth. A clean, wholesome face she thought it. She failed, however, to classify him for, despite his homely speech, he simply would not fit in with the butchers, bakers, and candle-stick makers of her limited experience. One thing she felt, and that very vividly: he was not to be snubbed or slighted. So—

"Do we follow the railroad much farther?" she asked.

"A smart mile," he answered. Then, with a sidelong glance at the space between them, he added, "I wouldn't sit on the rail."

"Thank you," she said, coldly. "I'm quite comfortable."

"Tastes differ," he genially commented. Then, stretching his whip, he added, "See that wolf!"

In a flash she abolished the space. "Oh, where? Will he—follow us?"

"Mebbe not," he said, adding, as he noticed a disposition on her part to edge out, "But he shorely looks hungry."

It was only a coyote, and afterwards she could never recall the episode without a blush, but the fact remains that while the grizzled apparition crowned a roll, she threw dignity overboard and clung to Carter. It was well, too, that she did, for more from deviltry than fear of the gray shadow the ponies just then bolted.

Ensued a minute of dust, wind, bumpings; then, without any attempt to check their speed, Carter got the mad little brutes back to the trail. Several furious miles had passed before, answering a gasping question as to whether he couldn't stop them, that imperturbable driver said:

"I ain't trying very hard. They're going our way, and we've got to hit this trail some licks to make Flynn's by noon. He's the first settler north of the valley."

They did hit it some "licks." One after another the yellow miles slid beneath the buck-board, deadly in their sameness. With the exception of that lone coyote, they saw no life. Right and left the tawny prairies reached out to the indefinite horizon; neither cabin nor farmstead broke their sweep; save where the dark growths of the Assiniboin Valley drew a dull line to the north, no spot of color marred that great monochrome. Just before they came to the valley Carter dashed around the Red River cart of a Cree squaw. Shortly after they came on her lord driving industrious heels into the ribs of a ragged pony. Then the trail shot through a bluff—rugged, riven, buttressed with tall headlands to whose scarred sides dark woods clung, the mile-wide valley lay before them. Up from its depths rose the cry of a bell. Clear, silvery, resonant, it flowed with the stream, echoed in dark ravines, filled the air with its rippling music.

"Catholic mission," Carter said, and as he spoke the ponies plunged after the trail which fell at an angle of forty-five into a black ravine. The girl felt as though the earth had dropped from under, then, bump! the wheels struck and went slithering and ricochetting among the ruts and bowlders. A furious burst down the last slopes and they were galloping out on the bottom-lands.

"Oh!" she exclaimed, regaining breath. "What recklessness!"

"Now do you really call that reckless?" His mild surprise would have been convincing but for the wicked twinkle.

"Of course—I do," she said, choking with fright and indignation. "I believe—you did it on purpose."

"Well, well." He shook a sorrowful head. "And to think I shouldn't have knowed it! Look out!"

They had swung by the log mission with the black-robed priest in the door, circled the ruins of a Hudson Bay fort, and now the Assiniboin Ford had suddenly opened before them. Fed fat by mountain streams, the river poured, a yeasty flood, over the ford, a roaring terror of swift waters. While the girl caught her breath they were in to the hubs, the thills; then the green waters licked up through the buck-board staves. Half wading, half swimming, the ponies were held to the narrow passage by that master-hand. On either side smooth, sucking mouths drew down to dangerous currents, and, reaching, Carter flicked one with his whip.

"Cree Injun drowned there last flood."

A moment later he turned the ponies sharply upstream and told of two settlers who had lingered a second too long on that turn. Indeed, it seemed to Helen as though each race, every eddy, perpetuated the memory of some unfortunate. She sighed her relief when, with a rush, the ponies took them up the bank, out of the roar and swirl, into the shade of a ravine.

Glancing up, she caught Carter regarding her with serious admiration. "You'll do," he said. Then she realized that this man, whom she had been trying to classify with her city tradesmen, had been trying her out according to his standards. The thought brought sudden confusion. She blushed. But with ready tact he turned and kept up a rapid fire of comment on the country through which they were passing till she recovered her composure.

For they were now in the Park Lands, the antithesis of the arid plains on the other side of the river. Flower-bespangled, dotted with clump poplar, retaining in August a suggestion of spring's verdure, the prairies rolled off and away in long earth billows. Everywhere rank herbage bowed in sunlit waves under the wind. Nor was there lack of life. Here an elk sprang from behind a bluff. A band of jumping deer followed him over the horizon. There a covey of prairie-chickens rose on whirring wing; a fox grinned at them from the crest of a sand-hill. A rich country, the girl was remarking on the lack of settlers when Carter extended his whip.

"There's the first of them. That's Flynn's place."

Speeding through the enormous grain-fields west of Winnipeg, Helen had seen from the cars solitary cabins of frame or sod, pinned down, as it were, in the exact centre of a carpet of wheat, emphasizing with their loneliness that vastness about them. But this was different, more homelike, if quite as strange. Built of hewn logs and lime-washed, Flynn's house nestled with its stables and out-buildings under the wing of a poplar bluff. Around it, of course, stretched the wheat; but here it was merely an oasis, a bright shoal in the sea of brown that flowed on to a distant dark line, the spruce forests of the Riding Mountains.

Bathed in sunshine, with cattle wandering at will, knee-deep in pasture, it made a beautiful picture. The girl came under its spell. She felt the freedom, the witchery of those sun-washed spaces; their silences, whispers, cloud-shadows, the infinity which broods upon them.

"Is our place like this?" she asked.

"Prettier." Carter indicated the distant forest line. "We are close in to the bush and the country is broken up into woodland, lake, and rolling prairie."

"Then I can be happy," she sighed.

Quickly averting his eyes that their sympathy might not dampen her mood, he drew her attention to a man who was cutting green fodder on the far side of the wheat-field.

"There's Flynn."

IV

THE COYOTE SNAPS

A tall Irishman of the gaunt Tipperary breed, Flynn straightened as Carter reined in, and thrust out a mighty paw. "Ye're welcome, ma'am; an' ye've come in season, for the woman's just called to dinner. Just drive on an' unhitch before the door."

"Yes, it's a fine stand of wheat."

Walking beside them, he replied to Carter's comment: "Too foine. It's a troifle rank to ripen before the frost." A wistful shade clouded his face, extinguished the mercurial twinkle in his eye. "It 'll freeze, shure." The accent on the last syllable was pitiable, for it told of long waiting, hope deferred, labor ill-requited. It was the voice of one who bolsters himself that the stroke of fate may not utterly kill, who slays expectation lest it betray him. Yet in its pessimism dead hope breathed. "Yes, it 'll freeze," Flynn assured the malicious fates.

At close range the house was not nearly so picturesque. A motley of implements strewed the yard: ploughs, harrows, rakes, a red-and-green binder, all resting hap-hazard among a litter of chips, half-hewn logs, and other debris. The stables were hidden by huge manure piles. The place lacked every element of the order one sees on an Eastern farm—rioted in the necessary disorder of newness. Flynn's generation were too busy making farms; tidiness would come with the next.

Not realizing this, Helen was drawing unfavorable parallels from the pervading squalor, when Mrs. Flynn, who was simply Flynn in petticoats, came bustling out with welcomes. Miss Morrill must come right in! It was that long since she, Mrs. Flynn, had set eyes on a woman's face that she had almost forgotten what they looked like!

"An' you that fond av your glass, mother?" Flynn teased.

"Glass, ye say?" Mrs. Flynn retorted. "Sure an' 'twas yerself that smashed it three months ago. It's the bottom av a milk-pan he's been shaving in ever since, my dear," she added.

Flynn winked. "An' let me advise you, Carter. If ivir ye marry, don't have a glass in the house an' ye'll be able to see ye'self in ivery tin."

Out at the stable the merriment died from his face, and facing Carter he asked: "Phwat's up between ye and Hines? I was taking dinner with Bender yesterday, an' while we was eating along came Hines.

"'There's a man,' he says, spaking to Bender av you. 'There's a man! big, impident, strong. Ye're no chicken, Bender, but ye couldn't put that fellow's shoulders to the ground.' I'm not needing to tell you the effect on Bender?" Flynn finished.

Carter nodded. He knew the man. Big, burly, brutal, Bender was a natural product of the lumber-camps in which he had lived a life that was little more than a calender of "scraps." Starting in at eighteen on the Mattawa, he had fought his way to the head of its many camps, then passed to the Michigan woods and attained the kingship there. He lived rather than loved to fight. But, though in the northern settlements Carter was the only man who approximated the lumberman's difficult standard in courage and inches, so far fate had denied him cause of quarrel.

"The coyote!" Flynn exclaimed, when Carter had told of Hines's attempt on Morrill's hay-slough. "An' him sick in bed, poor man. I wouldn't wipe me feet on Hines's dirty rag av a soul. But he's made ye some mischief. 'Ye're a liar, Hines!' Bender growls. 'I can lick him er any other man betwixt this an' the Rockies.'

"Hines didn't like the lie, but he gulped it. 'Talk's cheap,' he snarls.

"'Carter's a good neighbor,' Bender answers. 'But if he gives me a cause—'

"'A cause?' Hines cackles, laughing. 'Why, him an' Morrill have grabbed all the best hay in Silver Creek an' defy anny man to touch it. Run your mower into their big slough an' ye'll have cause enough.'

"That made Bender hot. 'I'll do it!' he roars, 'this very day.' But," Flynn finished, "he had to run out to the blacksmith's to fix his mower sickle, so he won't get out till to-morrow morning."

"If ye need anny help—" he said, tentatively, as Carter pondered with frowning brow. Then, catching the other's eye, he hastily added: "Ye'll pardon me! But Bender's a terr'ble fighter!"

His alarm was so palpable that Carter laughed. "Don't bother," he said. "I'm not going to roll, bite, chew, or gouge with Bender."

"Look here!" Flynn interposed, with additional alarm. "Ye'll not be after making anny gun-plays? This is Canada, ye'll mind, where they hang folks mighty easy."

Carter laughed again. "There won't be any fight. Listen!"

And Flynn did listen. As he grasped the other's meaning, his face cleared and his hearty laugh carried to the house where Helen was making the acquaintance of the smaller Flynns. Six in number, bare-legged, and astonishingly regular in gradation, they scampered like mice on her entrance and hid behind the cotton partition that divided bedroom from kitchen. For a while they were quiet, then Helen became aware of a current of stealthy talk underflowing Mrs. Flynn's volubility.

"Ain't her waist small?"

"Bet you she wears stays the hull time."

"Like them mother puts on to meetin'?"

"Shore!"

"Git out; her face ain't red. Mother nearly busts when she hitches her'n."

"Ain't that yaller hair pretty?" This sounded like a girl, though it was hard to decide, for all wore a single sexless garment.

"Bet you it ain't all her'n. Dad says as them city gals is all took to pieces when they go to bed." This was surely a boy, and, unfortunately for him, the remark sailed out on a pause in his mother's comment.

"James!" she exclaimed, raising shocked hands. "Come right here."

He came slowly, suspiciously, then, divining from his parent's look the enormity of his crime, he dived under her arm, shot out-doors, and was lost in the wheat. After him, a cataract of bare limbs, poured the others, all escaping but one small girl whom Helen caught, kissed, and held thereafter in willing bondage until, after dinner, Carter drove round to the door.

Though they had rested barely an hour after their forty-mile run, the ponies repeated the morning's performance, to the horror of Mrs. Flynn; then, as though realizing that they had done all that reputation required, they settled down to a steady jog—in which respect, colloquially, they were imitated by their human freight. A little tired, Helen was content to sit and take silent note of the homesteads which now occurred at regular intervals, while Carter was perfecting his plan for the discomfiture of the warlike Bender. Slough, lake, wood-land, farm passed in slow and silent procession. Once he roused to answer her comment as they rattled by some Indian graves that crowned a knoll.

"To keep the coyotes from robbing the resurrection," he explained the poplar poles that roofed in the graves.

He spoke again when the buck-board ran in among a score of curious mud pillars. About thrice the height of a man, inscriptionless, they loomed, weird guardians of that lonely land till he robbed their mystery.

"Them? Mud chimneys. You see, when a Cree Indian dies his folks burn down the cabin to keep his spirit from returning, and as mud won't burn the chimneys stand. Small-pox cleaned out this village." Then, with innocent gravity, he went on to tell of a stray scientist who had written a monograph on those very chimneys. "'Monoliths' he called 'em. Allowed that they were dedicated to a tribal god, and was used to burn prisoners captured in war. It was a beautiful theory and made a real nice article. Why did I let him? Well, now, 'twould have been a sin to enlighten him, he was that blamed happy poking round them chimneys, and the folks that read his article wouldn't know any better."

Chuckling at the remembrance, he relapsed again to his planning, and did not speak again till they had crossed the valley of Silver Creek from which the northern settlement took its name. Then, indicating a black dot far off on the trail, he said:

"There comes Molyneux."

"Two in the rig," he added, a few minutes later. "A man and a woman. That 'll be Mrs. Leslie."

Unaccustomed to the plainsman's vision, which senses rather than sees the difference of size, color, movement that mark cattle from horses, a single rig from a double team, Helen was dubious till, swinging out from behind a poplar bluff, the team bore down upon them. Two persons were in the rig: a man of the blackly handsome type, and a stylish, pretty woman, who, as Carter turned out to drive by, waved him to stop.

"Monopolist!" she scolded, when the rigs ranged side by side. "Here I'm just dying to meet Miss Morrill and you would have whisked her by. Now do your duty."

"Captain Molyneux," she said, introducing her companion in turn. "A neighbor. We just heard this morning that you were coming and I was so glad; and I'm gladder now that I've seen you." Her glance travelled admiringly over Helen's face and figure. "You know there are so few women here, and they—" Her pretty nose tip-tilted. "Well, you'll see them. Soon I shall make my call; carry you off for a few days, if your brother will permit it. But there! I'm keeping you from him. Good-bye. Now you may go, Mr. Carter."

A touch of merry defiance in the permission caused Helen to glance up at her companion. Though Mrs. Leslie's glance was almost caressing whenever it touched him, he had stared straight ahead of him while she chatted.

"You don't like them?" the girl asked. "Why? She likes you."

His sternness vanished and he smiled down upon her. "Now, what made you think that?"

"I didn't think; I felt it."

"Funny things, feelings, ain't they? I mind one that took me fishing when I ought to have been keeping school. 'Twas a beautiful day. Indian-summer back East. You know 't: still, silent, broody, warm; first touch of gold in the leafage. I just felt that I had to go fishing. But when dad produced a peeled hickory switch that night he told me: 'Son, feelings is treacherous things. This will teach you the difference between thinking and knowing.' It did—for a while."

"But you don't like them?" she persisted, refusing to be side-tracked. Then she blushed under his look of grave surprise, realizing that she had broken one of the unwritten canons of frontier etiquette. "I beg your pardon," she said, hastily. "I didn't mean to—"

His smile wiped out the offence. Stretching his whip, he said, "There's your house."

Helen cried aloud. Nestling under the eaves of green forest, it faced on a lake that lay a scant quarter-mile to the south. North, west, and south, trim clump poplar dotted its rolling land and rose in the fields of grain. Here nature, greatest of landscape-gardeners, had planned her best, setting a watered garden within a fence of forest. Just for a second the house flashed out between two green bluffs, a neat log building, lime-washed in settler style, then it was snatched again from her shining eyes.

But Carter had seen a figure standing at the door. "Clear grit!" he mentally ejaculated. "Blamed if he ain't up and dressed to save her feelings." Then, aloud, he gave her necessary warnings. "Now you mustn't expect too much. He's doing fine, but no doubt pulled down a bit since you saw him."

Two hours later Carter stepped out from his own cabin. He and Morrill had "homesteaded" halves of the same section, and as he strode south the latter's lamp beamed a yellow welcome through the soft night. Already he had refused an invitation to supper, deeming that the brother and sister would prefer to spend their first evening alone together, and now ignoring the lamp's message, he entered Merrill's stable, saddled the latter's cattle pony in darkness thick as ink, led him out, and rode quietly away.

Now of all equines, your northern cross-bred pony is the most cunning. For three black miles Shyster behaved with propriety, then, sensing by the slack line that his rider was preoccupied, he achieved a vicious sideling buck. Well executed, it yet failed of its intent.

"You little devil!" Carter remonstrated, as he applied correctives in the form of quirt and spurs. "Rest don't suit your complaint. To-morrow you go on the mower."

"Hullo!" a voice cried from the darkness ahead. "Who's that cussing?"

It was Danvers, an English remittance-man, a typical specimen of the tribe of Ishmael which is maintained in colonial exile on "keep-away" allowances.

"Are you lost?" Carter asked.

"Lost? No!" There was an aggrieved note in Danvers' tone. "You fellows seem to think that I oughtn't to be out after dark. There's Jed Hines going about and telling people that I knocked at my own door one night to inquire my way."

"Tut, tut," Carter sympathized. "And Jed counted such a truthful man! You'll find it hard to live that down. But where might you be heading for now—if it's any of my darn business?"

"Morrill's. Heard his sister had arrived. I'm going to drop in and pay my respects."

"Humph! that's neighborly. They've had just two hours to exchange the news of three years; they'll shorely be through by this. Keep right on, son. In five-and-twenty minutes this trail will land you at Jed Hines's door."

"Oh, get out!" Danvers exclaimed.

"Sir, to you?" Carter assumed a wonderful stiffness. "I'll give you good-night."

"Oh, here!" the youth called after him. "I didn't mean to doubt you."

Carter rode on.

Ridden by a vivid memory of the jeering Hines, Danvers became desperate. "Oh, Carter! Say, don't get mad! Do tell a fellow! How shall I get there?"

Carter reined in. "Where? To Hines's? Keep right along."

"N-o! Morrill's?"

"Oh, let me see. One—two—three—take the third fork to the left and second to the right; that ought to bring you—to your own door," he finished, as he listened to the departing hoof-beats. "That is, if you follow directions, which ain't likely. Anyway," he philosophically concluded, "you ain't agoing to bother that girl much to-night."

Spurring Shyster, he galloped on, and in ten minutes caught Murchison, an Englishman of the yeoman class, out at his stables. Receiving a hearty affirmative, rounded out with full-mouthed English "damns," in answer to his question, he declined Murchison's invitation to "put in," and rode on—rode from homestead to homestead, asking always the same question, receiving always the same answer. Remittance-men, Scotch Canadians, Seebach, the solitary German settler, alike listened, laughed, and fell in with the plan as Flynn had done. He covered many miles and the moon caught him on trail before he permitted the last man to carry his cold legs back to bed. It was long past midnight when he unsaddled at Morrill's stable.

Softly closing the door on his tired beast, he stood gazing at the house. Far-off in the woods a night-owl hooted, a bittern boomed on the lake shore, the still air pulsed to the howl of a timber-wolf. Though born of the plains, its moods had never palled upon him. Usually he had been stirred. But now he had no ears for the night nor eyes for the lake chased in rippled silver. He listened, listened, as though his strained hearing would drag the girl's soft sleep breathing from the house's jealous embrace. Soon he leaned back against the door musing; and when, having inspected the cabin from one side, the moon sailed over and looked down on the other, he was still there.

As the first quivering flushes shot through the grays of dawn Bender came out of his cabin. He intended to be at work on Merrill's big slough at sunrise. But as he rammed home the sickle into its place in the mower-bar a projecting rivet caused it to buckle and break. That spelled another journey to the blacksmith's, and the sun stood at noon before the sickle was in place. Falling to oiling with savage earnestness, that an ancient Briton might have exhibited in greasing his scythe-armed war-chariot, Bender then stuffed bread and meat into his jumper, hitched, and drove off north, looking for all the world like a grisly pirate afloat on a yellow sea.

Half an hour's easy jogging would carry him to Merrill's big slough, but on the way he had to pass two smaller ones. The first, which had a hundred-yard belt of six-foot hay ringing its sedgy centre, tempted him sorely, yet he refrained, having in mind a bigger prey. At the next he reined in, and stared at a dozen cut swaths and a mower with feeding horses tied to its wheels.

It was Molyneux's mower, and to Bender its presence could only mean that the settlement was rushing the sick man's sloughs. "Invasion of the British!" he yelled. "What 'll Carter say to this? Remember Yorktown!"

He was still laughing when a buck-board came rattling up the trail behind him. It was Hines.

"Cut that slough yet?" he asked.

"Just going there," Bender answered; then gave the reason of his delay, garnished with furious anathema on the maker of sickles. "But ain't that a joke?" he said, indicating Molyneux's mower.

Hines whinnied his satisfaction. "Didn't think it was in the Britisher. But my! won't that gall the long-geared son of a gun of a Yank? Drive on an' I'll follow up an' see you started—mebbe see some of the fun," he added to himself, "if Carter's there."

Quarter of an hour brought them to the big slough, which, on this side, was ringed so thickly with willow-scrub that neither could see it till they reined on its edge. Both stared blankly. When Hines went by that morning a mile of solid hay had bowed in sunlit waves before the breeze. Save a strip some twenty yards wide down the centre, it now lay in flat green swaths, while along the strip a dozen feeding teams were tied to as many mowers.

"A bee, by G—!" Bender swore.

"Hell!" Hines snarled even in his swearing. "Bilked, by the Almighty!"

For a moment they stood, staring from the slough to each other, the lumberman red, angry, foolish, Hines the personification of venomous chagrin. Presently his rage urged him to a great foolishness.

"You an' your casting!" he sneered. "Scairt, you was—plumb scairt!"

Astonishment, the astonishment with which a bull might regard the attack of an impertinent fly, obliterated for one moment all other expression from Bender's face. Then, roaring his furious anger, he sprang from his mower.

Realizing his mistake, Hines had already lashed his ponies, but even then they barely jerked the buck-board tail from under the huge, clutching fingers. Foaming with passion, Bender gave chase for a score of yards, then stopped and shook his great fist, pouring out invective.

"To-morrow," he roared, "I'll come over and cut on you."

"What's the matter? You seem all het up?" Carter's quiet voice gave Bender first notice of the buckboard that had come quietly upon him from the grassy prairie. With Carter were Flynn, Seebach, and two others. Not very far away a wagon was bringing others back from dinner.

"We're all giving Morrill a day's cutting," Carter went on, with a quiet twinkle. "I called at your place this morning with a bid, but you was away. We're right glad to see you. Who told you?"

Gradually a grin wiped out Bender's choler. "You're damn smart," he rumbled. "Well—where shall I begin?"

V

JENNY

Thus did the bolt which Hines forged for Carter prove a boomerang and recoil upon himself. For next morning Bender started his mower on a particularly fine slough which Hines had left to the last because of its wetness. Moreover, Hines had ten tons of cut hay bleaching near by in the sun and dare not try to rake it.

It was oppressively hot the morning that Bender hitched to rake the stolen slough; fleecy thunder-heads were slowly heaving up from behind the swart spruce forest.

"'Twon't be worth cow-feed if it ain't raked to-day," the giant remarked, as he overlooked his enemy's hay. Then his satisfaction gave place to sudden anger—a rake was at work on Hines's hay less than a quarter-mile away.

"Hain't seen me, I reckon," Bender growled. Leaving his own rake, he crouched in a gully, skulked along the low land, gained a willow thicket, and sprang out just as the rake came clicking by.

"Now I've got you!" he roared. Then his hands dropped. He stood staring at a thin slip of a girl, who returned his gaze with dull, tired eyes. It was Jenny Hines, Jed's only child.

"Well," Bender growled, "what d' you reckon you're doing?"

"Raking." Her voice was listless as her look. Just eleven when her mother died, her small shoulders had borne the weight of Jed's housekeeping. Heavy choring had robbed her youth, and left her, at eighteen, nothing but a faded shadow of a possible prettiness.

Bender coughed, shuffled. "Where's your dad?"

"Up at the house. He allowed you wouldn't tech me. But," she added, dully, "I'd liefer you killed me than not."

Bender's anger had already passed. Rough pity now took its place. His furious strength prevented him from realizing the killing drudgery, the lugging of heavy water-buckets, the milking, feeding of pigs, the hard labor which had killed her spirit and left this utter hopelessness; but he knew by experience that a young horse should not be put to a heavy draw, and here was a violation of the precept. Bender was puzzled. Had he come on a neighbor maltreating a horse, a curse backed by his heavy fist would have righted the wrong; but this frail creature's humanity placed her wrongs outside his rough remedial practice.

He whistled, swore softly, and, failing to invoke inspiration by these characteristic methods, he said, kindly: "Well, for onct Jed tol' the truth. Must have strained him some. Go ahead, I ain't agoing to bother you."

Having finished raking his own hay, he fell to work with the fork, stabbing huge bunches, throwing them right and left, striving to work off the pain at his heart. But pity grew with exertion, and, pausing midway of the morning, he saw that she also was plying a weary fork.

"You need a rest," he growled five minutes later. "Sit down."

She glanced up at the ominous sky. "Can't. Rain's coming right on."

Lifting her bodily, he placed her in a nest of hay. "Now you stay right there. I'm running this."

Picking up her fork, he put forth all his magnificent strength while she sat listlessly watching. It seemed as though nothing could banish her chronic weariness, her ineffable lassitude. Once, indeed, she remarked, "My, but you're strong!" but voice and words lacked animation. She added the remarkable climax, "Pa says you are a devil."

"Yes?" he questioned. "An' you bet he's right, gal. Keep a right smart distance from men like me."

"Oh, I don't know," she slowly answered. "I'd liefer be a devil. Angels is tiresome. Pa's always talking about them. He's a heap religious—in spells."

Pausing in his forking, Bender stared down on the small heretic. Vestigial traces of religious belief occupied a lower strata of his savage soul. Crude they were, anthropomorphic, barely higher than superstitions, yet they were there, and chief among them was an idea that has appealed to the most cultured of men—that woman is incomplete, nay, lost, without religion.

"Shore, child!" he protested. "Little gals shouldn't talk so. That ain't the way to get to heaven."

"D' you allow to go there?" she demanded, with disconcerting suddenness.

Bender grimaced, laughed at the ludicrousness of the question. "Don't allow as I'd be comfortable. Anyway, lumbermen go to t'other place. But that don't alter your case. Gals all go to heaven."

"Well!" For the first time she displayed some animation. "I ain't! Pa's talked me sick of it. I allow it's them golden streets he's after. He'd coin 'em into dollars."

Seeing that Hines had not hesitated in minting this, his flesh and blood, Bender thought it very likely, and feeling his inability to cope with such reasonable heresies he attacked the hay instead. Having small skill in women—the few of his intimate experience being as free of feminine complexities as they were of virtue—he was sorely puzzled. Looking backward, he remembered his own pious mother. Hines's wife had died whispering of religion's consolations; yet here was the daughter turning a determined back on the source of the mother's comfort. It was unnatural to his scheme of things, contrary to the law of his vestigial piety. He would try again! But when, the hay finished, he came back to her, he quailed before her pale hopelessness; it called God in question.

Limbering up her rake, he watched her drive away, a small, thin figure, woful speck of life under a vast gray sky. For twisting cloud masses had blotted out the sun, a chill wind snatched the tops from the hay-cocks as fast as Bender coiled them, blots of water splashed the dust before he finished his task.

Black care rode home with him; and as that night the thunder split over his cabin, he saw Jenny's eyes mirrored on the wet, black pane, and it was borne dimly upon him that something besides overwork was responsible for their haunting.

Bender had a friend, a man of his own ilk, with whom he had hit camp and log-drive for these last ten years. At birth it is supposable that the friend inherited a name, but in the camps he was known only as the "Cougar." A silent man, broad, deep-lunged, fierce-eyed, nature had laid his lines for great height, then bent him in a perpetual crouch. He always seemed gathering for a spring, which, combined with tigerish courage, had gained him his name. Inseparable, if Bender appeared on the Mattawa for the spring drive, it was known that the Cougar might be shortly expected. If the Cougar stole into a Rocky Mountain camp, a bunk was immediately reserved for his big affinity. Only a bottle of whiskey and two days' delay on the Cougar's part had prevented them from settling up the same section. However, though five miles lay between their respective homesteads, never a Sunday passed without one man riding over to see the other, and it was returning from such a visit that Bender next fell in with Jenny Hines.

It was night and late, but as Bender rode by the forks where Hines's private road joined on to the Lone Tree trail, a new moon gave sufficient light for him to see a whitish object lying in the grass. He judged it a grain-sack till a convulsion shook it and a sob rose to his ears.

"Good land, girl!" he ejaculated, when, a moment later, Jenny's pale face turned up to his, "what are you doing here?"

"He's turned me out."

"Who?"

"Jed." The absence of the parental title spoke volumes—of love killed by slow starvation, cold sternness, of youth enslaved to authority without mitigation of fatherly tenderness.

Without understanding, Bender felt. "What for?" he demanded.

Crowding against his stirrup, she remained silent, and the touch of her body against his leg, the mute appeal of the contact, sent a flame of righteous passion through Bender's big body. Indecision had never been among his faults. Stooping, he raised her to the saddle before him, and as she settled in against his broad breast a wave of tenderness flowed after the flame.

"No, no!" she begged, when he turned in on Jed's trail. "I won't go back!" And he felt her violently trembling as he soothed and coaxed. She tried to slip from his arms as they approached the cabin, and her terror filled him with such anger that his kick almost stove in the door.

"It's me!" he roared, answering Hines's challenge. "Bender! I came on your gal lying out on the prairies. Open an' take her in!"

In response the window raised an inch; the moonlight glinted on a rifle-barrel. "Kick the door ag'in!" Jed's voice snarled, "an' I'll bore you. Git! the pair of ye!"

"Come, come, Jed." For her sake Bender mastered his anger. "Come, this ain't right. Let her in an' we'll call it by-gones."

"No, no!" the girl protested.

Though she had whispered, Jed heard, and her protest touched off his furious wolfish passion. "Git! Won't you git!" he screeched, following the command with a stream of screamed imprecations, vile abuse.

If alone Bender would have beaten in the door, but there was no mistaking Hines's deadly intent. Warned by the click of a cocking hammer, he swung Jenny in front again, galloped out of range; then, uncertain what to do, he gave his beast its head, and half an hour later brought up at his own door.

"There, sis," he said, as he lit his lamp, "make yourself happy while I stable Billy. Then I'll cook up some grub, an' while we're eating we can talk over things."

She smiled wanly yet gratefully. But when he returned she was rocking back and forth and moaning.

"Don't take on so," he comforted. "To-night I'll sleep in the stable; at daybreak we'll hit south for Mother Flynn's." But the moans followed in quick succession, beaded sweat started on her brow, and as she swung forward he saw that which, two hours before, had turned Jed Hines into a foaming beast.

"Oh, my God!" The exclamation burst from him. "You pore little thing! you pore little child! Only a baby yourself!"

Stooping, he lifted her into his bed, tucked her in, then stood, doubtful, troubled, looking down upon her. Two-thirds of the settlers in Silver Creek were of Scotch descent; were deeply dyed with the granite hardness, harsh malignancy, fervid bigotry which have caused the history of their race to be written in characters of blood. Fiercely moral, dogmatically religious, she could expect no mercy at their hands. Hard-featured women, whose angular unloveliness had efficiently safeguarded their own virtue, would hate her the more because her fault had been beyond their compass. Looking forward, Bender saw the poor little body a passive centre for a whorl of spite, jealousy, virulent spleen, and the rough heart of him was mightily troubled. In all Silver Creek, Mrs. Flynn was the only woman to whom he felt he might safely turn. But Flynn's farm lay eighteen miles to the south—too far; the child was in imminent labor. What should he do?

"Jenny," he said, "any women folk been to your house lately?"

When she answered that they had been without a visitor for three months, Bender nodded his satisfaction. "Lie still, child," he said. "I'll be back right smart."

He was not gone long—just long enough to drive over to and back from Carter's. "I'm not trusting any of the women hereabouts," he told Carter. "Though it ain't generally known, the Cougar was married once. The same Indians that did up Custer cleaned up his wife and family. An' as he always lived a thousand miles from a doctor, he knows all about sech things. So if you'll drive like all hell for him, I'll tend to the little gal."

And Carter drove. In one hour he brought the Cougar, but even in that short time a wonderful transformation was wrought in that rough cabin under Bender's sympathetic eyes. From the travail of the suffering girl was born a woman—but not a mother. For of the essence of life Jenny had not sufficient to endow the child of her labor. The spark flickered down in herself, sank, till the Cougar, roughest yet gentlest of nurses, sweated with apprehension.

"It's death or a doctor," he told Carter, hiding his emotion under a surly growl. "Now show what them ponies are good for."

And that night those small fiends did "show what they were good for";—made a record that stood for many a year. Roused from his beauty-sleep, Flynn caught the whir of hot wheels and wondered who was sick. It was yet black night when Carter called Father Francis, the silent mission priest, from his bed. By lantern-light they two, layman and priest, spelled each other with pick and shovel in the mission acre, and when the last spadeful dropped on the small grave, Carter flew on. At cock-crow he pulled into Lone Tree, sixty miles in six hours, without counting the stop at the mission.

"I doubt I've killed you," he murmured, as the ponies stood before the doctor's door, "but it just had to be done."

The doctor himself answered the knock. A heavy man, grizzled, gray-eyed, sun and wind had burned his face to leather, for his days and nights were spent on trail, pursuing a practice that was only limited by the endurance of horse-flesh. From the ranges incurably vicious broncos were sent to his stables, devils in brute form. He used seven teams; yet the toughest wore out in a year. Day or night, winter or summer, a hundred in the shade or sixty below, he might be seen pounding them along the trails. Even now he had just come in from the Pipe Stone, sixty miles southwest, but he instantly routed out his man.

"Hitch the buckskins, Bill," he said, "and let him run yours round to the stables, Carter. He'll turn 'em out prancing by the time we're back."

It took Bill, the doctor, and Carter to get the buckskins clear of town, but once out the doctor handed the lines to Carter. "Now let 'em run." Then he fell asleep.

He woke as they passed the mission, exchanged words with the priest, and dozed again till Carter reined in at Bender's door. Then, shedding sleep as a dog shakes off water, he entered, clear-eyed, into the battle with death.

It was night when he came out to Bender and Carter, sprawled on the hay in the stable.

"She'll live," he answered the lumberman's look, "but she must have woman's nursing. Who's to be? Mrs. Flynn?" He shook his head. "A good woman, but—she has her sex's weakness—damned long-tongued."

Bender looked troubled. "There ain't a soul knows it—yet."

The doctor nodded. "Yes, yes, but I doubt whether you can keep it, boys."

"I think," Carter said, slowly, "that if it was rightly put Miss Morrill might—"

"That sweet-faced girl?" The doctor's gray eyes lit with approval, and the cloud swept back from Bender's rugged face.

"If she only would!" the giant stammered, "I'd—" He cast about for a fitting recompense, and finding none worth, finished, "There ain't a damn thing I wouldn't do for her."

The doctor took doubt by the ears. "Well, hitch and let's see."

Realizing that the girl would probably have her fair share of the prejudice, he opened his case very gently an hour later. But he might have saved his diplomacy.

"Of course!" she exclaimed, as soon as she grasped the facts. "Poor little thing! I'll go right over with Mr. Bender.

"And remember," the doctor said, finishing his instructions, "she needs mothering more than medicine."

So, satisfied, he and Carter hit the back trail, but not till he had examined Morrill with stethoscope and tapping finger. "Must have some excuse for my trip," he said, "and you'll have to serve. So don't be scared if you happen to hear that you have had another hemorrhage. Good! Good!" he exclaimed at every tap, but once on trail he shook his head. "May go in a month; can't last six. Be prepared."

A fiery sunset was staining the western sky when, on his way back from Lone Tree, Carter stopped at Bender's door. The glow tinged the furious cloud that rose from the Cougar's pipe.

"Doing well," he laconically answered. "Never saw a gal pull round better from a fainting spell."

Nodding comprehension, Carter mentioned a doubt that had nettled him on the trail. "Jed? Do you think he'll—"

Sudden ferocity flamed up in the Cougar's face. "I tended to him this morning," he said, slowly, ominously. "He's persuaded as he mistook the girl's symptoms. Anyway, he ain't agoing to foul his own nest so long as no one knows."

"Wants her back, I suppose?"

The Cougar nodded. "She's worth more to him than his best ox-team. But he ain't agoing to get her. Don't go! Miss Morrill's inside an' wants to run over home for some things. Fine gal that." The Cougar's set fierceness of face almost thawed as he delivered his opinion.

Driving homeward, Helen opened the subject just where the Cougar had left it. "She won't go back to her father," she said, "and I don't blame her. But she can't stay here."

However, Jenny's future was already provided. "You needn't to worry," Carter said. "The doctor's fixed things. He and his wife have neither chick nor child of their own; they'll take her in."

The girl exclaimed her surprised gladness. To her, indeed, the entire incident was a revelation. Here three rough frontiersmen had banded successfully together to protect a wronged child and keep her within their rough social pale. Through all they had exhibited a tact and delicacy not always found in finer social stratas, and the lesson went far in modifying certain caste ideas—would have gone farther could she have known the fulness of their delicacy.

Only once was the cause of Jenny's illness ever hinted at among the three; that when Carter and Bender lay waiting for the doctor in the stable.

"You don't happen to have made a guess at the man?" Carter had asked.

"She hain't mentioned him," the giant answered, a little stiffly.

But he thawed when Carter answered: "You'll pardon me. I was just wondering if a rope might help her case."

Bender had shaken his head. "Las' year, you'll remember, one of Molyneux's remittance-men uster drive her out while Jed had her hired out to Leslie's. But he's gone back to England."

Also Helen had learned to look beneath Bender's scarred surface. Every day, while Jenny lay in his shanty, he would slip in between loads of hay to see her. At first the presence of so much femininity embarrassed him. One petticoat hanging on the wall while another floats over the floor is enough to upset any bachelor. Only when sitting with Jenny did he find his tongue; then, giant of the camps, he prattled like a school-boy, freeing thoughts and feelings that had been imprisoned through all his savage years. It was singularly strange, too, to see how Jenny reciprocated his feelings. She liked Helen, but all of her petting could not bring the smile that came for Bender, in whom she sensed a kindred shy simplicity.

Helen was to get yet one other light from these unpromising surfaces, a light bright as those of Scripture which are said to shine as lamps to the feet. A few days after Jenny's departure Bender rode up to the door where Carter sat talking with Morrill.

"Got any stock to sell?" he inquired. "Cows in calf?"

"Going in for butter-making?" Carter inquired, grinning.

"Nope!" The giant laughed. "'Tain't for myself I'm asking. I'm a lumberman born an' bred; the camps draw me like salt-licks pull the deer. I'd never have time to look after them. Farming's play with me. On'y I was thinking as it wouldn't be so bad if that little gal had a head or two of her own growing inter money. You kin let 'em run with your band summers, an' I'll put up winter hay for them an' the increase. How are you, miss?" He nodded as Helen came to the door.

It was her first experience in such free giving, and she was astonished to see how devoid his manner was of philanthropic consciousness. Plainly he regarded the whole affair as very ordinary business. Carter's answer accentuated the novel impression—"What's the matter with me contributing them heifers?"

"Da—beg pardon, miss." Bender blushed. "No you don't. This is my funeral. But I'm no hawg. Now if you wanter throw in a couple of calves—"

Thus, without deed, oath, or mortgage, but with a certainty that none of these forms could afford, did little Jenny Hines become a young lady of property. The matter disposed of, Bender called Carter off to the stable, where, after many mysterious fumblings, he produced from a package a gorgeous silk kerchief of rainbow hues.

"You'll give Miss Morrill this?"

But Carter balked, grinning. "Lordy, man; do your own courting."

"Say!" the giant ejaculated, shocked. "You don't reckon she'd take it that way?"

Carter judiciously considered the question, and after mature deliberation replied: "I've seen breach-of-promise suits swing on less. But I reckon you're safe enough—if you explain your motive."

The giant sighed his relief. "Did you ever give a gal anything, Carter?"

"Did I? Enough to stock a farm if 'twas collected."

"How'd you go about it?"

"Why, jes' give it to her. You're bigger'n she is; kain't hurt you."

"Oh, Lordy, I don't know." Bender sighed again. "It's surprising what them small things kin do to you. Say, there's a good feller. You take it in?"

But Carter sternly refused, and five minutes later Bender might have been seen, stern and rigid from the desperate nature of his enterprise, sitting on one of Helen's soap-boxes. In the hour he talked with Morrill, he never once relaxed a death-grip on his hat. His eye never once strayed towards Helen, and it was late that evening when she found the kerchief under his box.

It speaks well for her that she did not laugh at its gorgeous colors; and her smile as she scribbled a little note of thanks that was delivered by Carter was far too tender for ridicule. Truly she was learning.

VI

THE SHADOW

Down a half-mile furrow that gleamed wetly black against the dull brown of "broken" prairie, Carter followed his oxen. He was "back-setting," deep-ploughing the sod that had lain rotting through the summer. For October, it was hot; an acrid odor, ammoniacal from his sweating beasts, mingled with the tang of the soil and the strong hay scent of scorching prairies. Summer was making a desperate spurt from winter's chill advance, and, as though realizing it, bird, beast, insects, as well as men, went busily about their business. The warm air was freighted with the boom of bees, vibrated to the whir of darting prairie-chicken, the yells of distant ploughmen; for, stimulated by an answer from the railroad gods, the settlers were striving to add to their wheat acreage.

"In certain contingencies," the general manager answered the petition, "we will build through Silver Creek next summer."

Judging by a remark dropped to his third assistant, "uncertain" would have expressed his meaning more correctly. "A little hope won't hurt them, and ought to go a long way in settling up the country. By-the-way, who signed these statistics? Cummings? That wasn't the tall Yankee who spoke so well. He never would have sent in such a jumble."

Blissfully ignorant, however, of railroad methods, the settlers interpreted the guarded answer as an iron promise. Forgetting Carter's part in getting them a hearing, Cummings and his fellows plumed themselves upon their diplomacy, took to themselves the credit—in which they evidenced the secret malevolence that a rural community holds against the man who rises above its intellectual level. Human imperfection is invariable through the ages. Plebeian Athens ostracised the just Aristides. Similarly, Silver Creek evidenced its petty jealousy against its best brains. "Oh, he's too damned smart!" it exclaimed, whenever Carter was mentioned for the council, school trustee, or other public office, nor paused to consider its logic.

Slowly, with heavy gaspings, the oxen stopped at the end of the furrow, and as he sat down on the plough while they rested, Carter blessed the happy chance that had caused him to "break" clear down to Morrill's boundary. Helen sat in the shade of her cabin, thus affording him delicious glimpses of a scarlet mouth, slightly pursed over her sewing, a loose curl that glowed like a golden bar amid the creamy shadows of her neck, the palpitant life of the feminine figure. Small wonder that he lingered on that turn.

"It's that warm," he hypocritically remarked, fanning himself, "those poor critters' tongues are hanging to their knees."

The girl bowed to hide her smile. "They always seem to tire at this end of the field."

"Discerning brutes," he answered, nowise nonplussed.

She broke a silence. "It is considered bad manners to stare."

"Yes?" he cheerfully inquired. "I'll make a note of that."

A few moments later she remarked, "You have a poor memory."

"Thank you for telling. In what way?"

"You were staring."

"N-o."

"You were."

"Beg your pardon. It takes two to make a stare. If I keep on looking you in the eye—that's staring. If I'm looking when you ain't supposed to know it—that's—that's—"

"Well?" she prompted.

"Mighty pleasant," he finished, rising.

As he moved off she looked curiously after. While he was talking, some fleeting expression, trick of speech had recalled him as she first saw him at Lone Tree—a young man, tall, sunburned, soft of speech, ungrammatical, and the picture had awakened her to a change in herself. In this her fourth month in the settlement she felt she had lost the keen freshness of the stranger's point of view. She now scarcely noticed his idiom, accent, grammatical lapses. Oddities of speech and manner that at first would have provoked surprise or laughter no longer challenged her attention. If the land's vast rawness still impressed, she was losing the clarity of first perceptions.

She was being absorbed; her individuality was slowly undergoing the inevitable process of addition and cancellation. How dim, indefinite the past already seemed. Some other girl might have lived it, gone through the round of parties, balls, associated with the well-groomed men, refined girls of her acquaintance. How vivid, concrete was the present! She contemplated her hands, roughened by dish-washing. Did it foretell her future? Would this equilibration with environment end by leaving her peer of the gaunt, labor-stricken women of the settlements? She shuddered. The thought stamped her mood so that, returning on the other round, Carter passed on, thinking her offended.

"Why so grave, sis?" Her brother smiled down upon her from the doorway. Since her arrival he had had many ups and downs, alternating between bed-fast and apparent convalescence. To-day the fires of life would flare high, to flicker down to-morrow like a guttering candle that wastes the quicker to its end. Not for the world would she increase his anxiety with her foreboding. Hiding the dejection with a quick smile, she turned his question with another.

"Bert, why does Mr. Carter dislike Captain Molyneux, the Leslies, and—"

"The English crowd in general?" he finished for her. "Does he? I never heard him say much against them."

"No, he's one of your silent men. But actions count more than words. When he drives me to or from Leslies' he invariably refuses the invitation to come in, pleading hurry."

"Well, he has been pretty busy."

Morrill stated a fact. Carter had spent the haying months in the forest sloughs, where they cut the bulk of their fodder. There, with the deep woods smothering every errant breeze, mercury at a hundred, the fat marsh sweating underfoot, he had moved, raked, or pitched while sand-flies took toll of his flesh by day and mosquitoes converted his homeward journey into a feast of blood. Eighty head of cattle, his and Merrill's, had to be provided for, and he alone to do it. And it was from these heavy labors that he had stolen time to drive Helen back and forth.

"But he repels their every attempt at friendliness!" she protested. "Positively snubbed Captain Molyneux the other day."

Morrill laughed. "Why do they persist in their overtures? Carter is flesh and blood of the frontier, which makes no bones over its likes and dislikes. With him a friend is a friend. He has no use for civilization which calls upon its votaries to spread their friendship in a thin veneer over a vast acquaintance. Having, courteously enough, intimated that he doesn't desire closer acquaintance, he expects them to heed the hint. Failing, they may expect to have it stated in stronger terms. Molyneux has lived long enough in the north to know that." His answer, however, simply completed the circle and brought them back to the starting-point.

She restated the issue. "But why doesn't he like them?"

Morrill answered her question with another. "Why do you like them?"

"They are nice."

"Mrs. Leslie?" he catechised.

"A trifle frivolous, perhaps, but—I like her."

"Leslie, Danvers, Poole, and the rest of them?"

"Impractical," she admitted, "thoroughly impractical, all but Captain Molyneux. His farm is a model. Yet—I like them."

She spoke musingly, as though examining her feelings for cause, analysis of which would have shown that the wide differences between herself and her new acquaintances had added to the glamour and sparkle which are given off by fresh personalities. She liked their refinement, courtesy, subtleties, and grace of conduct which shone the brighter in that rough setting. To her their very speech was charming, with its broad vowels, leisurely drawled, so much softer than the clipped American idiom.

They were, indeed, over-refined. Five centuries ago the welding of Celt, Saxon, Roman, Norman into one homogeneous whole was full and complete; since then that potent mixture of blood had undergone slow stagnation. Noble privilege and laws of entail had checked in the motherland those selective processes which sweep the foolish, wicked, and vicious from the face of the earth. Protected by the aristocratic system, the fool, the idler, the roué had handed their undesirableness down the generations, a heavy mortgage on posterity. Ripe fruit of a vicious system, decay had touched them at the core; last links of a chain once strong, they had lacked the hot hammering from grim circumstance that alone could make them fit to hold and bind.

Morrill laid his thin finger on the spot. "All right, Nell, they are harmless." He laughed as he used the scornful term which the Canadian settlers applied to their English neighbors. "You must have some company. I don't dislike them myself, and would probably like them better if it was not for their insufferable national conceit and blind caste feeling. They look with huge contempt on all persons and things which cannot claim origin in the narrow bit of English society from which they sprang. I'm not denying their country's greatness. But, like the Buddhist, lost in contemplation of his own navel, they have turned their eyes inward till they're blind to all else. On we Americans they are particularly hard, regarding us with the easy tolerance that one may extend to the imperfections of an anthropoid ape. Now don't fire up! They have always been nice to me. Still I can feel the superiority beneath the surface. With Carter it is different. Him they classify with the Canadian settlers, and you may fancy the effect on a man who, in skill of hands and brain, character, all the things that count in life, stands waist-high above them. He sees them cheated, cozened by every shyster. Men in years, they are children in experience, and if help from home were withdrawn not one could stand on his own legs. They are the trimmings of their generation, encumbrances on the family estate or fortune, useless timber lopped off from the genealogical tree. Do you wonder that he despises them?"

"I think," she said, after a thoughtful pause, "that he is too stern in his judgments. Impracticability isn't a crime, Bert, and people ought not to be blamed for the conditions that made them."

"True, little wisehead."

"He ought," she went on, "to be more friendly. I'm sure Mrs. Leslie likes him."

Morrill smothered a laugh. "Carter's a mighty handsome man, young lady, and Mrs. Leslie is—a shade impressionable. But in social affairs women decide on women, men on men."

She nodded, puckering her brow. "Yes, but he behaved dreadfully to Captain Molyneux."

Her genuine distress prevented the laugh from escaping. "Tell me about it," he sympathized.

"It was the other evening when he came to drive me home. Despite his reserve, the younger boys all like him, and when Captain Molyneux brought me out he was telling Mr. Poole and Mr. Rhodes about a horse that Danvers had bought from Cummings. 'The critter,' Carter said, 'is blind, spavined, sweenied, and old enough to homestead.'

"'Well,' the captain added, 'Danvers has always needed a guardian, Mr. Carter.'"

"In his patronizing way?" Morrill commented.

"A little, perhaps," she admitted. "Then, looking straight at us, Carter answered, 'He could have picked a worse.' What did he mean, Bert? The captain reddened and the boys looked silly."

Morrill grinned. "Well—you see, Nell, Molyneux's income is mostly derived from the farming of pupils who are apprenticed to him by a firm of London lawyers while under the impression that colonial farming is a complex business that requires years of study. Having whacked up from five hundred to five thousand dollars premium, they find, on arrival, that they have simply paid for the privilege of doing ordinary farm work. You said Molyneux's place was a model. No wonder, when he draws pay where other men have to hire. No, the business isn't exactly dishonorable!" He anticipated her question. "He does teach them something, and prevents them from falling into the hands of Canuck shysters who would bleed them for hundreds when he takes fifties. But—well, it isn't a business I'd care to be in. But there! I've talked myself tired, and Molyneux is coming at three to drive you up to Leslie's. You have just half an hour to dress."

"But I won't go," she protested, "if you're not feeling well."

"Bosh!" he laughed. "I'm dying to be rid of you. Expect to get quiet sleep this afternoon."

But as, half an hour later, he watched her drive away, his face darkened, and he muttered: "This will never do. She can't settle down to this life. Just as soon—" A fit of coughing left him gasping; but, under the merciful hallucination that attends consumption, he finished, "I'll sell out as soon as I'm rid of this cough and go back to the law."

Carter also watched her go. As, dank with sweat, grimed with dust and labor, he "geed" his oxen around the "land," she went by, a flutter of billowy white, deliciously dainty, cool, and clean. The contrast emphasized the difference between them so strongly that a sudden feeling of bitter hopelessness caused him to return only a stern nod to her bow and smile. Surprised, she looked back, and gleaning, perhaps, an intuition of his feeling from the dogged set of his face and figure, she was swept with sudden pity.

For a mile she was quiet; but while the sun shines youth may not hobnob with care, and that was a perfect day. Autumn's crimsons mottled the tawny prairies; waves of sunshine chased one another over the brown grasses to the distant forest line; and as, with cheerful clatter of pole and harness, the buggy dipped, swallow-like, over the long earth rolls, her spirits rose. She laughed, chatted, within five miles was involved in a mild flirtation. That was wicked! Of course! Afterwards, in private, she mortified the strain of coquetry that made such shame possible. Yet it was very natural. Given a handsome man, a pretty maid, and isolation, what else should follow? Molyneux had travelled in far countries and talked well of them and their savage peoples. He knew London, the Mecca of womankind, like a book; abounded in anecdotes of people and places that had been awesome names to her. Also he was skilled in subtle flattery, never exceeding by a hair's-breadth the amount which her vanity—of which she had a pretty woman's rightful share—could easily assimilate. Small wonder if she forgot the grim figure at the ploughtail.

Forgetfulness, however, was not for Carter. As he followed the steady rhythm of his furrows in heat and dust, heavy thought now loosened, now tightened the corners of his mouth. But bitterness did not hold him long.

"Baby! You are going to get her. But that ain't the way to play the game," he said, as the buggy disappeared. And she saw only friendliness in his smile on her return that evening and the score of other occasions on which he watched her goings and comings.

He "played his game" like a man, and with a masterly hand. Never obtrusive, he was always kind, cheerful, hopefully sympathetic during Merrill's bad spells. At other times his dry humor kept her laughing. He was always helpful. When the snows blanketed the prairies he instructed her in the shifts of winter housekeeping—how to keep the cabin snug when the blizzard walled it in fleecy cloud; how to keep the frost out of the cellar and from the small stock of fruits in the pantry. Together they "froze down" a supply of milk against the time when it would be cruel to keep cows milking. A night's frost transmuted her pans of milk into oval cakes, which he piled out-doors like cordwood. A milk pile! The snows soon covered it, and how she laughed when, drawing home wood from the forest, he mistook the pile for a drift and so upset his load.

Indeed, he wrought well! Kindliness, good temper, consideration, these are splendid bases for love. Not that he ever hinted his hope. He was far too shrewdly circumspect. It speaks for the quality of his wit that he recognized that, given differences in rank and station, love must steal upon her from ambush. Startled, she would fly behind ramparts that would be proof against the small god's sharpest arrows. So he was very careful, masking his feeling under a gentle imperturbability; sure that, if not alarmed, she must turn to him in the coming time of trouble.

For Morrill had steadily failed since winter set in. During the Christmas week he rallied, recovered voice and color, improved so much that Helen yielded to his wish for her to attend a New Year's party at Mrs. Leslie's; and as she kissed him good-bye there was nothing to indicate that this was but the last flash, the leaping flame which precedes the darkness.

A genuine frontier party, it was to be an all-day affair, and Carter drove her up in the morning. New Year had broken beautifully: clear, bright, almost warm; for the first time in a month the mercury had thawed long enough to register twenty-eight below. There had been no wind or drift for a week, so the trail was packed hard, and as the ponies swept its curves, balancing the cutter on one or the other runner, rapid motion joined with pleasurable anticipation to raise the girl's spirits to the point of repentance.

"Here I'm laughing and chatting," she said, soberly, "when I ought to be home with Bert."

"Nonsense!" Carter glanced approvingly upon the glow which the keen air had brought to her cheeks. "You haven't been out for a month, and you were getting that pale and peaked. I shall be with him. Now you just go in for a good time."

His generous solicitude for her happiness, for she was going among people he did not like, touched her. "I wish you were coming," she said. Then she added, "Won't you come in—just for a little while—if Mrs. Leslie asks you?"

He returned her coaxing smile. "I'll see." And as the men were all away, clearing a slough for skating, he stayed long enough to drink a toast with Mrs. Leslie.

That lady's eyes shone with soft approval as, standing by the table that was already spread with glass, silver, and white napery, he bowed. "To your continued health and beauty."

"Now wasn't that pretty?" she exclaimed, after he was gone. "Do you know, standing there in his furs, so tall and strong, he reminded me of one of those old Norsemen who sometimes strayed into degenerate southern courts. You are happy in your cavalier, my dear. If he asked me, I believe I'd run away with him." And there was a sigh in her laugh. For though a good fellow, Leslie was prodigiously chuckle-headed, and she had moods when his simple foolishness was as unbearable as her own frivolity—dangerous moods for a woman of her light timber.

"I wish," she added, a little later, "that we could have persuaded him to stay."

He knew better. Striding, a conqueror, into southern halls, the Norseman cut a mighty figure where he would have made but a poor appearance as an invited guest. A thought that was expressed in Carter's meditation on the homeward drive.

"She meant it, shorely! But, bless her! you ain't to be drawn into such a brace game. You'd look nice among those dudes."

He had left no fire in his cabin, but he was not surprised when, afar off, he saw his stove-pipe flinging a banner of smoke to the crystal air. As yet the northland had not achieved refinements in the shape of locks and bolts, and, coming in from a forty-mile drive from a Cree village, Father Francis, the priest of the Assiniboin mission, had put in and brewed a jug of tea.

Easy, courteous in bearing, upright despite his silvered years, the priest came to the door and welcomed Carter home. "Not much travel beyond the settlements," he said. "It was pretty heavy going and my ponies are tired. So I'll just accept the old invitation, son, and stay the night—that is"—his mellow laugh rang out—"if my presence won't make you anathema maranatha unto your neighbors."

Carter knew them, their rigid dogmatism, the bigotry which made them look askance at this man who, for thirty years, had fought the devil over the face of a parish as big as an Eastern State.

"I don't allow that they'll more than excommunicate me," he grinned, "and if they do I reckon that you'd drop the bars of your fold."

"Gladly!" the priest laughed. "They are always down, son." So, seated by the humming stove with the jug steaming between them, the two settled down to exchange the news of the neighborhood—an elastic term that stretched over territory enough to set an Old-World kingdom up in business.

It was strange gossip. To the north of them—and not very far at that; old Fort Pelly lay within twenty miles—the Hudson Bay Company, the oldest of chartered traders, still lorded it over the tribes. In dark woods, on open prairies stood the forts with their storehouses, fur lofts waiting groups of Indians. There Factor, Clerk, the Bois Brulés still lived and loved in the primitive fashion, careless of the settlement, first wave of civilization that was lipping around their borders. So the talk ran on fur packs, mishaps by trail or river, sinister doings in the far north, where the aftermath of the Metis rebellion was still simmering. A wild budget! What between it and Carter's choring, dark was settling as he and the priest entered Morrill's cabin.

Both started at what they saw. Despite Carter's optimism in Helen's presence, he had been fully alive to Morrill's condition, yet—he now stood, shocked, grieved in the presence of the expected.

The sick man was wellnigh spent, yet the stroke of death brought only a spark from his iron courage. "Another hemorrhage!" he whispered. "Shortly after you left. No, don't go for Helen. She gets so little pleasure. It is all over. I'll be all right to-morrow."

But it was not all over—though it would be "right" on the morrow. The rising moon saw Carter's ponies scouring the ghostly snows.

It had been a jolly party, skating in the afternoon, music and dancing in the evening; then, as reserve thawed under the prolonged association, they had fallen to playing Christmas games. Forfeits were being "declared" as Carter reined in at the door, and Mrs. Leslie's merry tones fell like blasphemy upon his ear.

"Fine or superfine?"

"Superfine? Then that must be Helen! Captain Molyneux will—" The penalty was drowned in uproar, which also smothered his knock. Followed loud laughter, and the door quivered under the impact of struggling bodies.

"Don't—please!"

Now, under Christmas license no girl is particularly averse to being kissed, and had Molyneux gone a little more gently about it, Helen had probably offered no more than the conventional resistance. But when he forced her head back so that her lips would come up to his with all the abandon of lovers, she broke his grip, and when pinned again against the door, struggled madly.

"Don't!"

There was no mistaking her accent. A flame of anger, leaping, confusing, blinded Carter. His every muscle contorted. From his unconscious pressure, hasp and handle flew from the door; as Mrs. Leslie shrieked her surprise, his hand dropped on Helen's shoulder, and from that small leverage his elbow sent Molyneux staggering back to the wall.

The action cleared his brain, calmed the great muscles that quivered under his furs with primordial impulse to break and tear. The flush faded from his tan, the flash from his eye. The hasp lay on the floor with the handle he had forgotten to turn. He saw neither them nor the guests in their postures of uneasy astonishment. Before his mental vision rose the scene he had just left, the priest kneeling in prayer beside a dying man.

The reaction of his shove had thrown Helen in against him, and her touch recalled his mission. "Your brother—" he began, then paused. He had meant to break it gently, but the confusion of conflicting emotions left him nothing but the fact. "Is—" he went on, then, appalled by a sudden sense of the ruthlessness of it, he stopped. But, reading the truth in his eyes, she collapsed on his arm.

To Carter, waiting outside in the moonlight for Helen, came Molyneux, and the door closing behind him shut in the hum of wonder and the sobbing that came from the bedroom where the women were putting on their wraps.

Molyneux was smoking, though, to give him his due, he did not require that invaluable aid to a cool bearing. Regarding the spirals, curling sharply blue in the moonlight, he remarked, "I don't quite understand your methods, my friend." The insolence of the "my friend" is indescribable. "It may be fashionable in Stump town to announce bad news by breaking down a gentleman's door, but with us—it savors of roughness."

"Roughness?" Carter scrutinized the dim horizon. "It wasn't all on one side of the door—my friend." His mimicry was perfect.

The captain hummed, cleared his throat. "A little Christmas foolery—perfectly allowable."

Carter's gaze shifted to the nimbus about the moon, a clear storm warning. "Foolery becomes roughness when it ain't agreeable to both parties."

"Who told you it wasn't?"

"My ear. If yours didn't—it needs training."

Molyneux smoked out a pause that perhaps covered a slight confusion. "Well, I don't care to accept you for a music-master. Under the distressing circumstances, I shall have to let it pass—for the present. But I shall not forget."

Carter smiled at the moon. "Looks like storm?"

VII

MR. FLYNN STEPS INTO THE BREACH

After putting forth a feeble straggle on the morning of the funeral, the pale winter sun retired for good as the north wind began to herd the drift over vast white steppes. Though fire had been kept up all night in Merrill's cabin by Mrs. Flynn, who had come in to perform the last offices, a pail of water had frozen solid close to the stove. After a quarter of an hour in the oven, a loaf of bread yet showed frost crystals in its centre at breakfast; a drop of coffee congealed as it fell in the saucer.

It was, indeed, the hardest of weather. By noon a half-inch of ice levelled the window-panes with the sash; pouring through the key-hole a spume of fine drift laid a white finger across the floor. Outside, the spirit thermometer registered forty-five below. The very air was frozen, blanketing the snow with lurid frost clouds. Yet, though a pair of iridescent "sun-dogs" gave storm warnings, a score of Canadian settlers, men and women, assembled for the service in the cabin. Severe, silent, they sat around on boards and boxes, eying Mrs. Leslie and other English neighbors with great disfavor, inwardly critical of the funeral arrangements. For ceremony and service had been stripped of the lugubrious attributes which gave mournful satisfaction to the primitive mind. Helen herself, in her quiet grief, was a disappointment; and she wore no black or other grievous emblem. Worse! The casket-lid was screwed down, and, filched of their prerogative of "viewing the corpse," they turned gloomy faces to the theological student who had come out from Lone Tree.

Here was an additional disappointment. Afterwards, in the stable, it was held that he had not improved the occasion. Of Morrill, who had been so lax in his attendance at occasional preachings as to justify a suspicion of atheism, he could have made an edifying text, thrilling his hearers with doubts as to whether the man was altogether fallen short of grace. But there was none of this. Just a word on the brother's sunny nature and brave fight against wasting sickness, and he was passed without doubt of title to mansions in the skies.

"I don't call that no sermon," Hines growled, as he thrust a frosty bit into his pony's mouth. "Missed all the good points, he did."

"Never heerd the like," said Shinn, his neighbor, nearest in disposition as well as location. "Not a bit of crape for the pall-bearers. I know a person that ain't going to be missed much."

"I've heerd," another man said, "as he doubted the Scriptures. If that is so—Is it true as the Roman priest was with him at the last?"

Hines despondently nodded. "We'll hope for the best," he said, with an accent that murdered the hope.

Shinn, however, who never could compass the art of suggestion, gave plainer terms to his thought. "There ain't a doubt in my mind. It's a warning to turn from the paths he trod."

"You needn't be scairt." From the gloom of the far corner, where he was harnessing the team that was to draw the burial sleigh, Bender's voice issued. "You needn't be scairt. There ain't a damn one of you travelling his trail."

Ensued a silence, then Hines snarled, "No, an' I ain't agoing to follow him on this. If you fellows want to tag after priests' leavings, you kin. I'm pulling my freight for home."

"You're what?"

Hines quailed as Bender's huge body and blue-scarred face materialized from the gloom. "I said as 'twas too cold to go to the grave."

"You did, eh? Well, you're going. Not that your presence is necessary, but just because you ain't to be allowed to show disrespect to a better man than yourself. Tie up that hoss. You're agoing to ride with me. An' if there's any other man as thinks his team ain't fit to buck the drifts"—his fierce eyes searched for opposition—"he'll find room in my sleigh."

So with Hines—albeit much against his will—heading the procession, a long line of sleighs sped through the mirk drift to the lonely acre which had been set apart for the long sleep. A few posts and a single wire marked it off from white wastes, and through these the drift flew with sibilant hiss, piling against the mounded grave which Flynn and Carter had thawed out and dug, inch by inch, with many fires, these last two days. And there was small ceremony. King Frost is no respecter of persons, freezes alike the quick and the dead. Removing his cap to offer a short prayer, the student's ears turned deathly white; while he rubbed them with snow, the mourners spelled one another with the shovels, working furiously in vain efforts to warm chilled blood. Roughly filled, the grave was left to be smoothed in warmer season; the living fled, leaving the dead with the drift, the frost, the wind, stern ministers of the illimitable.

No woman had dared the weather. Lying in the bottom of a sled, under hides and blankets, with hot stones at hands and feet, Helen had gone home with Mrs. Leslie. Coming back from the grave she formed the subject of conversation between Flynn and Carter, who rode together.

To Flynn's inquiry Carter replied that, as far as he was aware, she had no private means. Her father, a physician in good practice in a New England town, had lived up to every cent of his income, and the insurance he carried had been mortgaged to start the brother out West.

"Not having any special training," Carter finished, "she had to choose between a place in a store or keeping house for him."

"It's no snap in them sthores," Flynn sighed. "Shmall pay an' big temptations, they're telling me." Then, giving Carter the tail of his eye, he added, "But there'll be nothing else for it—now?"

"Oh, I don't know," Carter mused. "Flynn, are you and the other married folks around here going to let your families grow up in ignorance? Ain't it pretty nigh time you was forming a school district?"

In the slit between his cap and scarf the Irishman's eyes twinkled like blue jewels. Affecting ignorance, however, he answered, "An' phwere would we be after getting a teacher in this frozen country?"

"Miss Morrill."

Flynn subdued his laugh out of respect to the occasion. "Jest what's in me own mind. An' there'll be no lack av children for the same school, me boy, when you—There, don't be looking mad! 'Tis after the order of nature; an' I'm not blaming ye, she's sweet as she's pretty. Putting you an' me out av the question, I'd do it for her. An' it shouldn't be so hard—if we can corral the bachelors. But lave thim to me."

And Flynn went about it with all the political sagacity inherent in his race. "We'll not be spreading the news much," he told the married men to whom he broached the subject. "Not a word till we get 'em in meeting, or they'll organize an' vote us down."

Accordingly the summons to gather in public meeting was issued without statement of purpose, a mystery that brought out every settler for twenty miles around. An hour before time, some fifty men, rough-looking fellows in furs, arctic socks, moose-skins, and moccasins, crowded into the post-office, which, as most centrally located, was chosen for the meeting.

The expected opposition developed as soon as the postmaster, who presided, mentioned "eddycation."

"More taxation!" a bachelor roared. "You're to marry the girls an' we're to eddycate the kids!"

"Right you are, Pete!" others chorused.

But Flynn was ready. "Is that you, Pete Ross?" He transfixed the speaker with his blue twinkle. "An' yerself coorting the Brown girl so desprit that she don't get time to comb her hair anny more?

"An' you, Bill MacCloud," he went on, as Peter, growling that he "wasn't married yet," carried his blushing face behind the stove, "you that's galloping your ponies so hard after the Baker girl. Twins it was, twice running, in her mother's family, an' well ye know it. A public school ain't good enough for you, Bill? Which is to be—a governess, or a young ladies' siminery?"

So, one after another, Flynn smote the bachelors. Had a man so much as winked at a girl, it made a text for a sermon that was witty as risque.

Yet he was so good-tempered about it that by the time he had finished grilling the last victim the first-cooked were joining their laughter to that of the married men.

Then Flynn turned his eloquence upon a common evil. Everywhere the best of the land had passed into the hands of non-resident speculators, who hindered settlement and development by holding for high prices. "Was it a question of increased taxation?" Flynn asked. Then let the non-residents pay. Under the law they could expend eight hundred dollars on a building. Well, they would distribute the contracts among themselves—one man cut logs, another hew them, a third draw them, and so on! Every man should have a contract, an' who the divil would care if taxes were raised on the speculators.

It was his closing argument, however, that finished the bachelors. "Now me an' Jimmy have spotted a teacher, a right smart young woman—"

A howl of applause cut him short—the bachelors would call it settled!

Thus it came to pass that as, a week or so after the funeral, Carter was driving Helen from Leslie's back to her cabin, a deputation consisting of Mr. Flynn and Mr. Glaves was heading in the same direction.

All that week the cabin had stood, fireless, a mournful blot on the snowscape, but though she was only to be there for the hour required to pack her belongings, Carter had swept out the drift that morning and put on the fires. So the place was cosey and warm. Yet, with all its cheer, on entering, she relapsed into the first passionate grief. For nothing is so vividly alive as the things of a dead person, and everywhere her glance fell on objects her brother had used. Divining the cause, Carter left her to have her cry out on pretence of stable chores, and when he returned she was busily packing.

So while she worked he talked, explaining her affairs as related to himself through his partnership with Morrill. Their cattle were worth so much, but as it would require a summer's grazing to fit them for market, he would advance the money on her share. He did not mention the fact that he would have to borrow it himself at usurer's interest. As to the homestead: Land was unsalable since the bottom fell out of the boom, but in any case it was advisable to hold for the values that would accrue with the coming of the railroad. He would rent it, on settler's terms, paying roadwork and taxes for use of the broken land.

As, kindly thoughtful for her interests, he ran on, she rose from her packing, grasped his hand impulsively, squeezed his arm to her bosom.

"You have been so good!" The sunsets in her cheeks, the softness of her glance, her touch, almost upset his reason. But he resisted a mad impulse.

"Nonsense!" he said, when he could trust himself to speak. "I'm going to make money off you."

"Really?" she asked, smiling.

"Really," he smiled back.

"I—wish you could," she sighed. "But I am afraid you are saying that to please me. Well, you know best. Do as you please."

Had he done as he pleased, the question of their mutual interests would have been simply solved. But the time was not ripe. He was too shrewd to mistake gratitude for love.

"Now," he said, resolutely thrusting away temptation, "if it's any of my darn business—what are your plans?"

"My plans?" Leaning on the table beside him, she gazed dreamily upon the frosted panes. The question forced in upon her the imminence of impending change and brought a feeling of strong revulsion. The ties that death forges are stronger than those of life. It was inexpressibly painful, just then, to think of leaving the land which held her recent dead.

"My plans!" she mused, knitting her brows. "I haven't any—yet. Of course I have relatives, back East. But as father did not like them, I hardly know more than their names. I shall have to do something, but Mrs. Leslie is so good. She won't hear of me leaving until spring. I have heaps of time to plan."

But having bucked trail all morning, the solution of her immediate future just then heralded its arrival by the groan of frosty runners.

"Me an' Jimmy," Mr. Flynn explained, after he had introduced his co-trustee, "is a depytation. Being as it's the only crop the frost won't nip, Silver Creek is going to raise a few legislators. We want the young lady to teach our school."

"But," Helen objected, when she had assimilated the startling news, "I never taught school."

"You'll nivir begin younger," Flynn comforted; to which he added, "An' it's the foinest training agin the time ye'll have a few av your own."

Mr. Glaves solemnly contemplated the blushing candidate. "You kin sum, ma'am—an' spell?"

"Oh yes," she assured him. "I graduated from high-school."

"You don't say!" Both trustees regarded her with intense admiration, and Glaves said, "We didn't expect to get that much for our money, so we'll jest have you go a bit easy at first, lest there'll be some sprained intellec's among the kiddies."

VIII

WHEN APRIL SMILED AGAIN

"We'll begin right soon on the building," Mr. Glaves had said at parting. So when the mercury began to take occasional flights above zero in the last days of February, a gang turned loose in the bush. For two weeks thereafter falling trees and the bell-like tinkle of a broadaxe disturbed the forest silence. Then spring rode in on the back of a Chinook wind and caught them hauling. Ensued profanity. Thawing quickly, the loose snows slid away from the packed trails, causing the sleds to "cut off"; the bush road was mottled with overturned loads. Also the brilliant sun turned the snowscape into one huge reflector. Faces frizzled. Dark men took the colors of raw beefsteak, fair men peeled and cracked like over-ripe tomatoes. Yet they persisted, and one day in early April stood off to look on their finished work. "Chinked," sod-roofed, plastered, the log school-house gleamed yellow under the rays of the dying sun—education, the forerunner of civilization, had settled in the land.

As his cabin was nearest the school, the honor of boarding the teacher fell to the postmaster; and though her choice caused heart-burnings among others who had coveted the distinction, it was conceded wise. For not only did the Glaves's establishment boast the only partitioned room in the Canadian settlement, but his wife, a tall, gaunt woman, excelled in the concoction of carrot-jams, turnip-pies, choke-cherry jellies, and other devices by which skilled housewives eke out the resources of an inhospitable land.

In the middle of April school opened; a dozen small thirsters after knowledge arranged themselves in demure quiethood before authority that was possessed of its own misgivings. Teacher and scholars regarded one another with secret awe. But this soon wore off and they toiled amicably along the road which winds among arithmetical pitfalls and grammatical bogs to academic glories. It was milestoned by deputations, that road, said visitations generally consisting of one person—mostly unmarried and very red in the face—who inquired if the "kids was minding their book," then went off chuckling at his own hardihood. Also it seemed as though all the stray cattle for fifty miles around headed for the school. Helen grew quite expert in ringing variations on the fact that she "had not seen a strawberry steer with a white patch on the left flank." Her smile always accompanied the answer, and the owners of the hypothetical estrays would carry away a vision of a golden and glorified school-ma'am. What of these pleasant interests, and an unexpected liking which she had developed for the work itself, she became very happy in a quiet way as time dulled the edge of her sorrow.

But during the three months that preceded school opening the fates had not been idle. Attending strictly to their knitting, they had run a tangled woof in and out the warp of several lives.

"She's so good!" Helen had exclaimed, in her gratitude of Mrs. Leslie; but analysis of that lady's motives would have shown them not altogether disinterested.

Excluding a certain absence of principle that was organic, and therefore hardly chargeable against her till philosophers answer the question, "Can the leopard change his spots or the Ethiop his skin?" Mrs. Leslie was not fundamentally vicious. Like the average of men and women, she would have preferred to have been good, and, given a husband whom she feared and loved, she might have developed into a small Puritan mightily jealous for their mutual prestige. Lacking this, however, she was as a straw in a corner, ready to rise at the first wind puff. If, so far, she had lived in the fear of Mrs. Grundy, her conformity inhered in two causes—no man in her own set had stirred her nature, and, till Helen came, the winds of Opportunity had blown away from Carter.

What drew her to him she herself could hardly have said; and if the cause is to be found outside of the peculiar texture of her own nature, it must be in the natural law which makes opposites attract. Nature wars incessantly against the stratification which precedes social decay. Whether of blood or water, she abhors stagnation. Her torrential floods cleanse the backwaters of languid streams; passionate impulses, such as Mrs. Leslie's, provide for the injection into worn-out strains of the rich corpuscles that bubble from the soil. Carter's virile masculinity, contrasting so strongly with the amiable effeminacy of her own set, therefore attracted Mrs. Leslie, and, having now lassoed Opportunity—in the shape of Helen—she hitched the willing beast and drove him tandem with inclination.

Either by intuition or knowledge subtly wormed from himself or others, she learned Carter's habits, and no matter the direction of the drives which she and Helen took together, it was pure accident if they did not come in touch with him. Also at intervals they called at his cabin, after one of which visits Mrs. Leslie put the house-cleaning idea into Helen's head, insinuating it so cleverly that the girl actually thought that it originated with herself.

"Did you ever see anything so untidy?" she exclaimed, as on that occasion they drove homeward. "Harness, cooking-pots, provisions, all in a tangle. Bachelors are such grubby creatures! But really, my dear, he deserves to be comfortable. Couldn't we do something?—hire some one to—"

If she had counted on the girl's grateful enthusiasm, it did not fail her. "Let's do it ourselves!" she exclaimed. "I'd love to!"

So, in Carter's absence, the two descended upon the cabin with soap, pails, and hot water. Mrs. Leslie, the delicate, white-armed woman who kept a girl to do her own work, rolled up her sleeves and fell to work like a charwoman; and it is doubtful if she were ever happier than while thus expending, in service, her reserve of illegal feeling. There was, indeed, something pitiful in her tender energy. When, the cleaning done, she sat demurely mending a rent in Carter's coat, she might have been the young wife of her imaginings.

Her sentimental expression moved Helen to laughter. "You look so domestic!" she tittered. "So soft and contemplative. One would think—"

Mrs. Leslie was too clever for transparent denial. "I don't care," she answered. "I like him. He's awfully dear." And her expressed preference affected Helen—helped to break down the last barriers of caste feeling between herself and Carter. Till then she had always maintained a slight reserve towards him, but when, coming in unexpectedly, he caught them at their labors, she was as free and frank with him as she had ever been with a man of her old set. The change expressed itself in her hand-shake at parting, though it fell far short of Mrs. Leslie's lingering pressure.

In his surprise at the quantity and quality of the latter, Carter may have returned it, or Mrs. Leslie may have mistaken the reaction of her own grip for answer. Anyway, she thought he did, and on the way home plead weariness as an excuse to indulge luxurious contemplations. She fed on his every look, tone, accent, coloring them all with her own feeling, an indulgence for which she would pay later; indeed, she was even then paying, in that it was eating away her weak moral fibre as acid eats a metal, preparing her for greater licenses. At first, however, she was timorous—content with small touches, accidental contacts, the physical sense of nearness when, as often happened, they coaxed him to take them for a drive behind his famous ponies.

But such slight fare could not long suffice for her growing passion. Having observed, outwardly, the laws of social morality only because, so far, they had consorted with inclination; knowing, inwardly, no law but that of her own pleasure, it was only a question of time until she would become desperate enough to balance reputation against indulgence.

This came to pass a couple of months after Helen had opened up school, and would have happened sooner but that even a reputation cannot be given away without a bidder. Not that Carter was ignorant or indifferent to her feeling. Two thousand years have failed to make man completely monogamous and he is never displeased at a pretty woman's preference. A condition had interposed between the fire and the tow. In every man's life there comes a time when, for the moment, he is impervious to the call of illicit passion. A first pure love bucklers him like a shining ægis, and while certain pure eyes looked out upon Carter from earth, air, and sky, wherever his fancy strayed, he would not barter a sigh for the perishable commodity Elinor Leslie offered. Having, however, formed her judgments of men from the weak masculinity about her, she could not realize this. Imagining that he would come at the crook of her finger, she tried to recapture Opportunity.

"Mr. Carter was so kind and considerate of Helen that I think we ought to take him up," she said to her husband one day; and Leslie, whose good-natured stupidity lent itself to every suggestion, readily agreed.

Unfortunately for her scheme, Carter proved unfelicitously blind to his interest—as she saw it. Negatively, he refused to be "taken up," offering good-natured excuses to all of Leslie's invitations. So nothing was left but the occasional opportunities afforded by Helen's week-end visits. And these did not always lend themselves to Mrs. Leslie's purpose. When Molyneux brought her up—as happened half the time—he made full use of his monopoly; while Carter, in his turn, often drove her down to see Jenny in Lone Tree.

To do the young lady justice, she held a fairly even balance between those, her two cavaliers. According to the canons of romance she ought to have fallen so deeply in love with one as to hate the other. Instead she found herself liking them both.

There was, of course, a difference in the quality of her feeling. Strange feminine paradox! she was drawn to Molyneux by the opposite of the qualities on which she based her feeling for Carter. At heart woman is a reformer, and once convinced of his sincerity towards herself, the fact that Molyneux was reputed something of a sinner increased rather than lessened her interest. She experienced the joys of driving the lion in leading-strings, ignoring the danger of the beast turning upon her with rending fangs. Feeling her power, she tried to exercise it for his good, and felt as virtuous over the business as if it were not a form of vanity, and a dangerous one at that. Anyway, she rode and drove with him so much that spring and summer that she practically annihilated Mrs. Leslie's chances of seeing Carter.

That lady could, however, and did observe him in secret. Riding from home while Leslie was busy seeding, she would make a wide détour, keeping the lowlands, and so bring up, unobserved, in a poplar clump that afforded a near view of Carter's fields.

One day will example a score of others. It was, as aforesaid, seeding-time. Stripped of her snowy bodice, the earth lay as some brown virgin, her bosom bared to man's wooing and the kisses of the sun and rain. From her covert Mrs. Leslie could see his ox-team slowly crawling upon the brown fields which, as yet, had known no bearing yoke. Those days love was suggested by everything in nature. The air quivered in passionate lines down the horizon. Warmth, light, love were omnipresent. By every slough the mallard brooded. Overhead the wild goose winged northward to bring forth her kind on the rim of polar seas. Prairie cocks primped and ruffled on every knoll before their admiring hens. To her it seemed that birds and beasts, flesh and fowl were happier than she in their matings. Passionately, with bursting sighs, she strained at her chains, wildly challenging the marriage institution which has slowly evolved from the travail of a thousand generations.

Hers was the old struggle between the flesh and the spirit, the struggle that gave the sexless desert its hermit population. With this difference: Ancestry had bequeathed to her no spirit. She had nothing to pit against the flesh but her own unruly inclination. For her the battle offered no meed of victory in the form of chastity triumphant. The "dice of God were loaded"; she was striving against the record of foolish or vicious fathers. And she played so hard! At times, little heathen in spite of her culture, her eyes looked out upon him from the spring greenery with the tender longing of a mother deer; again they blazed with baffled fires; often she threw herself down in a passion of tears. So, feeding upon its very privations, her distemper waxed until, one June evening, it burst all bounds.

Returning through late gloaming with his weekly mail, Carter came on her holding her horse by the trail. Her voice, low yet vibrant, issued from the gloom.

"I'm afraid I shall have to trouble you for a ride, Mr. Carter; my saddle-girth has burst."

"Your hand is wet. It's blood!" he exclaimed, as he handed her in.

"I fell on a sharp stone. Will you please tie this handkerchief."

Bending to comply, he saw that the wound was clean-cut, and this may have caused him to examine the girth before he threw the saddle on behind. Then he knew—was certain as though he had seen her slash it with the penknife that lay in the scrub near by.

Picking up a stone, he pounded the severed edges on the wheel-tire; pounded them to a frazzle while she looked on, her pupils dilated in the half light, large, soft, black as velvet, intensifying a curious mixture of expectation and content. But if she read consent in the pains he was at with her excuse, alarmed surprise displaced expectation when, climbing in, he drove on without a word.

She glanced up, tentatively, once, twice, a dozen times at the erect figure, but always he stared ahead. Again and again her scarlet lips trembled, but she choked; sound halted on its bitten thresholds. Once she touched his arm, but he drew sharply away and his hand rose and flung beaded sweat from his brow. So, for a tumultuous age it seemed to her, they whirled through the gathering night, rattled on until a slab of light burst through the darkness.

Followed Leslie's voice. "Hullo, Elinor! What's the matter?"

She stiffened—Carter felt her stiffen as in a mortal rigor—but she answered, in level tones: "Oh, nothing much. My saddle-girth burst and Mr. Carter kindly drove me home. Won't you come in? Well—I'm ever so much obliged. Good-night."

Whirling homeward through the soft dusk, the tumult which had confused Carter resolved into its elements, shame, chagrin, wonder, and disgust. Each swayed him in turn, then faded, leaving pity. Flaring up in his cabin, his match revealed only concern on his sunburned face. Taking a packet from under the pillow of his bunk, he unfolded it upon the table, exposing a glove, a ribbon, and some half-dozen hairs that gleamed, threads of gold, under the lamplight. One by one he had gleaned them, picking the first from the back of Helen's coat one day coming out of Lone Tree.

As he leaned over the trove there was no mawkish sentimentality in his look, rather it expressed wonder, wonder at himself. For his life had not always jibed with the canons. To him in their appointed seasons had come the heats of youth; and if now they had merged in the deeper instinct which centres on a single mate, the change had been sub-conscious. The house he had built, the land he tilled, the herds he had gathered about him were all products of this instinct, provision against mating, for the one—when he should find her. Yet, though found, he wondered; wondered at the powerful grip which that small hand had wound into his heart-strings, that those golden threads should be able to bind with the strength of cables.

He did not puzzle long. Presently concern again darkened his countenance, and he murmured, "Poor little woman! poor little thing!"

Could he have seen her just then! Leslie was out talking horse with Molyneux at the stables, so no eye saw her when, in the privacy of her bedroom, she snatched the mask from her soul. At first stupefied, she stared dully at familiar objects until her glance touched a portrait of Helen on the dresser. That fired her passion, started the wheels of torture. Dashing it to the floor, she ground her heel into the smiling face, raving in passionate whispers; then flinging at length on the bed she writhed like a hurt snake, struck her clinched fists into the pillows, bit them, her own hands, soft arms. She agonized under the scorn that belittles hell's fury. Truly, out of her indulgences, her pleasant mental vices, the gods had twisted whips for her scourging!

But if whips, as claimed, are deterrents of physical crimes, they stimulate moral diseases; and whereas, previously, Mrs. Leslie had been merely good-naturedly frivolous, she came from under the lashes a dangerous woman—the more dangerous because there was no outward indication of the inward change. With Helen, whom Molyneux brought up at the next week-end, she was, if anything, kinder in manner, loving her with gentle pats that gave no suggestion of steel claws beneath the velvet. These, however, protruded, when the girl borrowed her horse to pay a visit to Carter.

Mrs. Leslie and Molyneux watched her away from the door. The lady had plead a headache in excuse for staying at home, but her eyes were devoid of weary languor. They had flashed as she averted them from the mended saddle-girth. They glittered as she now turned them on Molyneux.

"Calvert, you amuse me."

"Why?" he asked, flushing.

"Such devotion in that last lingering glance. It was worthy of a boy in a spasm of calf-love rather than the dashing cavalryman who has tried to add my reputation to the dozen that hang at his belt."

Molyneux shrugged denial. "That's not true, Elinor. I'm too good a hunter to stalk the unattainable."

She laughed, bowing. "Do I sit on such high peaks of virtue?"

"Or of indifference. It amounts to the same. Anyway, I saw that there was no chance for me."

Again she laughed. "What significance!"

"Well—I'm not blind, as—Leslie, for instance. I only wonder."

"At what?"

"Your taste."

She made a face at Helen's distant figure. "I might return your thought. After all, Calvert, from our viewpoint, you know, she's only a higher type of native—dreadfully anthropomorphic."

"Exactly," he answered. "And that's why I"—pausing, he substituted an adverb more in accordance with Mrs. Leslie's ironical mood—"like her. She's fresh, sound, and clean of body and mind. Clings to the ideals we chucked overboard a hundred years ago—lives up to them with all the vim and push of her race. She stirs me—"

"As a cocktail does a jaded palate," Mrs. Leslie interposed. "And a good enough reason; it will serve for us both, since you are so frank, Calvert. It is not your fancy I am laughing at, but your diffidence, the morbid respectability with which you wait till it pleases her to give that which you have been accustomed to command from others. It is quite touching.... But why this timidity? Why do you linger?"

"Because—" He paused, feeling it impossible to yield the real reason up to her mockery; to tell that the girl had touched a deeper chord of feeling than had ever been reached by a woman's hand; that she had broken the cynical crust which had been formed by years of association with the sophisticated women of the army set. He threw the onus back on her. "That's rich, Elinor. Here, for months, you have fenced her about; given her steady chaperonage; warned me to tone down to avoid giving offence. Now you ask why? Have you forgotten how you rated me for my violence in pressing her under the mistletoe?"

"Pish!" She contemplated him scornfully. "I only advised caution. And then—" She also paused; then, thrusting reserve to the winds, went on: "And then she hadn't come between me and—my wish. Now she has. And let me tell you, my friend"—she returned to her "cocktail" simile—"that while you linger, inhaling virginal aromas, a strong hand will slip in and drain the glass. Will you stand by and see her sweetness sipped by another? Now, don't strike me."

He looked angry enough to do it, but contented himself with throwing back her question, "Why do you linger?"

"Because I cannot drain my cup"—her lips quivered thirstily—"till yours is out of the way. He has the bad taste to prefer her spotlessness to my—"

"Sophistication?" he supplied.

She nodded. "Thanks. And he will continue to do so until you take her out of the way. So—it is up to you, as the boys say. I think, too, that she suspects that my interest is not altogether platonic, and as a commodity enhances in value as it is desired by others, her liking may be spurred into love. At present she's balanced. Likes you, I know. Better strike while the iron is hot."

"I would if I thought—" he began, then went on, musingly: "But I've sized it up as slow-going. Didn't think she was the kind that can be rushed."

Mrs. Leslie snorted her disdain. "You? With all your experience! To set her on a pinnacle! How long before you men will learn that we would rather be taken down and be hugged. While the saint worships at the shrine the sinner steals the image. I warrant you my big American won't waste any time on his knees. However, I've warned—here comes Fred from the stables."

That was not the end of their talk. It recurred at every opportunity; and by the time Helen returned Molyneux was persuaded against his better judgment that he had gone too easily about his wooing.

"What thou doest, do quickly," she whispered, as he went out to hitch to take Helen home. And as they drove away she gazed long after them from the door.

What was she thinking? Given a woman of firmer texture, one whose acts flowed from steady impulses, in turn the effects of settled character, thought may be guessed. But Mrs. Leslie's light nature veered to every wind of passion. She could not even hate consistently. Was she swayed altogether by revenge, or, as hinted by her talk with Molyneux, was hope beginning to rise from the ashes of despair?

IX

THE DEVIL

If, as said, the devil can quote Scripture for his own purposes, it does not follow that said purposes are always fulfilled.

Molyneux had better have followed his intuition and "gone slowly." But if, in brains and capacity, he towered above the average of his remittance-fellows, the taint of his ancient blood yet showed in a pliability to suggestion, a childish eagerness to snatch unripe fruit. Whereas, by a quiet apology, he had long ago repaired his error in the Christmas games, he must now commit greater foolishness.

Consciously and unconsciously, in varying degrees, Helen aided his blundering. She could not help looking her prettiest. But her delicacies of cream and rose, the tender mouth, the bosom heaving under its lace, did not require the accentuation of coquetry. It was the healthy coquetry of the young animal, to be sure, unconscious, as much as can be. She need not, however, have authorized his gallantries with laugh and smile—would not, had she realized his limitations, his confused morality, subordinance to passion, emotional irresponsibility.

Afterwards she had but a confused notion how the thing came to pass. They laughed, chatted, jested, while the tenderness in his manner bordered more and more on the familiar. He had been telling her of the strange marriage custom of an Afghan tribe and had asked how she would like such a forceful wooing.

"I think," she answered, "that a strain of the primitive inheres in our most cultured women. I'm sure I could never love a man who was not my master."

She spoke thoughtfully, considering the proposition in the abstract; but he, in his blind folly, interpreted concretely. In the sudden lighting of his face she read her mistake. But before she could put out a hand in protest, his arms were about her, his searching lips smothered her cry. She fought wildly, spent her strength in a desperate effort, then capitulated—lay, panting, while he fed on her face, neck, hair, her lips. And it was well she did. Prolonged resistance would only have provoked him to freer license. As it was, mistaking quiescence for acquiescence, he presently held her off that his hot eyes might share the spoil.

She now fully realized her danger. His expression, the glassy look of his eyes filled her with repulsion, but she summoned to her aid all the craft that centuries of dire need have bred in her race. She smiled up in his face, rather a pallid smile, but sufficient for his fooling. A playful hand held him back from another kiss.

"You are very rough," she whispered.

"Consider the provocation," he answered, dodging the hand.

She tried not to shrink. "You upset me," she murmured. "I am quite faint. Is there any water near by?"

She had noticed a slough ahead. Driving into it, he bent over and wet her handkerchief.

"Now if I could only drink."

He stepped ankle-deep into the water. "Out of my hands." But as he stooped, with concave palms, there came a rattle behind him.

Uttering an oath, he sprang—too late. As he waded to dry land she swung the ponies in a wide circle and reined in about fifty yards away. While he looked sheepishly on, she wiped her face with the kerchief, rubbed and scrubbed till the skin shone red where his lips had touched, then tossed the kerchief towards him and drove on.

A prey to remorse, shame, he stood gazing after. All said, a man's ideals are formed by the people about him. A virtuous woman, a leal friend, raise his standard for the race; and just then Molyneux would have given his life to place himself in the friendly relation that obtained between them a half-hour ago.

But he could not. Nor could all of Helen's vigorous rubbing remove the memory of those shameful kisses. Her bitten lips were scarlet when, a quarter-hour later, she rattled up to Carter's shanty; her eyes were heavy with unshed tears.

Now here was a first-class opportunity for him to play the fool. An untimely question, a little idiotic sympathy would have put him in a worse case with her than Molyneux. But though inwardly perturbed, shaking with anxiety, he kept a grip on himself.

"Such reckless driving!" he exclaimed, harking back to her own words on that first drive from Lone Tree. Then solemnly surveying Molyneux's hat, which was perched funnily on the seat beside her, he went on, "Looks like you've lost a passenger."

His twinkle removed the tension. Looking down on the hat, she laughed; and if, a minute later, she cried, the tears that wet his shoulder were not cast against him.

"If you will return the ponies," she said, when her cry was out—she had already told him enough to explain the situation—"I'll stay here till you come back and then you may drive me home—if you will?"

"And I'll find him?" She laughed at his comical accent as he intended she should.

"About three miles back."

"Any message?"

She sensed the menace. "Oh no! If you quarrel, I'll never, never forgive you. Now, please!" She placed her hand on his arm.

"All right," he agreed, and, five minutes later drove off with the Devil pony in leash behind.

From afar Molyneux saw him coming and braced for the encounter, but Carter had gotten himself well in hand. "Miss Morrill," he said, "is real sorry she couldn't hold the ponies. But, Lordy, man, you oughtn't to have gone picking flowers."

"He's lying!" Molyneux thought, but followed the lead. "Yes, it was careless. But, you know, it is always the unexpected that happens."

"You're dead right there."

The significance caused Molyneux to redden; but he tried to carry it off easily. "And I'm much obliged to you, Mr. Carter. Can't I drive you home?"

Turning from cinching his saddle, Carter regarded him steadily. "Obliged to you, sir. I'm a bit particular in my choice of company."

The contempt stung Molyneux to retort: "You are plain-spoken, but I'm told the trait is common in Americans. Fortunately for us outsiders, your women are more complaisant."

It only led him deeper. Giving a last vicious tug at the cinch, Carter vaulted into the saddle. "Yes," he shot back, as he arranged his bridle, "they make a mistake now and then, but it don't take 'em long to find it out." And he galloped away with easy honors.

Reining in at his own door half an hour later, he regarded with astonishment a transformation which had occurred in his absence. Instead of the woman, beautiful in her angry tears, a demure girl came out to meet him. While he was gone she had bathed her red eyes, then, to relieve a headache, had let down her hair and braided it into a plait of solid gold. Thick as Carter's wrist, it hung so low that, obedient to his admiring suggestion, she easily knitted it about her waist.

"You look," he said, "more like school-girl than school-marm."

With that simple coiffure displaying the girlish line of her head and neck, she might, indeed, have easily passed for eighteen. It accentuated a wee tip-tilt of her pretty nose, a leaning to the retroussé that had been the greatest trial of her youth and still caused her occasional qualms. Could she have realized the piquancy it lent to features that, otherwise, had been too regular or have known the sensation it caused her companion as he looked down on it and her eyelashes fluttering up from eyes that were wide and grave with question.

One glance reassured her. His unruffled calm, the ironic humor of his mouth, all expressed his mastership of the late situation. Satisfied, she mounted beside him when he had hitched the ponies and settled in against him with a sigh of relief. Not that she had so easily forgotten her late trouble. The injured droop of her mouth, the serious face moved him to vast sympathy and anger. He longed to smooth the knit brow with kisses, to take her in his arms and soothe her as a little child. For a second time that day her mouth stood in hazard, but, bracing himself against temptation, he tried to wean her from her brooding by ways that were safer if less sweet.

"Any one," he said, twinkling down upon her, "would think you'd lost your best friend—"

"Instead of my worst," she anticipated.

"Glad you put it that way." He nodded his satisfaction. "And since you do, why waste regrets? Jest wipe him clean off your books."

"It is bitter to learn that you have been deceived," she answered. "More bitter to feel yourself misread. Most bitter"—her voice dropped to a whisper—"to learn it in such a shameful way."

He did not say, "I warned you." Only his big brown hand closed on hers with a sympathetic squeeze that almost expelled the pain in her heart. She did not withdraw it; rather she drew in closer, and thus, hand in hand, they rattled south over the vast green prairies which now were all shotten with the iridescence of myriad flowers. The trail wound through seas of daisies, bluebells, white tuft. Slender golden-rod trembled in the breeze; dandelions and tiger-lilies flaunted their golden beauty under turquoise skies. It was, indeed, difficult to remain sad with such company in such surroundings; for not content with mute sympathy, he strove to divert her thought by talk of the animals or plants which they saw or passed, astonished her with his wide knowledge of curious traits in their nature or history. So, gliding from subject to subject, he weaned her from her trouble, and so, by easy stages, came to speaking of himself, modestly introducing the subject with a letter.

It was from the office of the traffic manager of the trunk line acknowledging a bid for tie and trestle contracts for the projected branch through Silver Creek. While Cummings, Hines, and their confrères were fulminating against the railroad pantheon, Carter had ridden over the spruce ranges of the Riding Mountains, had secured options on cutting permits from the provincial government, had driven down the old survey, and then submitted an estimate which caused the construction department of the railway to gasp its astonishment.

The chief engineer even carried the estimate to the traffic manager. "Ties and timbers, this fellow Carter comes within a few thousand feet of old Sawyer's estimate," he said. "Moreover, he is ready to deliver the goods. Gives references to the Bank of America, which is to finance his enterprise. Who is he?"

One would hardly expect the traffic manager to have remembered, but he had; and thus it came about that the postscript of the letter was in his own big sprawl. He regretted the fact that construction had been put off for another year, "but," he added, "I have placed your bid on my own files and shall see that it receives the earliest consideration when we are ready for construction."

Helen exclaimed her satisfaction. "I'm so glad. I never knew that—you could do this kind of work. Why didn't you tell me? I'm so interested. Will it be a large contract?"

Her eyes testified to her words, and as, obedient to her wish, he ran on giving details, they grew larger and more luminous. A touch of awe dwelt in their hazel depths. Feeling always the attraction of his fine physique, respecting his strength of will, clean character, he now commanded her admiration on another score. Was he not proving himself "fit" in the iron struggle of an economic age? And she, delicate bloom, crowning bud of the tree of evolution, being yet subject to the law that, of old, governed the cave maiden in her choice of a mate, felt the full force of this last expression of his power.

As never before, she responded to his thought and feeling. When, after a sudden lurch, he left his supporting arm on the rail across her waist, she did not draw away; nay, she yielded to a luxurious sense of protection and power, leaning in against his shoulder. That day all things had conspired in his favor—even her pique at Molyneux—and now the rapid movement, caressing sweep of the wind, riot of color and sunlight, all helped to influence her judgment in a situation that was rapidly approaching.

It lay, the situation, in a deep pool, ten feet below the bank of Silver Creek. As before noted, Death and the Devil, those lively ponies, were, as Carter put it, "worth watching" any and all the time on the dead level, and the fact that he held a loose line on them running down trail into the valley proved how very, very far he had departed from his usual imperturbable mood. Small wonder, for the hazel glances he had sustained this last hour would have upset the coolest head. But if his condition was perfectly natural, so also was the innate deviltry that caused the ponies to bolt the trail and plunge over the aforesaid bank.

Helen could never tell just how it happened. After two seconds' furious bumping, she felt herself lifted bodily. Followed a crash as they fell. That was the impact of the buggy wheel with Carter's head. The arms loosened as she took the icy plunge, then came a half-minute's suffocating struggle while the current was carrying her out to the shallows. Wet, draggled, she stumbled shoreward; then, as the water cleared out of her eyes, she turned and plunged wildly back. Face downward, Carter was floating over a two-foot shallow and another second would have carried him into a longer and deeper pool.

As for him, returning consciousness brought him sensations of something soft under his splitting head—that was Helen's bosom; of arms about his neck; lips that wildly kissed his and which opened with a glad cry when he moved.

"Oh, I thought you were dead!"

For one blissful moment she allowed him to gaze in at the clear windows of her soul; then remembering the unusual but effective restorative she had used in the case, she flamed out in sudden colors, the banners of discovered love. Never was maid in such a predicament! Was it fair to expect that she would let fall a head that had been damaged in her cause? She could only wait until, having fed his eyes full on her sweet distress, he reached up and pulled her blushing face down upon his own. The sun, the wind, the rippling water alone witnessed her surrender. After a while a grizzled badger peered at them from his hole, pronounced them harmless, and so came forth upon his errands. A colony of gophers laid aside serious business to note, heads askew, loves that differed so little from their own. A robin cried shame upon them from a willow near by. But they were not ashamed. An hour slid by without either thinking of such sub-lunary matters as damaged heads or wet clothing; at the end of which Death and the Devil, having accomplished the complete destruction of the buck-board, came back to look for their master—probably associating him with the evening feed of oats—and fell to cropping the grass along the creek.

Then she spoke, softly, blushing again. "You must think me shameless, but—I did—I really thought you were dead."

"Ain't you glad I'm not?" She never noticed the "ain't," this young lady who had originally sized him as an underbred person.

She did not answer, but he mightily appreciated the sudden tightening of her arms. "But what must you think of me?"

He told all—of his resolution the moment he saw her on the Lone Tree platform; of his hope, fears, dark despair, the hell he had suffered on Molyneux's account. A soft hand cut short this last revelation, and immediately they fell again into one of love's deep silences, an eloquent pause that endured until the westering sun threw long shadows across the creek. Then, rising, he caught the ponies and arranged saddles with blankets and straps from the broken harness, while she looked on with soft attention.

Mounted, they paused and looked back at the stream, ruby red under the dying sun, the clay bank, the bordering willows, then they kissed each other soberly and rode on. Dusk was blanketing the prairies when they drew up at Flynn's cabin, yet it was not too dark for Mrs. Flynn's sharp eyes to pick their secret.

"It's the new school-ma'am ye'll need to be looking for," she told Flynn. "Why? Man, didn't ye see him look at her, an' her that lovely red, her eyes pretty as a mother deer's, an' her voice soft an' cooing as a dove's. Flynn, Flynn! ye've forgotten your own courting."

One fine morning, two months later, Molyneux's drivers spun out of his stable enclosure and rattled south at a pace that did not keep up with their driver's impatience.

These two months had certainly been the unhappiest of his life. A man's opinions, philosophy, must, if they have vitality at all, be formed upon the actions of those about him, upon the phenomena which life presents to his reason. This, however, does not altogether annul the force of those ideals of conduct for himself and others which were learned at his mother's knee. Always they persist. Granted that loose life may smother the plant so that it produces neither fruit nor leafage, yet the germ is there—the assurety that beyond the rotten pale of fast society lies a fair land where purity, chastity, goodness, the virtues one firmly incarnates in the person of mother, sister, or girl friend, do grow and flourish. Under the foulness of the most determined roué lies the ineradicable belief that had Lot sought righteousness among the women of Sodom that wicked city had never been destroyed. One clean, wholesome girl will shake a man's faith in baseness, torture him with a vivid sense of his own backslidings, and now that passion's scales were fallen from his eyes, Molyneux appreciated at their full worth the naïve mixture of innocence and womanly wisdom, the health, strength, and wholesomeness of character that set Helen apart from his light acquaintance.

"Fool! fool!" he had told himself again and again. "She is worthy of a king—if one could be found worthy of her. And you had a fair chance! Oh, you fool!"

Nor had he failed to write her a letter of apology. He had done that in the first agonies of repentance, six weeks ago, and, receiving no answer, had taken the ensuing weeks to screw his courage to the point of asking pardon in person. But now that it was there he was possessed of a wild exhilaration that took no thought of refusal. She could hardly fail to pardon a suppliant for crimes that were instigated by her own beauty, and one so becomingly repentant! Full of the consciousness of his own virtuous intention, it was quite easy for him to credit Helen with the magnanimity that would be its reciprocal feeling; and this once established, himself pardoned in thought, he passed to day-dreams. Her smile, the sweet tilt of her pretty nose, her glory of golden hair, her every physical and mental charm, passed in mental review, beguiling the tedium of the trail till the school-house thrust up over the horizon.

Then his mood changed. Its squat, obtrusive materiality thrust into his consciousness, shattering the filmy substance of his dreams, and as he noticed the closed windows, shut door, doubt replaced elation, depression, the black antithesis of his late mood, settled down upon him.

As he sat staring a voice hailed him. "Been riding ahint of you this half-hour, but you never looked back. Fine haying weather, ain't it?"

Startled, Molyneux turned to find Jed Hines surveying him with an irritating smile. His expression plainly revealed that not only did he know Molyneux's errand, but that he was viewing it under the light of humorous secret knowledge. Restraining an impulse to remodel the expression, he said, nonchalantly as he could: "What is the matter here? School closed?"

Hines nodded. He had all the Canadian's traditional hate of the remittance-man; Molyneux, in especial, he detested, because, perhaps by his superior shrewdness, he gave less cause for contempt than the race in general. That he had paused to speak was proof sufficient that he had unpleasant news. He would, however, take his own time in delivering it—prolong the torture to the limit.

"Midsummer holidays," he laconically answered.

Molyneux ignored his curtness. "Miss Morrill at Glaves's place, do you know?"

Jed's grin widened. "You hain't heard, then?"

"Heard what?"

Jed gazed off and away over the prairies. "No, you won't find her at Glaves's."

How Molyneux longed to spoil the grin. But a deadly anxiety constrained him. "Where is she, then?"

"Nowheres around here."

"Do you know?"

"You bet!" The grin gave place to malignant satisfaction. "Yes, I know—that is, I kin guess, though I wouldn't if I thought it would do you any good. As it won't—Let me see—she was married a week ago by the Roman priest. Jedging by averages, I reckon as you orter find her in Carter's arms."

If he had expected his news to produce a disagreeable impression he was not disappointed, for its visible manifestation landed full in his face, and he dropped flat on his shoulders. Not lacking a certain wolf courage, primitive ferocity of the cornered rat, he sprang up, lunged at Molyneux, and went down a second time. Then he stayed, watching until the other had jumped into his buggy and driven away.

"I never saw the devil!" he muttered, shaking his fist, "but your face, jes' then, came mighty near the preacher's description."

X

FRICTION

Once upon a time a man wrote a book that proved how easily a cultured Eastern girl might fall in love with and marry a Western cow-boy. It was a beautiful story, about people who were beautiful or picturesque according as they were good or bad, but it ended just where, in real life, stories begin. After the manner of fairy tales, the author assured us that the girl and the cow-boy lived happily ever after. Now I wonder if they did?

A year later a big bull-fly thudded at the screen door of Carter's cabin in vain efforts to enter and take toll of Helen's white flesh. By the gentlemen who ordain the calendar, a year is given as a space of time between points that are fixed, immutable as the stars. Sensible folk know better. Years vary—are long or short according to the number, breadth, and depth of the experiences their space covers. This year had marked Helen. She was fuller lipped, rounder, enveloped by the sensuous softness of young wifehood. Sitting at table with her white blouse tucked in at the neck for coolness, she had never looked prettier. But granting these attributes of her changed condition, a keen observer would have missed that gentle brooding, ripe fruit of content which exhales from the perfectly mated woman. As, time and again, her glance touched Carter, sitting opposite, she would sigh, ever so gently, yet sigh; the direction of her glance told also that her discontent was associated in some way with his shirt-sleeves, rolled to the elbow, and his original methods in the use of his knife and fork. Grasping these implements within an inch of their points, he certainly secured a mighty leverage, yet undoubtedly lost in grace what he secured in power, besides pre-empting more elbow-room than could be accorded to one person at a dinner-party.

"Tut! tut!" she observed, timidly, after tentative observation.

"Oh, shore! There I go again!" His quick answer and the celerity with which his hands crawfished back to the handles told of many corrections; yet five minutes later they had stolen out once more to the old familiar grip.

She sighed again. It was not that she had wished to hobble her frontiersman, to harness him to the conventions. Her feeling flowed from a larger source. Believing him big of brain and soul as of body, she would have had him perfect in small things as he was great in large, that her ideal should be so filled and rounded out as to leave no room for sighs. To this end she had, from the first, attempted small polishments, which he had received with whimsical good-humor that took no thought of how vital the matter was with her. Had he realized this he might have made a determined effort instead of a slack practice which flows from easy complaisance; but, not realizing it, he made no headway. In these last months she had gained insight into that philosophical axiom: It is easier to make over a dozen lovers than one husband. Unlike the girl in the aforesaid beautiful story, she had begun reconstruction at the wrong side of the knot.

Not that this unwelcome truth would or could, of itself, have affected her love in quality or quantity. At times she agonized remorsefully over her tendency to criticism, tutoring herself to look only for the large things of character. Again, when, of nights, she would slip to his arms for a delightful hour before retiring, she would wonder at herself: every last vestige of discontent evaporated with her murmured sigh of perfect happiness. These were great moments for both. Lying so, she would look up in his bronzed face and listen while, in his big way, he talked and planned, unrolling the scroll of their future—listen patiently until he became too absorbed, when she would interrupt with some kittenish trick to draw him back into the delightful present. Pretty little tricks, loving little tricks, that one would never have dreamed lay hidden under the exterior of the staid young school-ma'am.

But these, after all, were moods, and there had been other and real cause of discontent. First, the railway gods had again broken faith with the settlers; and every cent that Carter could raise or borrow had been required to meet rents on his timber concessions. Though not in actual want, they had had to trim expenses, reduce their living to the settler scale. Having all of a pretty woman's natural love of finery, Helen could see no way of restoring her depleted wardrobe. Moreover, there was the choring, washing, milking of cows, feeding of calves, inseparable from pioneer settler life—a burden that was not a whit the less toilsome because self-assumed.

Carter would have spared her all that—was, indeed, angry when, coming in late one night, he caught her toiling at the milking. "I didn't know it was so hard," she pleaded, holding up her swollen wrists. "But I couldn't bear to see you come in, tired, at dark, then go on with the chores while I sat in the house."

He had made her promise not to do it again. But she did, and his protests, vigorous at first, slackened, until, finally, the choring had come to be regarded as hers as a matter of course.

Even the climate was against her, conspiring against her peace of body if not of mind. The previous winter had been the bitterest in a score of years, temperatures ranging from forty below zero, with a yard of snow on the level, fifty-foot drifts in the bluffs, and hundred-mile winds to drive cold and snow through the thickest of log walls. For days she had sat in her furs by the red-hot stove, while the blizzard roared about the cabin, walling it in fleecy snows—sat listening to the agonized shout of wind-blown trees, the squeal of poplar brake, the smash of rent branches, the thunderous storm voice that was spaced only by distant crashes as the lords of the forest went down to stiff ends. North, south, east, west had veered these terrible winds, freighting always their inexhaustible snows. The trails were blown from earth's face; solitary blotch, their cabin rose like a reef from an ocean of whiteness; and they, castaways, were practically divorced for days, and sometimes weeks, from all communication with their kind. Hardly less terrible had been the calms, the vast frozen silences as of interplanetary space that followed the blizzard, ruling the snowy steppes. They filled her with a terrifying sense of the illimitable, those silences, vivid as though she, a lonely soul, were travelling through vast voids of time and space. She shrank under them, afraid.

Followed a mosquito year in a mosquito country. Fattened by the heavy snows, stagnant sloughs held water till late in the summer and so bred the pests by myriads of myriads. Of nights the tortured air whined of them. By day their cattle hung about the corrals, cropping the grass down to the dust, or if they did wander farther afield, came galloping madly back to the smudges. For two months any kind of travel had been impossible; clouds of the pests would settle on hands, face, neck quicker than one could wipe them off. Milking and choring had to be done under cover of a thick reek to an accompaniment of lashing tails, with frequent and irritating catastrophes in the way of overturned pails. The acrid odor of smoke clung to everything—hair, clothing, flesh; the cabin was little better than a smoke-house until the heat had mitigated the pests while adding its own discomforts.

It was a dull life enough for men whose tasks were broken by periodical trips to market; it was martyrdom for housefast women. Always around the shanty mourned the eternal winds of the plains. Wind! Wind! Wind in varying quantity, from a breeze to a blizzard, but always wind. Its melancholy dirge left a haunting in the eyes of men. Its ceaseless moan prepared many a plainswoman for the madhouse.

With bright hope at heart to gild the future, she might have endured both discomfort and drudgery, but the postponement of construction work on the branch line had killed immediate hope. With dismay she realized a certain coarsening of body and mind, a thickening of finger-joints, roughness of skin, an attenuation where milking had turned the plump flesh of her arms into gaunt muscle. And to her the thought of that far-off summer day recurred with increasing frequency—would this equilibration with environment end by leaving her peer to the scrawny, flat-chested women of the settlements? She who had excelled in the small arts—music, painting, modelling in wax and clay? Her past, in such seasons of depression, seemed now as that of some other girl—a girl who had worn pretty dresses and been admired and petted by father, brother, and friends. Of all her gifts, her voice, a sweet contralto, was only left her; and of late it had naturally attuned itself to her sadder moods. So she had felt her life shrink and grow narrow, until looking down the vista of frozen winters, baking summers, they seemed, those weary years, to draw to a dull, hard point, the wind-swept acre with its solitary grave. Conditions had certainly combined to produce in her a subconscious discontent that might develop into open revolt against her lot at the touch of obscure and apparently insignificant cause; they reinforced and made dangerous the irritation caused by his little gaucheries.

As aforesaid, her dark moods alternated with spasms of remorse—fits of melting tenderness in which she condemned herself for her secret criticism of him. Peeping through their bedroom window only the preceding night, the moon had caught her bending over his sleep. The tender light absorbed his tan, softened the strong features without taking from their mobility; deeply shading the hollows, it gave his whole face an air of clear-cut refinement. Its wonderful alchemy foreshadowed the possibilities of this life, lying so quiescent beneath her eyes. For a long hour she held the vigil, while thought threw flitting shadows athwart her face; then, stooping, she softly kissed him under cover of her clouding hair.

It was a momentous caress, registering as it did her acceptance of a lowered ideal, marking her realization of the friction which follows all marriages and is inevitable to such as hers. Yet it had not removed the cause; that remained. It is easier far to overlook a great sin than a daily gaucherie, to rise to vast calamity than to brook the petty irritations which mar and make life ugly. The cause remained, surely! To see her quiet and pensive at table this day, who would have dreamed that the morrow would see the thin edge of the wedge driven in between them?

"There's to be a picnic in the grove by Flynn's lake to-morrow, Nell," he said, as he rose from dinner. "Let's take a day off?"

"All right!" she agreed; and the kiss with which she rewarded the prospect of even such a slight break in the dulness of life may easily be regarded as the first tap on the wedge.

How quickly personality responds to atmosphere! When, next morning, Helen climbed into the buck-board beside Carter, she was frankly happy as a woman can be in the knowledge that she is looking fit for the occasion. Cool, clean, and fresh in a billowy white dress of her own laundering, excitement and Carter's admiring glances intensified her naturally delicate color. As they rattled over the yellow miles, doubt and misgiving vanished under the spell of present happiness. She returned him eyes that were lovingly shy as those of their honeymoon; was subdued, sedate, sober, or burst out in small trills of song as the mood seized her. Not until she was actually upon the picnic-ground did she realize the real nature of this, her first appearance at a public function since her marriage.

A clear sky and a breeze that set yellow waves chasing one another over the far horizon had brought out the settlers in a fifty-mile circle—even the remittance-men, who had been wont to spell amusement in the red letters of the London alphabet, were there. Like most country picnics, it was pseudo-religious in character, with a humorous speech from the minister figuring as the greatest attraction. Amusements ran from baseball and children's games for youth to love-making in corners by shamefaced couples.

Leaving Carter to put up his team, Helen carried their basket over to where a crowd of officious matrons were arranging tables under the trees, and so gained first knowledge of what was in store for her. The latest bride, she was the centre of attraction, target for glances. Approaching a group of loutish youths, she felt their stares, flushed under the smothered laugh which greeted her sudden change of direction. Girls were just as unmannerly. Ceasing their own rough flirtations, they gathered in giggling groups to observe and comment on one who had already achieved that which they contemplated.

Nor was she more comfortable among the matrons. While she was teaching school, the halo of education had set her apart and above them, but now they wished her to understand that her marriage had brought her down to their level. They plied her with coarse congratulations, embarrassed her with jokes and prophecies that were broader than suggestive. Time and again she looked, for rescue, at Carter, but he was talking railroad politics in an interested group, did not join her till lunch was served, and afterwards was hauled away to play in a baseball game—married men versus single.

So she had but a small respite. With his departure the women renewed their onslaughts, as though determined to beat down her personal reserve and reave her nature of its inmost secrets. No subject was too sacred for their joking—herself, her husband, the intimacies of their lives. There was no satiating their burning curiosity; her timid cheeks, monosyllabic answers, served only to whet their sharp tongues. Shocked, weary, cheeks burning with shame, she sat on, not daring to go in search of Carter and so brave again the fire of eyes, until, midway of the afternoon, she looked up to see Molyneux and Mrs. Leslie approaching.

It was the crowning of her humiliation. With the exception of a duty-call on her return to Silver Creek, and which she had not returned, it was the first time that Helen had seen Mrs. Leslie for more than a year. "As you think best," Carter had said, when she had debated the advisability of renewing the friendship. "You wouldn't care to meet Molyneux again, would you? He's sure to be there." And, departing from his usual sane judgment, he made no further explanations, said nothing of his drive in the dusk with the love-sick woman, knowledge of which would surely have killed Helen's friendly feeling. Lacking that knowledge, she had pined for the one woman who could give her the social and intellectual companionship her nature craved, pined with an intensity of feeling that was only equalled by her present desire to avoid a meeting.

If they would only pass without seeing her, she prayed, bowing her head in shame. But Mrs. Leslie had been watching from afar. "Poor little thing!" she had exclaimed to Molyneux. "Alone among those harpies! Come, let's rescue her!" And whatever her motive, the kiss she bestowed on the blushing girl was warm and natural. "Why, Helen," she said, "whatever are you doing here? Come along with us."

"We are going to organize a race for three-year-old tots, Mrs. Carter," Molyneux explained. "We really need your assistance."

His deferential air as he stood bareheaded before her, the languid correctness of his manner, even the aristocratic English drawl, pierced that atmosphere of vulgarity like a breath of clean air. The easy insolence with which he ignored the settler women was as balm to her wounded pride. She recovered her poise; her drooping personality revived.

"I should like to—very much," she answered, adding, a little timidly, "But I was waiting for my husband."

"Dutiful child," Mrs. Leslie laughed. "Well, he is so busy running up the batting average for the Benedicts that he has forgotten you. Come along!"

"We might go round—" Helen began, tentatively,

She would have finished "his way," but, glancing over at the game, she saw that in his interest he really had forgotten her. "Very well!" she substituted; and, rising, she strolled off between the two, passing within a few yards of Carter. Busy with his game, he did not see her, nor would have known what company she was keeping but for Shinn, a near neighbor of Jed Hines and fellow of his kidney.

"Your wife," he remarked, "seems to be enjy-ing herself." His sneer caused a titter among both players and spectators, but before it subsided Carter came quickly back. Throwing a careless glance after Helen, "That's more'n I can say for yourn."

The titter swelled to a roar that caused Helen to look back. Mrs. Shinn, poor drudge, had not strayed twenty feet from her cook-stove in as many squalid years, as every one knew well. Grinning evilly, Shinn subsided, while, after carelessly waving his hand at Helen, Carter returned to his batting. If he disapproved of her escort, not a lift of a line betrayed the fact to curious eyes—not even when he drove around and found her still with Molyneux and Mrs. Leslie.

They were both silent on the homeward drive. In Helen's mind Carter was associated with the coarse and sickening humiliations of the day. As never before, she felt the enormous suction from below; she battled against the feeling with the desperation of the swimmer who feels the whirlpool clutching at his heels.

Her mood was defiant, and if, just then, he had taken her to task for her truancy, she would have flamed up in open revolt. But he did not.

"You are tired," he said, very gently, when the ponies had run them far out from the press of teams and rigs. She appreciated that; yet when he slipped an arm about her waist she moved restlessly within its circle.

The wedge was well entered.

XI

THE FROST

One noon, a week after the picnic, Carter stood and looked out over his hundred-acre field of wheat from his doorway. A golden carpet, sprigged with the dark green of willow bluffs, it ran back into a black, environing circle of distant woodland. As a vagrant zephyr touched it into life, Helen remarked, looking over his shoulder:

"The serrated ears in restless movement give it the exact appearance of woven gold. Isn't it beautiful!"

The dramatist loves to make great events follow in rapid sequence. It is the need of his art. But in life the tragic mixes with the commonplace. Even Lady Macbeth must have, on occasion, joked or talked scandal with her handmaidens. And as these two looked out over the wheat, there was naught to indicate the shadow which lay between them.

"Finest stand I ever saw," Carter answered. "Five-foot straw, well headed, plump in the grain; ought to grade Number One Extra Hard. We'll make on that wheat, little girl."

"Do you really think so?"

He turned quickly.

"Those women at the picnic—-" She explained her dubious tone. "They said you were foolish to put in so much wheat. 'What kind of a darn fool is your husband, anyway?' that Mrs. MacCloud asked me. 'He kain't never draw all that wheat to Lone Tree. Take him a month to make two trips. 'Tain't no use to raise grain without a railroad. We folks hain't put in more'n enough for bread an' seed.'"

He laughed, as much at her clever mimicry as at Mrs. MacCloud's frankness. "If they had put in more I wouldn't have sown any. Could have bought it cheaper from them. But as they didn't— Do you know that every man in this settlement makes at least one trip a month to Lone Tree during the winter? Well, they do, and they'll be glad to make expenses freighting in my wheat. With grain at seventy a bushel, a load will bring thirty dollars at the cars, and I can hire all the teams I want at three a trip."

"Why"—his foresight caused her a little gasp—"how clever! I should never have thought of that."

His eyes twinkled his appreciation of her wifely admiration, and, taking her chin between his hands, he looked down into her eyes. "What's more, when that wheat money comes in, you an' me 'll jest run down to Winnipeg an' turn loose on the dry-goods stores."

It was the first hint of his knowledge of the turning, dyeing, the shifts she had made with her wardrobe, and he made a winning. The knowledge that he had seen and understood caused the wedge to tremble and almost fall out.

"Can we—afford it?" she asked, willing now to go without a thing.

"Don't have to afford necessities. Breaks me up to see you going shy of things."

For the last three days he had bestowed the parting kiss. This morning he received it—a warm one at that—and as he strode off stableward, her burst of singing echoed his cheerful whistle. She was quite happy the next few days planning for their descent on the shops. She sang at her work—warbling that was natural as that of the little bird which prinks and plumes for its mate in the morning sunlight. Reflecting her happy mood, Carter was humorously cheerful—so pleased and satisfied that she stared when, one evening, he came in, gloomy and depressed.

His black mood had come out of the east with a moaning wind that now herded leaden clouds over dun prairies. For one day rain pelted down, then, veering north, the bitter wind blew hard for a second day. That evening it died, and a pale sun swung down a cloudless sky to a colorless horizon. Under its cold light the wheat stood erect, motionless, devoid of its usual sighing life. A hush, portentous of change, brooded over all.

From their doorway Helen heard Hines, three miles away, rating his dog. "Hain't no more gumption than an Englishman, durn you! Sick 'em, now!" followed the maligned animal's bark and the thunder of scurrying hoofs.

"How clear and calm it is!" she commented, as Carter came up from the stables.

He glanced at the thermometer beside the door. "Too clear. I'm afraid it is all off with the wheat."

"Why? What do you mean?"

He turned from her astonished eyes. "Frost."

"Frost? You are surely mistaken? See how sunny it is!"

Shaking his head, he laid a forefinger on the thermometer. "Six o'clock, and the silver is down to thirty-five."

At dusk it had lowered another degree, and throughout the northland a hundred thousand farmers were watching, with Carter, its slow recession. On the fertile wheat plains of southern Manitoba, through the vast gloom of the Dakotas, to the uttermost limits of Minnesota, the mercury focussed the interest of half a million trembling souls whose fire-fly lanterns dusted the continental gloom. Prayers, women's tears, men's agonized curses marked its decline, that, like an etching tool, graved deep lines on haggard faces in Chicago, Liverpool, and London far away.

At thirty-two Carter lit the smudges of wet straw, and simultaneously the vast spread of night flamed out in smoke and fire. "I don't go much on it," he told Helen. "But some believe in it, and I ain't agoing to miss a chance."

He was right. Pale thief, the frost stole in under the reek and breathed his cold breath on the wheat. Holding his instrument, at ten o'clock, in the thickest smoke, Carter saw that it registered twenty-seven. Five degrees of frost and the cold of dawn still to come! Raising the glass, he dashed it to pieces at his feet.

It was done. Reverberating through the land, the smash of his glass typified the shattering of innumerable fortunes, the crash of business houses. The pistol-shot that wound up the affairs of some desperate gambler was but one echo. Surging wildly, the calamity would affect far more than the growers of wheat. Iron-workers, miners, operatives in a hundred branches of industry would shiver under the cold breath of the frost. For now the farmer would buy less cotton, the operative pay more for his flour, the miner earn a scantier wage.

True, the balance swings ever even. This year ryots of India, Argentine peons, Egyptian fellaheen would reap where they had not sown, gather where they had not strawed. Another year a Russian blight, Nile drouth, hot wind of Argentine would swing prices in favor of the northland. But in this was small comfort for the stricken people.

"All gone!" Carter exclaimed at midnight. "The feathers are frozen offen them bonnets."

Helen sensed the bitterness under his lightness. "Never mind, dear," she comforted. "I really don't care. You did your best."

He had done his best! To a strong man the phrase stabs, signifying the victory of conditions. He winced, as from an offered blow. It was the last drop in his cup, the signal of his defeat. It marked the destruction of this his last plan for her. He had not, in the beginning, intended that she should ever set her hand to drudgery. His love was to come between her and all that was sordid, squalid. If the railroad contract had materialized, she should have had a little home in Winnipeg where she might enjoy the advantages of her early life. He had planned for a servant—two, if she could use them—and all that he asked in return was that she should bring beauty into his life, adorn his home, sweeten his days with the aroma of her delicate presence. In this small castle of Spain he had installed his beauty of the sweet mouth, golden hair, pretty profile; and now, out of his own disappointment, he read reproach in the hazel eyes that looked out from the ruins.

Long after her sleep-breathing freighted the dusk of their bedroom, he lay gazing wide-eyed into the black future. A sudden light would have shown his eyes blank, expressionless, for his spirit was afar, questing for other material with which to rebuild his castle. In thought he was travelling Silver Creek, from its headwaters in the timber limits to its source where it flowed into the mighty Assiniboin. It was a small stream—too small to drive logs except for a month on the snow waters. But with a dam here—another there—a third on the flats—rough structures of logs with a stone and gravel filling, yet sufficient to conserve the falling waters! The drive could then be sent down from dam to dam! During the night he travelled every yard of the stream, placing his dams, and at dawn rose, content in his eyes.

Slipping quietly from the house, he saddled the Devil and led him quietly by while Helen still slept, and an hour later rode up to Bender's cabin. The Cougar was also there, and from dubious head-waggings the two relapsed into thoughtful acquiescence as Carter unfolded his plans.

"She'll go down like an eel on ice!" Bender enthusiastically agreed. "All you want now is backing. Funny, ain't it, that nobody ever thought o' that before? Say"—he regarded Carter with open admiration—"you're particular hell when it comes to thinking. If I'd a headpiece like yourn—"

"You hain't," the Cougar coldly interrupted, "so don't waste no time telling us what you might ha' done. Get down to business. I know a man"—he thoughtfully surveyed Carter—"that financed half a dozen big lumbering contrac's on the Superior construction work. He'll sire anything that looks like ten per cent. an' this of yourn will sure turn fifty. Come inside an' I'll write you a letter."

What of the Cougar's inexperience with the pen, the morning was well on when Carter rode back to his cabin. If Helen had looked closely she might have seen the new resolution that inhered in his smile, but she had been concerned with her own reflections. Somehow, things had not appeared this morning as they did last night. Crude daylight shows events, like tired faces, in all their haggardness, and their complexion was not improved by the steam from her wash-tub. Time and again she had paused to survey her hands, creased and wrinkled by cooking in hot water. Her bare arms recalled her first party-dress, and set her again in the sweet past. Beside it the present seemed infinitely hopeless, squalid, dreary. As she rubbed and scrubbed on her wash-board, life resolved itself into an endless procession of wash-days, and tears had mingled with the sweat that fell from her face to her bosom.

Noting her red eyes, Carter was tempted to disclose his new hope, but remembered the failure of previous plans and refrained. As yet nothing was certain. He would not expose her to the risk of another disappointment. He rightly interpreted her sigh when he told her that he would have to go down to Winnipeg on business about the timber limits, and his heart smote him when, looking back, he saw her standing in the door. Dejection resided in the parting wave of her hand, utter hopelessness.

That lonely figure in the log doorway stuck in his consciousness throughout his negotiations, causing him to hustle matters in a way that simply scandalized the Cougar's man, a banker of the old school. Yet his hurry served rather than hurt his cause. While the very novelty of it made him gasp, the banker was impressed. In private he informed his moneyed partners that such a chance and such a man rarely came together. "He's a hustler, and the profit is there," he said, in consultation. "A big profit. We can cut lumber ten per cent under the railroad price and yet clear twenty-five cents on the dollar."

That settled it. Half a day later Carter was on his homeward way, bearing with him the power to draw on Winnipeg or Montreal for moneys necessary for supplies, men, and teams. Running home from Lone Tree, he whiled away the miles with thoughts of Helen's joy. He pictured her, radiant, flushed, listening to his news, and, quickening to the thought, he raced, full gallop, the last mile up to his door.

His face burst into sunshine as, in response to his call, he heard her cross the floor. Then his smile died, and he stared at Mrs. Leslie. With the exception of an occasional glimpse as they met and passed on trail, it was the first he had seen of her since the soft summer evening when she laid illicit love at his feet. But no hint of that bitter memory inhered in her greeting.

"How are you, Mr. Carter?" she cried, in her old, gay way. "I think you are the meanest man in Silver Creek. Married a year, and neither you nor Helen have set foot in our house. You are a regular Blue beard. But you needn't think that you can hide from us forever. I just pocketed my pride, ignored your snub, and made my third call. Yes"—she emphatically nodded her pretty head—"the third, sir. But I forgive you; come in and have some tea. Helen is down at the stables hunting eggs to beat up a cake."

Covering his vexation with some light answer, he drove on to the stables, the life and light gone out of him, his face the heaviest that Helen had ever seen. "She called," she answered his abrupt question, "and I have to entertain her." Then, piqued by his coldness, she went on: "For matter of that, I do not see why you should try to cut me off from her companionship! She is the only woman I care for in the settlements!"

If he had only told her! But causes light as the falling of a leaf are sufficient to deflect the entire current of a life, and it was perfectly natural that, in his bitter disappointment, he also should give way to a feeling of pique. The reason trembled to his lips, and there paused, stayed by the resentment in her eyes.

"As you see fit," he answered. "Now I have to drive over to see Bender, on business."

"Won't you wait for some tea?"

"No. And don't wait supper. I may be late."

Hurt, she watched him drive away; then, as he suddenly reined in, she dashed the tears from her eyes. "Here's a letter for you," he called. "Got it from the office as I came by."

He nodded in answer to Mrs. Leslie's cheery wave as he rolled by the cabin. It was more than cold, yet, sitting chin on hands, that lady smiled cheerfully when Helen came up from the stable. "Don't apologize, my dear," she laughed. "Men are such fools. Always doing something to hurt their own happiness. Just banish that rueful expression and read your letter."

"What's the matter?" The question was called forth by Helen's sudden cry of dismay. She glanced at the wedding-cards that Helen offered. "Hum! Old flame of yours, eh? These regrets will assail one."

However, she knit her straight brows over the enclosure. In part, it ran: "We were so pleased to hear of your wonderful marriage from your auntie Crandall. It was just like you to announce the bare fact, but she told us all about it. A railroad king! Just fancy! He must be nice or our delicate Helen would never consent to bury herself in the wilderness. Do you know I have been just dying to see him, and now I shall, for we are passing through your country on our way to the Orient. Which is your station?" Followed sixteen pages of questions, description of trousseau, and other feminine matters which Helen reserved for future consumption.

Could she have laid tongue, just then, on Auntie Crandall, that lady had surely regretted her enlargements on Helen's modest statement of her husband's prospects. Lacking that easement of feeling, she cried. This visit capped her misery, brought the long record of misfortune, discomfort, disaster to a fitting climax.

"Poor child!" Mrs. Leslie patted her shoulder. "But why did you tell her such crammers? It was the good auntie?" She tilted her nose. "For the honor of the family, we lie, eh? Heaven help us! Your friend—what's her name?—Mrs. Ravell—she's rich, of course? Thought so—couldn't be otherwise—trust the malignant fates for that. Well—" She glanced meditatively about the cabin. Instead of lime-washing the logs, settler fashion, Helen had left them to darken with age, ornamenting them with a pair of magnificent moose horns and other woodland trophies. Tanned bear-skins covered a big lounge that ran across one end; buffalo robes and other skins took the place of mats on the floor. Mrs. Leslie nodded approval. "Not bad. Quite wild-westy, in fact. You will simply have to live up to it. You have given up your town-house for the present and are rusticating while your hubby directs some of his splendid schemes for the regeneration of this section—"

"Oh!" Helen burst in. "I couldn't say that. It would be—"

"Lying? Nonsense, child! Have you a town-house? No! Well, what are you kicking about?" Mrs. Leslie's descent to the vernacular was as forcible as confusing. Before Helen had time to differentiate between the status involved by "not having a town-house" and giving one up her temptress ran on. "That is it. You are rusticating. Now, I can lend you some of my things—glass, china, and so on. When do they arrive?" She consulted the letter. "Hooray! Your husband will be gone all next week, and they come—let me see: one, two, three—next Friday. Couldn't be better."

Helen blushed under her meaning glance. "No, no! It would be wicked."

"Why not?" Mrs. Leslie laughed merrily. "They just dropped in and there's no time to send for him. Quite simple."

"Do you think I'm ashamed of him?" Helen asked, flushing.

Mrs. Leslie trimmed her sails to the squall. "Certainly not. He's a dear. You know I always liked him. But—if your friends were to make a long stay it would be different. You couldn't hide his light under a bushel. But a two days' visit? What could they learn of him in that time? The real him? They would no more than gather his departures from the conventional. I wouldn't expose him to unfriendly criticism. Frankly, I wouldn't, dear, at the cost of a little fib!"

The flush faded, yet Helen shook her head.

"As you will." Rising, the little cynic shrugged as she drew on her riding-gloves. "But at least take a day to think it over."

"No!" Helen shook vigorous denial. "I shall tell him to-night."

She was perfectly sincere in her intention, and if Carter had returned his usual good-natured self she would certainly have told him. But Mrs. Leslie's presence had angered him and destroyed his native judgment. He remembered that this was the outcome of Helen's invitation to Mrs. Leslie at the picnic, and his heart swelled at the thought that she should, of her own volition, go back to friends whom she knew that he despised. He felt the folly of his brooding, even applied strong language to himself for being many kinds of a fool. But his reasonable intention to open his budget of good news on his return was never carried out because of the coldness of her reception. Nervous from her own news, piqued by his curt leave-taking, she served his supper in silence or answered his few remarks in monosyllables. Nothing was said that night, and he retired without offering the usual kiss.

There he offended greatly. Her woman's unreason would, for that, accept no excuse. So when, after working off his own mood next morning, he came in to breakfast, he found her still the same. Really offended, she served him, as at the previous meal, in silence, and as, afterwards, she went about her work, her lashes veiled her eyes, her lips pouting.

It was their first real quarrel, and the very strangeness, novelty of her mood made it charming. But when, under urge of sudden tenderness, he tried to encircle her waist, she drew away, and, afflicted with a sense of injustice, he did not try again. There again he made a mistake. Justice has no concern with love. It is empirical, knows no law but its own. She wanted to be taken and kissed in spite of herself, as have all women on similar occasions, from the cave maidens down.

It so happened that she was in the bedroom when he left the house, and she did not see that he had taken with him the bundle she had packed the preceding night. She still intended to mention the letter. Indeed, as she heard his step on the threshold, she thought, "He'll stop at the door for his clothes."

But he did not; and hurrying out at the sound of scurrying hoofs, she was just in time to see him vanish behind a poplar bluff. She called, called, and called, then sat down and wept, the more miserable because of a secret, guilty feeling of relief.

XII

THE BREAK

For three days a brown smoke had hovered over the black line of distant spruce. It was far away, fifty miles at least. Yet anxious eyes turned constantly its way until, the evening of the fourth day, the omen faded. Then a sigh of relief passed over the settlements. "Back-fired itself out among the lakes," the settlers told one another. Then, being recovered from their scare, they invidiously reflected on the Indian agent who permitted his wards to start fires to scare out the deer. Nor did the fact that the agent was blameless in the matter take from the satisfaction accruing from their grumblings.

That evening five persons sat with Helen at supper, for she had invited the Leslies and Danvers, Molyneux's farm pupil, to meet her guests. For her this meal was the culmination of days of anxious planning. To set out the table she and Mrs. Leslie had ransacked their respective establishments, and she blushed when Kate Ravell enthused over the result.

"What beautiful china!" she exclaimed, picking up one of Mrs. Leslie's Wedgwood cups. "We have nothing like this." Then, glancing at the white napery, crystal, and silver, she said, "Who would think that we were two thousand miles from civilization?"

It was, indeed, hard to realize. Obedient to Mrs. Leslie's orders, her husband and Danvers had fished—albeit with reluctance—forgotten dress-suits from bottom deeps of leather portmanteaus. She herself looked her prettiest in a gown of rich black lace superimposed on some white material, and, carrying her imperative generosity to the limit, she had forced one of her own dinner-dresses upon Helen. Of a filmy, delicate blue, it brought out the young wife's golden beauty. From the low corsage her slender throat and delicate face rose like a pink lily from a violet calyx. Usually she wore her redundant hair coiled in a thick braid around the crown of her head for comfort; but to-night it was done upon her neck in a loose figure of eight that revealed its mass and sheen. Looking from Mrs. Leslie to Helen, Kate Ravell had secretly congratulated herself upon having, despite her husband's protest, slipped one of her own pretty dresses into his valise.

His laugh, a wholesome peal that accorded with his good-humored face, followed her remark. "She didn't think that at Lone Tree," he said. "A lumber-wagon was the best the liveryman could do for us in the way of conveyance, and when Kate asked if he hadn't a carriage he looked astonished and scratched his head.

"'Ain't but one in town,' he answered, 'an' it belongs to Doc Ellis. 'Tain't been used sence he druv the small-pox case down to the Brandon pest-house. I 'low he'd let you have it.'"

His wife echoed his laugh. "It was a little rough, but this—it's great!" She pointed out through the open door over the wheat, golden under the setting sun, to the dark green and yellow of woods and prairies. "You are to be envied, Nell. Your house is so artistic. The life must be ideal—"

Inwardly, Mrs. Leslie snorted: "Humph! If she could see her milking, up to ankles in mud on rainy days—or feeding those filthy calves?" Aloud, she said, "Unfortunately, Helen isn't here very often—spends most of her time in Winnipeg." Ignoring Helen's pleading look, she ran on, "Did you store your things, my dear, or let the house furnished?"

Thus entrapped, Helen could only answer that her goods were stored, and her embarrassment deepened when Mrs. Leslie continued: "It is such a pity, Mrs. Ravell, that you could not have met Mr. Carter! He is such a dear fellow, so quiet and refined. Fred"—Leslie's grin faded under her frown—"what is the matter?"

"A crumb, my dear," he apologized. "Excuse me, please."

"We shall have to return you to the nursery." Her glance returned to Kate Ravell, and, oblivious of the entreaty in Helen's eyes, she ran on in praise of Carter. He was so reserved! The reserve of strength that goes with good-nature! Resourceful—and so she flowed on with her panegyrics. She was not altogether insincere. Helen caught herself blushing with pleasure whenever, leaving her fictions, Mrs. Leslie touched on some sterling quality. Twice she was startled to hear put into words subtilties that she herself had only felt, and on each occasion she narrowly watched Mrs. Leslie, an adumbration of suspicion forming in her mind. But each time it was removed by absurd praise of hypothetical qualities or virtues Carter did not possess. So Mrs. Leslie praised and teased.

What influenced her? It is hard to answer a question that inheres in the complexities of such a frivolous yet passionate nature. Naturally good-natured, she would help Helen out in all things that did not cross her own purposes. The sequel proves that she had not yet got Carter out of her hot blood. Given which two things, her action, teasings, and panegyrics are at least understandable.

"We are very sorry," Kate Ravell said when Mrs. Leslie gave pause. "We did wish to see him. Do you suppose, Helen, that we might if we stayed another day?"

It was more than possible, but Ravell relieved Helen of a sudden deadly fear. "Can't do it, my dear. We are tied down by schedule. Should miss the Japan steamer and have to lay over in Vancouver two weeks."

Kate sighed. Newly married, she had all of a young wife's desire to see her girl friend happy as herself; nor would aught but ocular demonstration satisfy the longing. She was expressing the hope that Carter and Helen should some day visit them in their Eastern home, when she suddenly paused, staring out-doors. Following her glance, Mrs. Leslie saw a man, a big fellow in lumberman's shirt and overalls. The garments were burned in several places, so that blackened skin showed through. His eyes were bloodshot, his face sooty, which accounted for Mrs. Leslie's not recognizing him at once.

"Mr. Carter!" she exclaimed, after a second look.

Helen was pouring tea, but she sprang up at the name, spilling a cup of boiling tea over her wrist. She did not feel the scald. Breathless, she stood, a hand pressed against her bosom, until Mrs. Leslie, the always ready, burst into merry laughter.

"What a blackamoor! How you frightened us! Where have you been?"

Coming up from the stables, Carter had heard voices, laughter, the tinkle of teacups, and the sound had afflicted him with something of the feeling that assails the wanderer whose returning ears give him sounds of revelry in the old homestead. He had suffered, during his absence, remorse for his own obstinacy mingling in equal proportions with the pain of Helen's coldness. Absence had been rendered endurable by the thought that it would make reconciliation the easier; but now that he was returned, ready to give and ask forgiveness, to pour his good news into her sympathetic ear, he found her merrymaking.

His was a hard position. Between himself, rough, ragged, dirty, and these well-groomed men in evening dress, there could be no more startling contrast. He felt it. The table, with its snowy napery, gleaming appointments, was foreign to his sight as the décolleté dresses, the white arms and necks. Yet his natural imperturbability stood him bravely in place of sophistication.

"Been fighting fire," he answered, with his usual deliberation. "Suppose I do look pretty fierce."

His glance moved inquiringly from the Ravells to his wife.

But she still stood, eyes wide, breath issuing in light gasps from her parted lips. For her also the moment was full of bitterness. There was no time for thought. She only felt—a composite feeling compounded of the misgiving, discontent, humiliation, disappointment, disillusionment of the last few months. It all culminated in that moment, and with it mixed deep shame, remorse for her conduct. Also she had regret on another score. If she had told him, he would at least have been prepared, have achieved a presentable appearance. Now she was taken in her sin! Foul with smoke, soot, the dirt and grime of labor, he was facing her guests.

Starting, she realized that they were waiting, puzzled, for introductions—that is, Kate was puzzled. Ravell was busily employed taking admiring note of Carter's splendid inches. Poor Helen! She might have been easier in her mind could she have sensed the friendly feeling that inhered in Ravell's cordial grip.

"We were just deploring the fact that we were not to meet you, Mr. Carter," he said. "We felt sure of finding you home after the notice we gave Mrs. Carter. We were really quite jealous of your affairs, but now we shall go away satisfied."

Given a duller man, the word "notice" supplied the possibilities of an unpleasant situation. But though he instantly remembered the letter, Carter gave no sign till he and Helen had passed into their bedroom. Even then he abstained from direct allusions.

"Friends of yourn?" he questioned, as she set out clean clothing.

"Kate is an old school-fellow. Wait; I'll get you clean towels." She bustled about, hiding her nervousness from his gray inquisition. "They are on their honey-moon. Going to the Orient—Japan, China, and the island countries. They stayed off a couple of days to see us."

"To see you," he corrected.

She colored. Her glance fluttered away from his grave eyes. She hurried again into speech. "Wait, dear! I'll get you some warm water."

He refused the service, he who had loved to take anything from her hands. "Thanks. I think the lake fits my case. Give me the towels and I'll change down there after my swim."

The meal was finished, and she, with the others, had carried her chair outside before he came swinging back from the lake. He was wearing the store clothes of her misgivings, but the ugly cut could not hide the magnificent sweep of his limbs. She thrilled despite her misery. As she rose to get his dinner, Mrs. Leslie also jumped up.

"Poor man, you must be famished!" she exclaimed. "No, Helen, you are tired. Stay here and entertain the men. Mrs. Ravell and I will wait on Mr. Carter. And you, Mr. Danvers, may act as cookee."

Thus saved from an uncomfortable téte-à-téte, Helen suffered a greater misery than his accusing presence. While chatting with Ned Ravell, her ears were strained to catch the conversation going on inside. She listened for Carter's homely locutions, shivering as she pictured his primitive table manners. As a burst of laughter followed his murmured bass, she wondered whether they were laughing with or at him.

She might have been easy, for the laugh was on Danvers. As yet that young gentleman was still in the throes of the sporting fever which invariably assails Englishmen new to the frontier. Any day he might be seen wriggling snakelike on the flat of his belly through mud towards some wary duck, and an enthusiastic eulogium on the shooting qualities of a new Greener gun had drawn from Carter the story of Danvers' first kill.

"Prairie chicken's mighty good eating an' easy shooting," he remarked, with a sly look at Kate Ravell. "But nothing would satisfy his soaring ambitions but duck. Duck for his, sirree! an' he blazed away till the firmament hereabouts was powder-marked and riddled. Burned up at least three tons of powder before he got my duck."

"Your duck?" Danvers protested. "Just hear him, Mrs. Leslie. It was a wild duck that I shot down here by the lake."

Carter chuckled and went on with his teasing. "I came near being called as a witness to that cruel murder, for I was back-setting the thirty acres down by the lake when I heard a shot an' a yell. I read it that he'd got himself, an' was jes' going after the remains, when up he comes on a hungry lope, gun in one hand and a mallard in the other. The bird was that mussed up its own mother couldn't have told it from a cocoanut door-mat. Looked like it had made foolish faces at a Gatling; yet he tells me that he gets the unfortunate animal at eighty yards on the wing."

"You know how close that old gun of mine used to shoot," Danvers interrupted. "It was choke-bored, Mrs. Ravell. At eighty-yards it would put every shot inside of a three-foot circle."

"The feather marking looked sort of familiar to me," Carter went calmly on. "An' he admits, on cross-examination, that he murders this bird in front of my cabin."

"What of it?" Danvers eagerly put in. "Wild ducks light any old place."

"But it jes' happens that the confiding critter has raised her brood in the sedges there, being encouraged an' incited thereto by my wife, who throws it bread an' other pickings. Taking Danvers' gun-barrel for some new kind of worm, when he pokes it through the sedge she sails right up and is examining the boring thereof, when, bang! she's blown into a railroad disaster."

"Don't believe him, Mrs. Ravell," Danvers pleaded. "It was a wild duck, and I shot it flying."

"So if the new gun's what you say it is," the tormentor finished, "you'd better to practise on prairie chicken an' don't be misled by Mrs. Leslie's hens."

"As though I couldn't tell a hen from a prairie chicken!"

Carter joined in the laugh which Danvers' indignant remonstrance drew from the women, yet under the laugh, beneath his humorous indifference, lay a sad heart. "She knew they were coming! She didn't tell me!" Down by the lake he had reasoned the situation out to its cruel conclusion—"She's ashamed of me!" How it hurt! Yet the flick on the raw served him well in that it set him on his mettle, nerved him to carry off the situation.

He did not try to transcend his limitations, to clog himself with unfamiliar restrictions of speech or manners. But within those limitations he did his best, and did it so well that neither woman was conscious of social difference. He showed none of the bashfulness which might be expected from a frontiersman sitting for the first time at table with fashionable women in dinner-gowns. On the contrary, he admired the pretty dresses, the white arms, the hands that handled the teacups so gracefully; and when he spoke the matter so eclipsed the manner that it is doubtful whether Kate Ravell noticed a single locution. His shrewd common-sense, quaint humor, the quickness with which he grasped a new point of view, and the freshness of his own impressed her with his strong personality. Pleased and amused, she had no time to notice grammatical lapses or small table gaucheries that had irritated Helen by constant repetition.

"He's delightful," she told her husband, in a conjugal aside.

In the conversation which ensued after they joined the others outside, Carter also took no mean part. Of things he knew, and these ranged over subjects that were the more interesting because unfamiliar to the town-bred folks, he spoke entertainingly; and on those foreign to his experience he preserved silence. On every common topic his opinion was sound, wholesome. His keen wit punctured several fallacies. The quaint respect of his manner to the women served him as well with the men.

"Big brain," Ravell told his wife in that conference which all married folk have held since the first pair retired to their bedroom under the stars at the forks of the Euphrates. "That fellow will go far."

"So gentle and kind," Kate added. "I think Helen is lucky. Those English people are nice," she went on, musingly; "but if I were Helen I'd keep an eye on Mrs. Leslie."

"Yes," she answered his surprised look, nodding vigorously. "She is in love with Mr. Carter. How do I know?" She sniffed. "Didn't I see her eyes—the opportunities she made to touch him while handing him things at supper? Helen is safe, though, so long as she treats him properly. He doesn't care for Mrs. Leslie."

He shook his head reprovingly. "You shouldn't make snap judgments, Kate."

Had he witnessed a little scene that occurred just before the Leslies drove away! Good-byes had been said, and Helen had gone in-doors with her guests. Danvers, who was riding, had galloped away. Then, at the last moment, Leslie remembered that he had left his halters at the stable. While he ran back Carter stood beside the rig. Brilliant northern moonlight showed him Mrs. Leslie's eyes, dark, dilated, but he ignored their knowledge till she spoke.

"I wouldn't have done it."

"Done what?"

His stoicism could not hide the sudden flash of pain. She saw it writhe over his face like the quivering of molten lead ere his features set in stern immobility.

"It is very chivalrous of you." She smiled bitterly. "But why wear a mask with me?"

"You have the advantage of me, ma'am," he stiffly answered, and moved round to the ponies' heads.

Leslie was now returning, but she spoke again, quickly, eagerly, with the concentration of passion. "It is always the way! The more we spurn you the hotter your love, and—" She paused, then, hearing her husband's foot-fall, whispered: "Vice versa. Remember! I wouldn't have done it!"

After their departing rattle had died, Carter threw himself on the grass before the house and lay, head on clasped hands, staring up at the moon; and Helen, who was using unnecessary time making a temporary bed, paused and looked out from the open door. The dark figure loomed stern and still as the marble effigy of some crusader. There was something awful in his silence; the soft moonlight quivered around and about him, seemed a sorrowful emanation. Frightened, remorseful, she sat locking and unlocking her fingers. What was he thinking?

Part of his thought was easy to divine. It would be common to any man in his situation—the hurt pride, jealous pain, misgiving, unhappiness, but beyond these was an unknown quantity, the product of his own peculiar individuality. His keen intellect had already analyzed the cause of her shame. He was rough, crude, unpolished! Any man might also have reached that conclusion. It was in the synthesis, the upbuilding of thought from that conclusion, that he branched from the common. He was humble enough in acknowledging his defects. Yet his natural wit showed him that humility would not serve in these premises. Forgiveness for the crime against his personality would not remove the cause of the offence. Far-sighted, he saw down the vista of years his and her love slowly dying of the same similar offences and causes. That, at least, should never be! He had reached a decision before she came creeping out in her night-dress.

"Aren't you coming to bed, dear?"

He sensed the remorse, sorrow, pity in her voice, but these were not the feelings to move his resolution. Pity! It is the anodyne, the peaceful end of love. Rising, he stretched his great arms and turned towards the stables.

"Where are you going?" she called, sharply, under the urge of sudden fear.

"To turn in on the hay."

She ran and caught his arm, and turned her pale face up to his. "Why? I have made our bed on the couch. Won't you come in?"

"No!"

"Why?" she reiterated. "Oh, why?"

"Because it is shame to live together when love has fled."

She clasped his arm with both hands. "Oh, don't say that! How can you say it? Who says I do not love you?"

"Yourself." His weary, hopeless tone brought her tears. "In love there is no shame, an' you was ashamed of me."

"I did mean to tell you." Desperate, she caught his neck. How valuable this love was becoming, now she felt it slipping from her! "I did! But you went away without saying good-bye."

"There was opportunity, plenty. You could have sent for me."

His sternness set her trembling. "Then—I thought—I thought—they were only to be here for one day. Such a short visit. I thought they might misjudge—I didn't want to expose you to hostile criticism."

"You've said it. Love knows no fear. Good-night."

"Oh!—please—don't!" she called after him, as he strode away. Pity, woman's weakness, the conservative instinct that makes against broken ties, these were all behind her cry, and his keen sensibility instantly detected them. He closed the stable door.

According to the canons of romance, it would have been very proper for that jarring echo to have unstoppered the fountains of her love and all things would have come to a proper ending. But, somehow, it did not. After a burst of crying into her lonely pillow, she lay and permitted her mind to hark back over her married life. Hardship, squalor, suffering, misfortune passed in review till she gained back to the days when Molyneux had also paid her court. What share had anger and pique in affecting her decision? Angry pride was, just then, ready to yield them the larger proportion. Later came softer memories. She was troubled as she thought of his generous kindness. Under the thought affection, if not love, revived, and conscience permitted no sleep until she promised to beg forgiveness.

However, circumstance robbed her of the opportunity. Before the Ravells retired, Carter had said good-bye, as he intended to start back for the woods before sunrise. "You needn't to get up, either," he had told her. "I'll take breakfast with Bender." But now she promised herself that she would rise, get him a hot meal, and then make her peace. But at dawn she was awakened by his wheels, and, running to the door, she was just in time to see him go by. She would have called only, as the cry trembled to her lips, his words of the night before recurred to memory—"Marriage without love is shame!" Suddenly conscious of her night-gear, she shrank as a young girl would from the eye of a stranger, and the chance was gone.

"I'll tell him when he returns," she murmured, blushing.

But he did not return; and two days later Bender and Jenny Hines drove up to the door.

In the neatly dressed girl, with hair done on top of her head, it was difficult, indeed, to recognize the forlorn creature whom Bender had picked up on that night trail. Though she was still small—a legacy from her drudging years—she had filled and rounded out into a becoming plumpness. Her pale eyes had deepened, were full of sparkle and color. Two years ago she would have been deemed incapable of the smile she turned on Helen.

"I'm so glad to see you, Mrs. Carter; an' I'm to stay with you all winter while your husband's up at the camp. The doctor didn't want to let me go," she said, not noting Helen's surprise, "an' he wouldn't to any one but you."

"The camp? What camp?"

It was Jenny's turn to stare. As for Bender, he gaped, while his colors rivalled those of a cooked beet. Sweating under her questions, he looked off and away to escape the spectacle of her white misery as he explained Carter's new enterprise and its glorious possibilities. He finished with an attempt at comfort.

"I ain't surprised that he didn't tell you. I allow he was going to spring it on you all hatched and full-fledged. Me an' Jenny here was real stupid to give it away. Might just as well have said as she'd come on a little visit. I allow he'll be hopping mad at the pair of us. An' now I'll have to be going after the Cougar. He'll do the chores till we kin get you a hired man."

If the fiction eased the situation, it deceived neither her nor them. Having, a week later, delivered the new hired man, a strong young Swede, Bender delivered his real opinion with dubious head-shakings while carting the Cougar away. "Don't it beat hell, Cougar? Him that straight an' good, her that sweet an' purty, yet they don't hitch. It's discouraging."

"Well," the cynic grunted, "take warning."

Bender eyed him wrathfully. "Now what in hell do you mean?"

But he blushed under the Cougar's meaning glance.

"I reckon he'll drop in on his way up," Bender had assured Helen. But he did not. She yet allowed herself to hope—hoped on while the weeks drew into months, each of which brought a check for household expenses. Soon the snows blanketed the prairies; heavy frost vied with the cold at her heart; and he had not come. Jenny's reticence kept the truth from leaking out; but such things may not be hid, and about Christmas-time it was whispered through the settlements that Carter had left his wife.

XIII

THE CAMP

That was a hard winter. From five feet of snow the settlements thrust up, grim, ugly blotches on the whiteness. And it was very cold. Once the spirit dropped down, down, down to seventy-two below zero—one hundred and four degrees of frost. Fifty was normal, forty, rather warm. Also it stormed, and when the blizzard cut loose, earth, air, or sky was not merged in blanched chaos.

Nestling snugly in the heart of the spruce, Carter's camp, however, was free of the blizzard. Let the forest heave to upper air-currents, tossing skeleton branches with eerie creakings, yet the gangs worked in comfort, cutting and hauling logs, while outside a hundred-mile wind might be herding the drifts.

By New Year's his work was well in hand. Eight million feet of logs lay on the ice, filling Silver Creek bankful like a black flood for a long half-mile. Not that this had been accomplished without friction. Such jettison of humanity as drifts to a lumber-camp does not shake down to work in a day. From earth's four corners a gallows crew of Swedes, French, Russians, Irish, Canadians, Yankees drifted in, and for one month thereafter internecine war raged in the bunk-houses. Then, having bit, gouged, and kicked itself into some sort of a social status, the camp concentrated upon the boss.

The choppers, strangers to him, soon took his measure. A swift answer to a mutinous glance, an order quietly drawled, and the relation was duly fixed. But it was different with the teamsters. They, with their teams, were all drawn from the settlements and knew him personally or by report. Even Hines had condescended to accept three dollars a day and board at the hand of his enemy. But than this no man can greater offend against his neighbors—to rise superior in the common struggle for existence. From them he obtained no credit for the initiative which had conjured the camp out of nothing. Now that it was in full swing, each man felt that he could have done the trick himself. A man may have no honor in his own country; so, as always was, always will be, they, the weak, snarled at him, the strong carrying their envious spite to the length of trying to kill the goose which was laying the golden egg. Though the money earned this winter would make an easy summer, they struck at the source of supply—wasted his fodder, tipped over his sleds, cast logs off to lighten their loads, manifested their jealousy in a hundred mean ways.

The matter of the fodder he easily corrected. Discovering the teams one evening bedded to their bellies with his choicest hay, he sent for Bender, who expressed himself profanely over the waste.

"If this keeps up we'll be out of hay an' a job in another month," Carter said. "What's got into them?"

"Search me," the giant foreman answered. "They know a heap better. Pure malice, I reckon."

"Got a good man in your gang?"

"Big Hans, the loader. He's licked every man in his outfit."

"Well, put him in charge of the stables, with fifty cents a day raise."

"Don't need the raise," Bender suggested. "He'd sooner fight than eat."

"Oh, give it to him."

Events justified the expenditure. At the end of a week it were, indeed, difficult to locate a feature of Big Hans's face—to distinguish nose from cheek or discover his mouth. But beyond this uncertainty of visage there was nothing undecided about Hans. He had worked steadily through the teamsters and come out on top. The waste stopped.

The derelict logs and loads were not so easily settled. Once, sometimes twice, a month business called Carter to Winnipeg, and, though Bender ruled the camp with an iron fist, one pair of eyes cannot keep tab on fifty teamsters. Driving in one evening, Carter counted fifteen cast-off loads between the dumps and the skidways. The last lay within three hundred yards of the skids, where a halloo would have brought the Cougar—loading boss—and a dozen men to the teamster's aid.

That was the last straw. Through gray obscurity of snowy dusk Carter stared at the dark mass as though it incarnated the mulish obstinacy which dogged his enterprise. Perhaps it did, to him, for he muttered: "I'm real sorry for you. Must have troubled you some to make back to the stables. Guess you wasn't late for supper."

Vexed, indignant, he drove slowly by the skidways, where the sleds stood loaded for the morning trip. Enormous affairs, built on his own plans, fourteen feet across the bunks, they were loaded squarely with four tiers of logs, then ran up to a single log. In the gloom they loomed like hay-stacks, and a stranger to the woods would have sworn that no single team could start one. But they ran on rounded runners over iced tracks, and Carter knew that they were not overloaded.

"No kick there," he muttered.

Farther on a rise in the trail gave him a view of the camp across a wide slough: a jumble of log buildings that shouldered one another over the inequalities of a narrow, open strip between slough and forest. Under the rising moon the sod roofs, flat and snow-clad, gleamed faintly. Patches of yellow, frosted windows blotched the mass of the walls. Beyond, dark spruce towered against the sky-line. It spread, that gloomy mantle of spruce, illimitable as night itself, northward to the frozen circle, its vast expanse unbroken by other centre of warmth and light. Solitary splash of life, the camp emphasized the profundities of environing space, accentuated their loneliness.

Reining in, Carter gazed thoughtfully at this, the work of his hands. The clear air gave him many voices. He could hear Big Hans swearing quaintly in the stables. A teamster sang on his way to the cook-house. An oblong of brighter yellow flashed out of a mass. That was the cook-house door opening to admit the singer. Came a murmur and clatter of dishes; then light and sound vanished. Suddenly, far off, a long howl troubled the silence. Wild, mournful, tremulous, it was emblematic of his problem. Here, a hundred miles beyond the stretch of the law's longest finger, the law of the wolf pack still obtained—only the strong hand could rule.

The howl also signalled his arrival at a conclusion. "They're at supper," he muttered. "I'll tackle them there an' now."

First he went to the office, a rough log-hut which he shared with Bender. The giant lay, smoking, in his bunk, but he sprang up at Carter's news. "An' I busted the head of the Russian on'y yesterday for pitching off a load! Who's at the bottom of it? Now you've got me. Michigan Red's as mean as any. Jes' this morning he busted two whiffle-trees running, an' I happened along jes' in time to save the third. Of course, his runners was froze down hard, an' him snapping his heavy team like all get out.

"'From your looks,' I says to him, 'I'd have allowed you'd sense enough to loosen your bobs!' He on'y grinned. 'Clean forgotten, boss. Kick that hinter bunker, will you?' That man," Bender finished, "has gall enough to fix out a right smart tannery."

Carter frowned. The man, a red-haired, red-bearded fellow, with a greenishly pale face and cold, bleak eyes, had come in from the wheat settlements about the Prairie Portage, driving a huge team of blacks. The one, a stallion, rose sixteen and a half hands to the crest of his swelling shoulder. Reputed a man-killer, he wore an iron muzzle in stable or out. His mate, a rat-tailed mare, equally big, differed only in the insignia of wickedness, wearing a kicking-strap in harness, a log-chain in the stable. Man and team were well mated.

"If he'd make his pick on me!" Bender growled on, "'twould have been pie-easy. I'd have smashed him one, an' you could have handed out his walking-papers. But no! It's you he's laying for. 'Your boss ain't big enough to do it,' he says, when I tell him that there'll be other things than busted whiffle-trees if he don't look out. 'You're a privileged character till I'm through with him.' An' that's just the way of it. He'll swallow all I kin give him while waiting for you."

Carter's nod confirmed Bender's reasoning. No one else could play his hand in this game of men. The giant had deferred to that unwritten law of the woods which reads that every man must win his own battles. "Know anything of him?" he asked.

"Cougar ran acrost him once in Michigan. Don't lay no stress on his character, but says he's mighty good with his hands."

"Well, come along to the cook-house."

As they opened the cook-house door a hundred men looked up from the three tables which ran the length of the long log-hut. These bristled with tinware, and between them and the stove three cookees ran back and forth with smoking platters of potatoes, beans, and bacon. At the upper end a reflector lamp shed a bright light over the cook and his pots; but tables were dimly lighted by candles stuck upright at intervals in their own grease. Their feeble flicker threw red shirts and dark, hairy faces into Rembrandt shadow. Hot, oily, flushed from fast and heavy eating, intensely animal, they peered through the reek of steaming food at Carter.

'"I won't keep you a minute," he answered the resentment which his interruption had called to all the faces. "I jes' want to say that too many logs have been dumped by the trail of late. Now if any teamster thinks that the loaders are stacking it on him, he can report to the foreman, who'll see him righted. But if, after this—"

"More beans!" A laugh followed the harsh interruption. The faces turned to Michigan Red. When the others paused he had continued eating, and now, his greenish face aglow with insolence, he was holding an empty platter out to the nearest cookee.

It was a difficult situation. There was no mistaking his intent, yet the interruption was timed so cunningly as to leave no actual cause of offence. Behind Carter, Bender bristled with rage, ready to sweep casuistical distinctions aside with his fist. Malignantly curious, the faces turned back to Carter.

He waited quietly till the red teamster was served; paused even then, for, as the latter fell to his eating, shovelling beans into his mouth with knife loaded the length of the blade, Carter experienced an uncomfortable twinge of memory. The squared elbows, nimble knife, bent head grossly caricatured himself in the first days of his marriage, and vividly recalled Helen's gentle tutelage. For a second he saw himself with her eyes, then pride thrust away the vision.

"After this"—he began where he had left off—"any teamster who dumps a load without permission or good cause will be docked time and charged for his board."

"More pork!" It was the red teamster again. Resting an elbow on the table while he held out the plate behind him, he permitted his bleak glance to wander along the grins till it brought up on Carter.

Choking with anger, Bender stepped, but Carter laid a hand on his arm while he spoke to the cook. "This man has a tape-worm. Send him the pot."

Blunt and to the point, the answer exactly suited lumberman primitive humor. As the door closed behind them Bender's chuckles echoed the men's roaring laugh. "Fixed him that time," he commented. "But he come back right smart."

"Can't come too soon. It all helps to fill in."

Bender sensed the sadness in his tone, and the big heart of him was troubled. These months past he had seen Carter pile task on task, seeking an anodyne for unhappiness in ceaseless toil. Every night the office lights burned unholy hours. Waking this particular night, long after twelve, Bender saw that Carter was still at his desk.

"Time you hired a book-keeper," he remonstrated. "Trail you are travelling ends in the 'sylum."

"Book-keeper couldn't do this work."

"No?" Bender sat up. "What's the brand?"

"Figuring—grading contrac's, bridges, trestles, timbering."

"For what?"

"A railroad."

Bender snorted. "Shore! You ain't surely calculating on the C.P.'s building the branch?"

"No."

The monosyllable discouraged further questioning, but Bender stuck to his main objection. "Well, if you keep this gait you'll railroad yourself into the graveyard. It is two now; at five you'll be out with the loaders."

"Correct."

The giant straightened up in his bunk. "Good God, man! Don't you never sleep?"

"I'll sleep to-morrow night. Now, shut up!"

Growling, Bender subsided, and long after he had slid again into the land of dreams, Carter stared at the opposite wall with eyes that gave him neither the bales, boxes, ranged along its length, nor the shirts, socks, overalls, and other lumbermen's supplies on the rough shelving. He saw only Helen's flower face blossoming out of the blackness of the far corner.

The replica of himself that he had seen that night in Michigan Red was but the climax of similar, if milder, experiences. Naturally enough, his Winnipeg trips had brought him in contact with people of more or less refinement. He met them at hotels, or in the parlors of his business acquaintances when, as sometimes happened, they invited him to dinner. Such circumstances had simply forced him to set a guard on his speech and manners—to imitate those about him. There had been nothing slavish in his imitation—no subtraction from the force of his personality. It was rather the grafting of the strong, wild plant with the fruit of hot-house culture. It inhered in a dawning realization that manners, courtesy, social customs were based on consideration for others' happiness, besides being pleasant of themselves.

Not that he was ready to admit the fact as sufficient excuse for Helen's treatment of himself. Hurt pride forbade. "She didn't give me a chance," he murmured. "I'd have come to it—in time. She was ashamed."

Yet each concession to social custom became an argument for her, and was turned against him in the nightly conflict between pride, passion, love, and reason. Often love would nearly win. While her face smiled from the corner, love would whisper: "She is yours. Six hours' ride will take you to her."

But pride always answered, "Wait till she sends for you." And he would turn again to his figuring.

For pride had enlisted ambition in its aid. Long ago his clear sight had shown him the need of a competing railroad, and gradually a scheme had grown upon him. What man had done, man could do. If a great trunk road could develop from the imagination of one man, a transverse line that should strike south and find an outlet on the American border could hatch from the brain of another. He would build it himself. Already he had broached the matter to his financial backers, and they had given it favorable consideration—more, were interesting other capitalists in the project. So, in camp, on trail, his every spare moment was given to the working out of construction estimates.

Only once was his resolution shaken. From Lone Tree the camp "tote" trail slid due northeast, passing the settlements a half-dozen miles to the east. Save on this one occasion, when the need of men and teams caused him to take the other, he always used the "tote" trail. And even this time he did not dally in the settlements. Having advertised his need at the Assiniboin mission, Flynn's, and the post-office, he headed up for the camp as dusk blanketed the prairies. Dark brought him to his own forks, where, reining in, he gazed long at a yellow blotch on the night, his own kitchen light. A five-minute trot would put him with her! Love urged go! Pride said nay! And while they battled his ponies shivered in the bitter wind. He waited, waited, waited. Which would have won out will never be known, for presently a cutter dashed out of the gloom, swung round on his trail, and, as he turned out to let it by, he caught voices, Helen's and Mrs. Leslie's, in lively chatter.

Leaning over, he lashed his ponies, raced them into the camp.

After that he turned with renewed assiduity to his figures. Still, they are dry things, matters of intellect, useless for the alleviation of feeling. One emotion requires another for its cure, and the trouble with Michigan Red promised more forgetfulness than could be obtained from the most intricate calculations. That is why he had said, "He can't come back too soon."

He quickened at the thought of the coming struggle. In himself the red teamster embodied the envy, spite, disaffection which, from the first, had clogged Carter's enterprise. He materialized the vexatious forces, impalpable things that Carter had been fighting, and he felt the relief which comes to the man who at last drives a mysterious enemy out to the open.

XIV

THE RED TEAMSTER

As Bender prophesied, Michigan Red came back "right smartly."

The following Sunday was one of those rare winter days when the mercury crawls out of its ball sufficiently to register a point or two. At noon the silver column indicated only four below zero, and, accustomed to sterner temperatures, the men lolled about the camp bare-headed and shirt-sleeved. One hardy group was running a poker game on a blanket under the sunny lea of a bunkhouse; the younger men, choppers and teamsters, skylarked about the camp essaying feats of strength: some tossed the caber, others put the shot, a third squad startled the forest with the platoon fire of a whip-cracking contest. Standing in his doorway, the cook, autocrat of the camp, remarked patronizingly on the latter performance.

"Pretty fair," he judicially observed, as one young fellow raised the echoes—"pretty fair, Carrots, but Sliver there has you beat. Needn't to look so cocky, though, Sliver," he qualified his praise, "or I'll call up Michigan to teach you how to crack a whip."

"Oh, shucks! I ain't scared o' him," Sliver grinned. Then, rising to his slim height, he writhed body and arm and let forth a veritable feu de joie.

"You would, would you?" the cook warned. "Here, Red!" he called to the gamblers. "Get up an' give this kid a lesson."

"You go plumb to—" The location was drowned by Sliver's second volley.

"Oh, come, Red!" the cook urged. "This kid makes me tired."

The red teamster went on playing, and would, no doubt, have indefinitely continued the game but that, looking up to curse the importunate cook, he saw the stable roustabout interestedly watching the whip-crackers. A man in years, the latter was a child in intellect, simple to the point of half-wittedness. Picking him up, starving, in Winnipeg, Carter had brought him up to the camp early in the winter, and ever since he had served as a butt for the camp's jokes.

Michigan rose. "Lend me your whip, Carrots!"

"Now you'll see!" the cook confidently affirmed, as the long lash writhed about Michigan's head. Exploding, it sent a trail of echoes coursing through the forest. As is the pop of a pistol to the roar of a cannon, so was his volley compared to that of Sliver. Then, to prove himself in accuracy, Michigan snapped a fly from the cook's bare arm.

"A trifle close," he exclaimed, rubbing the spot. "Do it ag'in, Red, an' I cut out your Sunday pudding."

Grinning, Michigan swung again, turned, as the lash writhed in mid-air, and cracked it explosively within an inch of the roustabout's ear. "Stan' still, you son of a gun!" he swore, as the poor simpleton flinched. "Keep him in, boys. Stan' still, or I'll take it clean off nex' crack.... Now we'll play you've a fly on the tip of your nose."

The play was too realistic, drawing a spot of blood. Yelling with pain, the roustabout swore, begged, pleaded piteously to be let alone. But a circle of grinning teamsters hedged him in on all sides save where the red teamster stood with his whip. Man, in the aggregate, is always cruel. Let a few hundred blameless citizens, fathers of families, husbands, brothers, be gathered together and flicked with passion's whip, and you have a mob equal to the barbarities of Caligula. And these men were raw, wild as the woods. Shoving the simpleton back whenever he tried to break, they stood grinning while Michigan cut cracking circles about his head. Sometimes his hair moved under the wind of the lash; sometimes it grazed his nose. There was no telling where it would explode. He could not dodge it. Trying, the whip drew blood from his neck.

"Stan' still, then!" the red teamster answered his yell of pain. "I ain't responsible for your cavortings."

"Spoiling Red's aim!" the cook admonished, severely. "I never seed your like!"

"Now open your mouth wide," the tormentor went on. "I'm agoin' to put the tip in your mouth without techin' your lips—if you don't move. Open wide!"

But the man's small wits were now completely gone. He opened his mouth obediently, then, uttering a scream, a raucous, animal cry, he sprang at his tormentor. But a dozen hands seized and dragged him back.

"Hold him, boys! I'll skin the tip of his nose for that."

As Michigan swung his whip the roustabout sent forth scream on scream. Foam gathered on his lips. Terror had driven him insane.

"No, no!" the cook remonstrated. "That's enough, Red—that's enough!"

Unheeding, the teamster took aim, swung, then—another lash tangled in his. Yelling with the sudden pain of a twisted wrist, he swung round on Carter. Unobserved, he had run across from his office, snatched up Sliver's whip, tangled Michigan's lash, and jerked it over his shoulder.

"Boys"—he now faced the flushed crowd—"I don't allow to mix up with your fun, but what do you call this?"

One glance at the bloody weal on the roustabout's neck and the brutal mob resolved into its individual components, each a unit of sorrow for its share in the torture.

"Jest a poor fool at that." Carter laid his hand on the simpleton's shoulder.

"Shore, shore! Yes!" the cook agreed. "It's too bad. We didn't go to do that. No. We jest calculated to have a little fun, an' carried it a leetle too far."

"That's so! That's so!" Carrots, Smith, and Sliver all seconded the cook, all voicing repentant public opinion.

"No, Red didn't go to do that," the cook continued. "He moved. Red didn't mean it; did you, Red?"

After that one yell of pain the red teamster's eyes had glued to a handspike which lay near by. But the useless wrist checked the impulse, and he stood, sullenly noting changed opinion.

"Is this a Sunday-school?" he answered, sneering. "Or mebbe a Young Folks' Christian Endeavor? Sliver, what's the golden text?"

"Oh, shore, Red!" Sliver remonstrated.

"It's this." Carter looked round the group. "Any man who lays a hand on this poor lad again gets his time." His glance fixed on Michigan Red.

The red teamster shrugged. His chance had gone by, and he was acute enough to recognize the fact. Not that he lacked courage or strength to try it out, man for man—bite, gouge, kick, in the brutal fashion of the lumber woods. Taken by surprise, he had lost his vantage, and now saw that his adversary had cleverly ranged against him an adverse opinion.

"It's not him I'm laying for," he growled. "Some other day!"

The "other day" came a week later. Entering the stables at noon in search of Brady, the water-hauler, Carter saw the red teamster perched on the top rail of the black stallion's stall, in his hand the iron muzzle which he had unstrapped that the brute might feed with ease. As the beast snapped, rather than ate, his oats, he cast vicious, uneasy glances from the tail of his eye at Red; but, indifferent to the brute's mood and the anxious glances of his fellows, the teamster calmly chewed his tobacco.

It was by just such tricks that he had gained ascendency over his fellows. Whereas it was worth another man's life to step into their stall, the blacks would stand and sweat in rage and fear while Michigan slapped and poked their ribs. The devil in the beasts seemed to recognize a superior in the pale-green fiend in the man.

"Brady here?" Carter asked. "Oh, there you are!"

He stood immediately behind the stallion, and as he spoke Michigan brought the iron muzzle down with a thwack an the brute's ribs. Snorting, it lashed out, just missing Carter. One huge, steel-shod heel, indeed, passed on either side of his head. Under such circumstances a start was a little more than justifiable; yet after that tribute to surprise Carter stepped quietly beyond range and went on talking to Brady.

"This afternoon you can hitch to the water-cart an' ice the track in to them new skidways."

Then, turning, he eyed Michigan Red. "That's a techy beast of yourn, friend."

"Techy?" Michigan sneered. "There ain't another man in this camp as kin put the leathers on him!"

"No?"

"No!" Swinging his heels against the stall, Michigan added, "Not a damned man."

Picking up a spear of hay, Carter chewed it while he looked over the beast, now foaming with rage. It was a dare. He knew it—saw also the amused interest in the on-lookers. They felt Michigan had him in the door. "The leathers," he remarked, "are on him."

It was a skilful move, throwing the initiative back to the teamster. Not one whit fazed, however, he exclaimed, in mock surprise, "Why, damme, so they are!" Sliding down, he laid a hand on the stallion's crest. Instantly the brute ceased his plunging, uneasy stepping, and while the man stripped off the harness only long, slow shivers told of smothered fury.

"There you are!" He threw collar and harness at Carter's feet.

"Look here, boss!" Brady remonstrated, as Carter picked them up. "I wouldn't go to do it. Shure I wouldn't. The baste is a man-killer be Red's own word. Luk at him for the proof."

Ears laid flat to his neck, glossy hide shivering, the whites of his eyes showing viciously, chisel teeth protruding through grinning lips, the stallion's appearance bore out his reputation.

"I wouldn't!" a dozen teamsters chorused.

Unheeding, Carter entered the stall. As he ranged alongside, the stallion tried to rear, but was snapped back by his halter-chain. So foiled, he humped his shoulders, dropping his head between his knees; then, just when the teamsters expected to see the sixteen hundred pounds of him grind Carter against the stall, he suddenly straightened and stood still as before, save for the slow shivers.

"Mother of God!" Brady exclaimed. "What 'll that mane?"

Carter's hand rested on the beast's crest. What did it mean? Only the red teamster knew. But whether the animal shook to the memory of some torture, or merely mistook the firm hand for that of his master, he moved but once while Carter adjusted and buckled the harness. That was at the cinching of the bellyband; but he quickly quieted. The click of the breeching-snaps sounded like breaking sticks through the stable, and as he stepped out from the stall a score of breaths issued in one huge sigh.

"Now hurry, Brady," he said. "The job will keep you humping till sundown."

Respectful glances followed him away from the stable. He had touched his men in a vulnerable spot, and though, hereafter, they might growl and grumble—the lumberman's sole relaxation—he could count on a fair amount of obedience from all but such malingerers as Shinn and Hines, or a natural anarchist like Michigan Red. The latter took on the yoke of authority only to defy it; and though even his bleak face lit up as sunlight struggles through frost of a winter's morning, he soon found cause for further trouble.

Dropping into the smith's shop a few days later, Carter found Seebach, the German smith, ruefully contemplating a half-dozen disabled sleds. "Herr Gott!" he exclaimed. "In one half-day these haf come in. Alretty yet I works like t'ree tefils, an' this iss the leedle games they play on me. It is that you gifs me a helper or I quit—eh?"

Too surprised to laugh over the other's ludicrous anger, Carter puzzled over the breakage. As aforesaid, the sleds had been built on his own plans to carry enormous loads. To four-by-six runners, shod with an inch of steel, hardwood bunkers a foot square were fastened with solid iron knees braced with inch iron. Every bolt and pin was on the same massive plan. The best of a dozen patterns of as many logging-camps had gone into the making of those sleds. Yet, though they ought to have been good for twenty tons oh the roughest kind of a road, they were racked, split, or twisted, bunkers torn off, ironwork on all badly sprung.

Carter whistled. "How did they do it?"

"Brady, he says it vas the new roat into the pridge timbers. In one place it goes like hell over a pank down to a lake, with a quick turn at the pottom. 'The Pig Glide,' Brady calls it."

"I'll go out an' look at it."

A half-hour's walk brought him to the hill. Debouching from heavy timber, the trail inclined for two hundred yards, then sheered down at an angle of forty-five degrees to a lake below. As the smith had said, an abrupt turn at the bottom added to the trail's difficulties. Too steep for ice-sledding, hay had been spread over the face of the hill, and with this to ease the descent Carter could see no reason for the broken sleds.

A man had been told off to respread the hay after each passage, and he grinned at Carter's question. "Bust 'em here? You bet! How? Well, they come down on a gallop. Teams is coming now, so if you set down in the scrub there you'll see 'em do it."

It was as he said. One after the other the teams emerged from the forest, gathered speed on the incline, and came flying down the hill, the great sleds cracking and groaning under the strain of enormous loads as they skidded around the bottom turn. Michigan Red came last, and Carter's anger could not altogether drown a thrill as he watched the red teamster take the hill. Whooping, whip-cracking, blacks stretched on the gallop, he tore down that plumb hill-side and skidded round the turn, load balanced on one runner. It split, with a pistol report, but the steel shoe held and he passed safely on and down the lake.

"He was the first to cut loose," the trackman explained. "T'others followed his dare."

"Well, they'll have to quit it. Warn each man, Joe, an' report all to me that disobey."

When, that evening, Joe reported that all but Michigan Red had obeyed the order, he sensed hot anger under the boss's calm. Expecting an explosion, he was the more surprised when, after a thoughtful pause, Carter dismissed him with an order to take a couple of hand-rakes out on the job the following morning. To the Cougar he gave orders that the red teamster was to load last. Obedient, the Cougar sent Michigan Red to break track into a new skidway; thus all of his fellows had passed on down the glide while Michigan was still loading.

"Load him light—dry logs, an' not too many," Carter had ordered. But, incensed at the delay, the teamster indulged in such sarcastic allusions to the frailty of the loaders' female ancestors that the ribald crew piled the logs on till his load bulked like a hay-stack. None other than the blacks could have started the sled out from the skids; and while, with jerks and sudden snatches, the fierce brutes worked it out of deep snow to the iced tracks, the loaders looked admiringly on. It was a triumph in driving. Man and team worked like a clock, and, returning blasphemous answers to the loaders' compliments, Michigan slid off down the trail.

To make up for his lost time, he urged the blacks to a trot, and so came swinging down the incline at twice his usual speed. Not till he reached the very edge did he see that the hay had been raked off the face of the hill. A mask of ice, it glittered in the sun.

Half-way down Carter stood with Joe. Looking up, they saw Michigan poised on the top log, a red, sinister figure against the sky. He seemed to pause, throw back on his lines—a quick, involuntary movement. Then, craning forward, he glanced down that glittering stretch—a comprehensive look that took in Carter, Joe, and their plan.

"Give him a forkful under the runners as he goes by," Carter whispered. "Otherwise we'll kill his team."

A second, as aforesaid, the red teamster paused; then, loosing his lines, he leaned over and lashed the stallion under the soft of the belly.

"My God!" Joe cried.

He saw the black brute rear, snorting—saw the blacksnake bite the mare's flank—saw the pair plunge over the grade; then water bathed his eyes. He heard, however—heard the rush and roar, a thunder of hoofs as the long, steel calkings cut through the ice and struck fire from the face of the hill. He felt the wind as the sled passed, and waited for the crash—which did not come.

A voice, cold, deliberate, restored his vision. "I didn't think it was in horse-flesh." Carter was gazing after team and sled, now a black patch on the snow of the lake. "Beat us this time, Joe," he continued; "but we'll fix him to-morrow."

That evening, however, the red teamster enjoyed the fruits of his exploit. It seasoned the beans at supper, sweetened the stable choring. Opinion agreed that it was now "up" to the boss, but split on his probable action, one-half the stable agreeing with Hines that Michigan surely earned his discharge, the other half holding that settlement by battle would be the certain ending. Neither event, however, had come to pass by bedtime, and the mystery was intensified by the chucklings of the road gang, which came in from work long after the teamsters retired. Next morning, too, the loaders—evidently in the secret—added to the suspense by asking the teamsters if they intended to toboggan down the glide that trip.

"Bet you don't!" they yelled after Michigan Red.

Though not exactly nervous, the mystery yet affected the red teamster. As his load slid through the forest uneasiness manifested itself in thoughtful whistlings, broken song snatches, unnecessary talk to his horses. Not that he was a whit afraid. The half-dozen or so men whom he expected would try to enforce the new order could not have prevented him from at least sending his team at the grade. The fierce soul of him thrilled at the thought of opposition, and, coming out of the forest, he set a pace that would have ridden down opposition.

But he reined in at the hill. Instead of the force of his imaginings, only Joe Legault stood at the foot of the glide. The hay had been respread on its face, but—the road gang had built a rough bridge over a deep gully, and now the glide led, straight as an arrow, out to the lake. The racking curve was utterly abolished.

Grinning, Joe said: "The boss allows that it's your privilege to kill your own horses. So go it if you wanter. Hain't going to hurt his sleds none."

Michigan walked his horses.

Carter had won out. Moreover, he had done it without the loss of prestige that would have ensued by the usual brutal methods in vogue in lumber-camps. Law, of a man or people, cannot endure, of course, without force behind it. Yet behind his imperturbability, quiet taciturnity, the men felt the power to enforce his commands. So his authority was no more called in question. Not that envious spite ceased to dog him. Hines, Shinn, and their coterie stood always ready to stir up discontent, foment trouble.

It was their sympathy that caused the cook to maintain one can of poor baking-powder to be valid excuse for leaving. But Carter disposed of minor troubles with the same easy good-humor that he had given to big ones.

"I reckon you've been scandalously mistreated," he told the cook. "I'm right sorry to lose you. Must you go?"

Mollified, the cook stayed.

Then Baldy, chief of the "tote"-trail teamsters, rose to the point that "thirty hun'red was load enough for drifted trails."

"Thirty it is, Baldy," Carter cheerfully answered, and Baldy yanked forty and forty-five hundred all winter over the worst of trails.

He had proved himself in the mastership of men just at the time that opportunity was holding out her hand, and proof and fruit of his winning came the very day that saw the last load delivered at the dumps. "It is a go!" The wire which announced, with this bit of slang, the successful financing of his railroad projects was brought in by Baldy from Lone Tree, and with it buttoned against his heart Carter made his way to the stables where the teamsters were, as they thought, bedding up for the last time.

"We have feed for three months left," he said, "and I can promise work through the summer. At what?" He turned, smiling, on Brady. "Never mind; all those that want it kin have it till freeze-up. In the mean time I'll feed an' care for your teams till the log-drive is down."

Grumblers from the cradle, kickers born, teamsters and choppers had looked forward to this last day in camp, swearing all that ten dollars a day would not hire them for an hour longer. No, sirree—not an hour! Now they looked their doubt.

"What's the pay?" Brady asked.

"Half a dollar a day more'n you're getting."

"That beats farming in these parts. You kin sign me, boss."

And me—me—me! The answers floated in from all over the stable. Only a few of the older men elected to return to their farms, and after all had spoken Carter turned to Michigan Red, who occupied his old perch on the stallion's stall.

"Well, Red?"

"Didn't s'pose you'd need me."

Carter went on writing. He could afford to be generous. He had beaten the man at every point; to retain him where another would have discharged him was, indeed, the crowning of his victory, and Michigan knew it. Had he doubted, he had but to read it in the countenances of his fellows. A good gambler, however, he hid resentment, and where a poor loser would have taken his discharge he accepted re-employment.

His red beard split in a sneering grin. "Oh, guess I'll trouble you for a little longer."

The day was eventful for another reason. Coming up from a short visit to the settlements, Bender handed Carter a letter that evening, the superscription of which sent the dark blood flooding over his neck, for it was the first he had seen of Helen's writing these months. Was this the answer of his longing? Had she sent—at last? His fingers trembled as he tore the wrapping, then he paused, staring. It was his last check, returned without an explanatory scrap.

"She's hired to teach her old school again." Bender answered his blank look.

XV

TRAVAIL

If the white months seemed to lag with Carter up at the camp, they dragged wearily with Helen down in the settlements. Christmas had been particularly dreary, for it did not require a woman's marvellous memory for anniversaries for her to live over again every incident and experience of last Yuletide. In their living-room Carter had built a chimney and fireplace of mud, Cree style, and on Christmas Eve she had cuddled in against his broad breast and talked of a sweet possibility. They had the usual pretty quarrel over sex and names—has the tongue one good enough for the first-born? Then he had hung her stocking, and none other would suit him, forsooth, but the one she was wearing. He had laughed away her blushing protestations, and had kissed the white foot and toes that squirmed in his big hand. Sitting alone this Christmas, she had blushed at the memory; then a gush of tears had cooled her hot cheeks, tears of mingled sorrow and thankfulness that their pretty dream had not taken form in flesh.

One January morning she sat, chin in hands, and stared across the humming stove at the white drift outside. Nels, the Swedish hired man, had killed three pigs for winter meat the day before, and with a touch of humor that was foreign to his bleached complacency had set them on all-fours in the snow. Stiff, frozen—so hard, indeed, that the house-dog retired disconsolately after a fruitless tug at an iron ear—they poked marble shoulders out of a drift. The eye of one was closed in a cunning wink. His neighbor achieved a grin. The mouth of the third was open and thrown back, as though defying death with derisive laughter.

Steeped in thought, Helen did not see the grim grotesques. These months she had undergone three distinct changes of feeling. First she was becomingly repentant. Viewed under the softening perspectives of time and distance, Carter's crudities waned, while his strength and virtues waxed. The insignificant sloughed away from his personality, leaving only the strong, the virile. During this stage she formed small plans towards reconciliation, and bided patiently at home, ceasing her visits to Mrs. Leslie. Not that she felt them wrong, but, besides the shame natural to her position, she liked to feel that she was gratifying what she deemed her husband's prejudice; she experienced the satisfaction which accrues from a penance self-imposed.

When, however, he did not return, she relapsed into hurt silence—would not speak of him to Jenny, nor listen when Bender dropped in on one of his periodical visits with news from the camp. Lastly came cold resentment, anger at the grass-widowhood that was being thrust upon her, a feeling that was the more unbearable because she secretly admired his boldness in cutting the knot of their difficulties. She recognized the wisdom of the act. Had he not taken the initiative, the process of disenchantment would have continued till she herself might have taken the first step to end their misery. But the knowledge did not mitigate the sting. He had forced the separation! The thought rankled and grew more bitter day by day.

This morning she was in a particularly dangerous mood. Conscious of her original good intention, knowing that her fault had been the product of conditions as much as her own weakness, she was ripe for revolt against the entire scheme of things that had forced the lot of crabbed age upon her flushed youth, compelling her to sit by a lonely fire. And as she sat and brooded a clash of bells broke up her meditations; the door opened, letting in a bitter blast that froze the warm interior air into chilly fog, from the centre of which Mrs. Leslie emerged, heavily furred and voluble as ever.

"Anchorite!" she screamed. "Or is it anchoress? Three, four—no, six visits you owe me. Explain! Bad weather? Hum!" She tilted her pretty nose. "If I couldn't fib more artistically, Helen, I'd adhere to the painful truth. You were afraid—of hubby."

"I—I wasn't!"

Mrs. Leslie surveyed the girl's flushed anger with sarcastic pity. "Tut! tut! More fibs. Huddled over that stove, you make the loveliest study of despair. You have been crying, too."

"I—I haven't!" The lines of Huddled Despair flowed into Radiant Anger.

"Your eyes are red?"

"Well, if they are—if I did—it was through anger."

Mrs. Leslie accepted the modified admission. "That's right, my dear. He—no man is worth the compliment of regretful tears. They are all foolish, selfish, fickle as children. They cry for love like a child for the moon, throw it away when the toy wearies, howl if another tries to pick it up. They only value the unattainable. Bah!"

The ejaculation was comical in its feigned disgust, but just then Helen had ears only for the serious or sympathetic—preferably the latter. "Tell me, Elinor," she asked, "do you really think I have deserved this at his hands?"

"No." For once in her life Mrs. Leslie dealt in undiluted truth—because, perhaps, lying would not serve her purpose. "One could understand his pique—" With incredible hardihood, considering the part she herself had played, she commented: "Really, my dear, you ought not to have done it. But he has been altogether too severe—unforgiving. I don't see how you stand it. I should freeze these cold nights without some one to warm my feet on."

"To think"—speech was such a relief after months of bitter silence, and Helen never even noticed the other's funny climax—"to think that this should be dealt to me by a man of whose very existence I was unconscious a short two years ago! Is he a god to exercise such power—to command me to eat the bread-and-water of affliction during his pleasure? Why, I was twenty-two before I ever saw him! Doesn't it seem ridiculous—silly as though one pebble on a beach were to establish limits for another? They roll and rub where and with whom they list, and why shouldn't I?" Ignoring the fact that monogamy was her sex's greatest achievement, and that the first woman who bartered love for protection, cookery for maintenance, had not driven such a bad bargain, she finished: "Wouldn't it be funny if pebbles were condemned to rub and roll in definite pairs till winds and waves had buried one or other affinity deep in the sands. Why—"

"In other words," Mrs. Leslie interrupted, "why should vertical distances count for more than horizontal—death for more than distance—seven feet under the sod carry advantages and opportunities that do not go with seventy miles above? There isn't any reason. It is just so."

"Well, I won't stand it!" Rebellion inhered in Helen's stamp. "I won't! I won't! I won't!"

Mrs. Leslie shrugged her hopelessness. "Thousands of women have to. What can you do, my dear?"

"Do?" the girl answered, hotly. "I have already done it—applied for and secured my old school. Unfortunately, I must remain here till the spring term opens."

Now to accuse Mrs. Leslie of trailing a definite purpose were to reveal lamentable ignorance of her ruling traits. She was no fell adventuress of romance, stealthy of plot, remorseless in pursuit. Persistence was foreign to her light character. Unstable as water, she veered like a shuttlecock under the breath of emotion, yet, withal, grasped speedily at such straws as the winds of opportunity brought within reach. If she lacked force to plot Carter's capture, or to revenge herself for his slight through Helen, she was willing enough now that the wind served.

"In the mean time," she said, "you will stay with me?"

"Oh, I couldn't do that!" Oh, complex feminine nature! Helen balked at the freedom of her agonizings. The quick earnestness of her answer told of the hope that still glowed in the ashes of despair.

But Mrs. Leslie turned hope against her. "Oh yes," she mocked. "You were not afraid of him; certainly not. But that is not the way to get him back, my dear. If you would regain your recreant, give him a rival."

Now, though this piece of worldly wisdom was strictly in line with Helen's crooked parable of the pebbles, the idea sounded grossly common in plain words. Hastily she said, "You don't suppose that I would—"

"No! no!" Mrs. Leslie skilfully retrieved her error. "I only meant that it would be as well to keep him on the anxious seat. Never let a man feel too sure of you—it isn't healthy, for him or you. I wouldn't wait here till it pleased him to extend magnificent forgiveness for so small a fault. Go out—visit—let him see that you can be happy without him—that you have still attractions for others."

"But I don't care. Why do you persist, Elinor, in hinting that I still love him? I don't."

"Then you'll come with me?"

"I'd like to, but I can't leave Jenny alone with Nels."

Mrs. Leslie might have replied that this was exactly what she would have to do when school opened; instead, she contemplated the love which masqueraded behind this unparalleled obstinacy from sphinxlike eyes. "Jenny must be dying to see her friends in Lone Tree," she suggested. "Let her take a vacation. As for Nels—he can bach it."

Helen looked troubled. It was really astonishing to see how she ran from liberty. But she had, perforce, to make some show of living up to her professions, so she called Jenny and anxiously inquired if she didn't want to visit her friends. Unfortunately, Jennie had been oppressed these many days with a longing to see the good doctor, and the expression of her wish carried the day for Mrs. Leslie.

"Oh, well," she sighed; and Mrs. Leslie prudently confined her laugh within her own hollow sepultures.

Accepting the invitation with misgivings, she was astonished, on her return home, to find how thoroughly she had enjoyed her two weeks' visit. Yet it was only natural. Besides the change, Mrs. Leslie had been at pains to amuse and entertain her. There were cosey chats over the teacups on matters dear to the feminine heart, and daily sleigh-rides—mad dashes over hard-packed trails to music of jingling bells. Once the drive was extended as far as Regis barracks, twenty miles to the west, and Helen was introduced to captains of the mounted police in scarlet splashed with gold, their ladies, the agents and clerks of the government land office—pleasant people at first sight, of whom she was to learn more. Of nights, Molyneux and other remittance-bachelors would drop in, and, with drawn curtains excluding the vast arctic night, there would be music, songs, games. Small wonder that she enjoyed herself, or that, the ice thus broken, she gravitated between home and the Leslies' during the remainder of that winter.

Speaking of Molyneux, a greater surprise inhered in the fact that she had been able to meet him without embarrassment, a condition that was due to the tact and real consideration which he displayed. At their first meeting he paused only for a pleasant greeting; next, he ventured a chat; and these lengthened until he felt safe in staying out an evening.

He marked his greatest gain the day that—Leslie being under the weather with a cold—she allowed him to drive her home. By those gentlemen, the romanticists, this fact would not have been accorded a tender implication. They paint love in colors fast as patent dyes: good girls love once; or, if a second passion be grudgingly allowed, it is only after the first is safely bestowed in cold storage underground. In face of the fact that the little god occasionally shoots a double arrow, that the sigh of many a wife would be unwelcome if intelligible to her husband, that many a maid has slipped into spinsterhood between two passions, they lay down as the basic principle of ethical romance the canon that neither wife nor maid can entertain two loves other than in sequence.

Now Helen may not have been in this case, and if she had it goes without saying that she would never have admitted the preference even to herself. For she had been raised in the very shadow of the aforesaid canon. Yet he had certainly won on her—for good reason. In person he was above the average of good looks; his manners touched standard. In that he, alone of the English set, had been able to wring a living from the stern northland without the aid of a fat allowance, he commanded her respect. Also she thought that he was trying to sink his past—he entertained the same illusion—and as every good girl loves to imagine herself as an "influence," the thought gave her satisfaction. Molyneux had no cause of complaint.

To do him justice, he tried, in a slovenly fashion, yet still tried, to live up to this, the one pure love of his life—purity must be interpreted as applying to his intention rather than motive. Of all the remittance-men who frequented Mrs. Leslie's house, he, at this time, showed the least moral taint. Often he thrust in between Helen and things offensive. Though, during Helen's visits, Mrs. Leslie made some attempt to put her house in order, she could not always bridle her male guests, who smoked Leslie's imported tobacco and offered herself veiled love. But Molyneux sterilized most of their blackguardism, nipping entendre with a chilly stare, destroying double meanings by instant and literal interpretation—did it so effectually that she never noticed the pervading sensualism. Indeed, he did it so much as to draw Mrs. Leslie's fire. "Virtuous boy," she said, teasing him one day. "You almost convert me to the true-love theory."

His grimace gauged the depth of his reformation. To him as to Mrs. Leslie the text could be fitted: "Can the leopard change his spots or the Ethiop his skin?" Really he had not changed in quality or purpose; it was the same Molyneux in pursuit of the same end. His tactics were merely altered to suit his game. He would, of course, have denied this—probably with the warmth of honest conviction. At times his reflections on the subject attained highly moral altitudes. He had known from the first that Helen could never live with Carter! Duty certainly called him to end her bondage! Yes, he believed himself honest, and would continue to so believe until some unexpected check loosed the Old Adam again. This was proved by the flashes of passion at the very thought of failure. It would have been much more natural for him to have attempted a raid on Carter's Eden. But, warned by previous experience, he waited, waited, waited, and watched as the snake may have watched the maiden Eve over the threshold of Adam's garden. Now that time seemed to have verified his prediction, that, albeit with hesitant steps, Helen was approaching the gate of her own accord, he held back the hot hand that fain would have plucked her forth lest he should startle her into flight.

There were many watchers of the girl's progression during the winter months: Mrs. Leslie, who might be said to await the moment when a shove might throw the girl off her balance headlong into Molyneux's arms; the settlers, who anticipated such a denouement with scandalous tongues; the remittance-men, who betted on the result, basing odds on her lonely condition. To these there could be but one end. Always the human soul reaches for happiness, and the fact that she had once mistaken Dead Sea fruit for love's golden apples would not prevent her from tiptoeing to pluck again. Would she pluck?

Molyneux, for one, was sure that she would, and, having the courage of his conviction, put his hope into speech, choosing an opportune time. Nels always drove her over to Leslie's, and at first brought her home. But by the middle of February the latter part of the task fell by consent of all to Molyneux, and he spoke while driving her home one afternoon.

"Read this," he said, handing her a telegram that called him to his father's death-bed.

"Oh, I'm so sorry!" she exclaimed, impulsively.

"For what," he questioned, "his sickness or my absence?"

"Both," she frankly answered. "You have been—very nice to me. I shall miss you."

Now this was all very proper, but when he stated that he should be gone at least seven weeks she ought to have veiled her concern. But she did not, and the regret that swam in the hazel eyes strengthened his purpose. "Before I go I must say something. How long is our present relation to last?"

The raise of her eyebrows might have meant anything. He took it as encouragement, and ran on, "You know that I love—have always loved you."

Here, according to the canons, she ought to have withered him. Instead she gave him the truth. "I am not blind."

"Thanks for your candor. Now, a step further—do you intend to remain his bondwoman?"

This was harder, yet her answer correctly interpreted her feeling. "I—I—really don't know."

The doubt spurred him. "You do not love him. You could not—after the way he has treated you. You must have love. A glance at your face would tell a dullard that it is as necessary to your existence as air or water. You cannot be happy without it. It is life to you; more than sustenance. You must be wrapped in it, touch it at every point, feel it everywhere around you. Your being cries out for a passion all-absorbing; you will take nothing less. I would—"

"Give me such love?" She had thrilled under his truthful analysis of her nature, and now she cried out the passion of her sex, the eternal desire for a love everlasting as that of a mother. "Is such possible?—a love that never stales, that endures after the hot blood cools and beauty fades? Could you love me through old age? No, no! A woman can, but never a man!"

"I can! By God! I can!" he cried, blazing in response to her passion. "I'll prove it, for sooner or later you are going to love me."

She laughed a little wearily. "There spake the bold man. Well—you have my good wishes."

"Your—good—wishes?"

"Don't flatter yourself." Her staying hand checked his enthusiasm. "You said just now that I didn't love—my husband. Perhaps you are right. I don't know. I have no standard by which to judge, and only love could supply one. So far—you have failed to do so. I like you—very much; but—if I ever love again, the man must lift me out of myself, make me forget—him, myself, the whole world."

"I'll do it!" he confidently exclaimed; then, sobering, added: "I want you to promise one thing. It isn't much—simply to give serious thought to your position while I am away—to remember what I have just told you and to forget that first foolish mistake that cost me so much. Now will you?"

"Surely," she honestly answered.

"And—if possible—give me an answer?"

She nodded, and he was content to leave it there. They were now on the last mile, and they made it in silence, he plunged in delicious reverie, she very thoughtful. Looking up as the cutter rolled and bumped over the frozen stable-yard, he caught her looking at him with soft compassion.

"Well?"

She smiled. "Did you really—suffer?"

"Hell!"

Grasping her hand, he had almost kissed it when she jerked it suddenly away. "There's Karl—and Jenny—standing in the door." Noting his sudden discomposure, she added: "Never mind, she didn't see you. Won't you come in?"

"Can't—put me late for the choring."

This was only one of a dozen times that he had refused the invitation. A little surprised, she watched him turn and drive away, then she saw Nels coming up from the stable, and the thought was lost in wonder as to whether or no he had seen Molyneux take her hand.

Now, as a matter of fact, Nels had; moreover, he mentioned it to Jenny as he helped her wipe the supper dishes, and thereby earned much trouble. "I tank," he observed, "something is doings. Cappan he taken the mistress hand. Pratty soon the boss no have womans."

His chuckle died under her wrathful stare. "Mention that to any one, Nels, an' Mr. Bender 'll break every bone in your body."

It was not so easy to dispose of her own misgivings. As, that evening, she arranged the dishes in the homemade plate-rack, she turned sombre eyes on Helen, musing by the stove. Often her lips opened, but sound trembled on its thresholds. She kept her own counsel till Bender dropped in on his next visit.

It was perfectly natural for her to turn to him for counsel. Coming to her as he did, in the moment of her sore trouble, her girl's heart had opened and vented on him the love that had been prisoned since the death of her mother; and ever since a perfect understanding of kindred natures had obtained between them.

"They're talking about her in the settlements something scan'lous," she told him. "Tongues is clacking from here to Lone Tree. Why don't Mr. Carter come home? Kain't you persuade him?"

But Bender shook his head. "No, he's stiffer'n all he— Beg your pardon! I mean he's dreadful sot in his mind. I wouldn't envy the one that went to advise him."

Before going away Bender touched on a matter that was now old history in their intercourse. "Changed your mind yet, little girl?"

It was now Jenny's turn to sorrowfully shake her head. "It would be my an' pleasure to be wife to a big, good man like you. But I just kain't bring myself to put you where any man could cast my shame in your face."

"Oh, shore!" he protested. "You was that little—a teeny bit of a thing, jes' seventeen—on'y a baby. Who'd be holding it agin you? Besides—he's in England."

"Yes—he's in England," Jenny slowly repeated. "But—"

He did not see the queer look she sent after him as he rode away.

XVI

A HOUSE-PARTY

One morning, some three weeks after Molyneux's departure, Helen sat in her doorway reading, as certain an indication of coming spring as the honk of the wild geese speeding northward on the back of the amorous south wind. As yet the prairie sloughs wore mail of ice, but from dizzy heights those keen-eyed voyagers discerned tricklings and wee pools under sheltered forest banks, sufficient till the laggard sun should smite the snows and fill the air with tinklings and gurglings, loose the strange sound of running waters on the frozen silence. Another month would do it. Already the drifts were packing, and the hard trails traversed the sinking snows like mountain chains on a relief map. In Helen's door-yard stratas of yellow chips, debris of the winter's furious firing, were beginning to appear; with them, lost articles; indeed, Nels was gobbling joyously over the retrieval of an axe, when Leslie's team and cutter came swinging into the yard.

Mrs. Leslie was driving, and, seeing Helen, she screamed from a hundred yards: "They are coming! All of 'em!"

"Who?" Helen asked, when the ponies stopped at the door.

"Why, Edith Newton, Mrs. Jack Charters, Sinclair Rhodes—you remember? I told you that I should give a house-party for the Regis folks when the frosts let up. Hurry and pack up your war-paint! They'll be here to-morrow, and I need your help. No refusal! Fred is going in to Lone Tree to-morrow and Jenny can go down with him. Nels will cook for himself, won't you, Nels?"

"I tank I can cook, yes." Nels ceased his jubilations over the axe long enough to season his assent with a bleached grin.

"There! It's all fixed." Bustling inside, she talked volubly while assisting in Helen's selections. "Yes, take that; you look your sweetest in it; and I imported Captain Chapman especially for you. That also; you'll need it evenings. No, Captain Charters isn't coming. Some Indian trouble called him west. Oh, Mrs. Jack won't care—I'm the loser, for he was always my cavalier."

Driving home, she rattled steadily, entertaining Helen with descriptions of her expected guests, giving their pedigrees, aristocratic connections, while she spiced her discourse with malicious fact. Sinclair Rhodes had secured his appointment as land agent at Regis through distant cousinship to the governor-general. And why not? The offices ought to go to well-bred people! He had money, must have, for his salary and expenses were out of all proportion—so much so as to cause comment by malicious people, envious souls! What if he did make a little, as they said, on the side? The government could afford it; and every one knew what Canadians were in office! People who live in glass houses, and so forth! It was simply racial envy! She was also becomingly indignant over the action of certain Canadians who had made trouble for Captain Chapman in the matter of mounted-police supplies. What figure did a few tons of provisions cut in a gentleman's accounts? These commercial intellects, with their mathematical exactness, were horrid. Newton? He was an appointee of Rhodes. No, no relation. She waived further description of the Newtons, omitted the pregnant fact that Charles Newton's presence cut as little figure in his wife's social calculations as Captain Charters' absence did in those of Mrs. Jack.

Caution, doubtless, counselled the omission. The quail is not flushed till the net be spread. Yet the reservation was hardly necessary in the light of Helen's condition. Judgment of another's action is colored by one's own mental state, and she was not so likely to be shocked by one who had defied the conventions against which she herself was in open mutiny. Anyway, she liked Mrs. Jack at first sight, despite the scandalous manner in which she flirted with Charles Newton the first night at table. Big, tall, and fair, large eyes expressed her saving grace, an unparalleled frankness that seemed to sterilize her flirtations and rob them of impropriety. Twice during the meal she retailed Newton's tender asides to his wife, asking, laughingly, if she recognized the vintage.

However, being as yet in happy ignorance of many things that would soon cause her serious disquiet, Helen thoroughly enjoyed that first evening. The well-appointed table, with its sparkling glass, silver, snowy napery; the well-groomed people and their correct speech alike fed her starved æsthetic senses while they aroused dormant social qualities. She laughed, chattered, capped Mrs. Jack's sallies, displaying animation and wit that simply astonished Mrs. Leslie. Her wonder, indeed, caused Edith Newton to whisper in Mrs. Jack's ear:

"Elinor looks as though she had imported a swan in mistake for a duckling. Look at Sinclair—positively smitten. Giving her all his attention, though he took Elinor in. The girl seems to like him, too."

Mrs. Jack's big eyes turned to the laughing face that was raised up to Rhodes. "Don't believe a word he says, my dear," she suddenly called across the table. "And look out for him. He's dangerous."

Though she laughed, Rhodes must have sensed a serious motive, for he glanced up in quick annoyance. "Do I look it?" he asked, turning again to Helen.

Nature does not lie. His narrowly spaced eyes, salient facial angles, dull skin, heavy lips carried her certificate of degeneracy. A physiognomist would have pronounced him dangerous to innocence as a wild beast on less evidence, but to Helen's inexperience he appeared as a man unusually handsome, profile or front face. The significant angles did not alter the good modelling of his nose and chin or affect the regularity of his features. Tall, slim, irreproachable in manner and dress, there was no scratch to reveal the base metal beneath his electroplate refinement.

"You certainly don't," she answered, laughing.

"Then," he said, with mock gravity, "I can patiently suffer the sting of calumny."

"Calumny?" Mrs. Jack echoed, teasingly. "Calumny? What's that?"

"Synonyme for conscience," Edith Newton put in, with a spice of malice. For though the conquest of Rhodes—to which Regis gossip wickedly laid Newton's presence in the land office—was now stale with age and tiresome to herself, she was selfish enough to resent his defection.

"Sinclair found it while rummaging Fred's coat for matches," her husband added. Leslie's simplicity was as much of a joke to them as it was with the Canadian settlers, and, under cover of the laugh, Chapman—a big blond of that cavalry, mustached type which wins England's cricket matches while losing all her wars—leaned over and whispered in Newton's ear: "Leslie will lose more than his conscience if he doesn't look out. La belle Elinor is madly smitten." Aloud, he said, "Sinclair would hardly know what to do with it, Mrs. Newton."

"Hearken not to the tongue of envy, Mrs. Carter," Rhodes retaliated upon his tormentors. "I'm a very responsible person, I assure you."

She laughed at his mock seriousness, and, believing it all fooling, gave him so much of her attention that evening as to cause more than one comment. "Rhodes is making heavy running," Newton remarked once to Chapman, who replied, conceitedly stroking his mustache, "Wait till I get in my innings."

"After me," Newton answered. "I come next at the bat."

Ignorant of this and other by-play, however, Helen thoroughly enjoyed the first days of the party. On the frontier, amusement is a home-made product, and shares the superiority of domestic jams, jellies, and pickles over the article of commerce. They caught the fickle damsel Pleasure coming and going, reaping the satisfaction of both spectator and entertainer. By day they skated, drove, or curled on a rink which the male guests laid out; nights, they sang, danced, played games, and romped like children.

Apart from a certain freedom in their intercourse, which she attributed to long acquaintance, Helen found nothing objectionable in the demeanor of her new friends during those first few days. On the contrary, she thought them a trifle dull. Their preglacial and ponderous humor excited her risibility; she laughed as often at as with them. At other times she could not but feel that they regarded her as alien, a pretty pagan without their social pale, and she would revolt against their enormous egotism, insolent national conceit. She broke many a lance on that impregnable shield.

"You English," she flashed back when, one evening, Newton reflected on American pronunciation of certain English family names—"you English remind me of the Jews, with their sibboleth and shibboleth. Is your aristocracy so doubtful of its own identity that it is compelled to hedge itself against intrusion by the use of passwords. You may call 'Cholmondeley' 'Chumley,' if you choose, but we commit no crime in pronouncing it as spelled."

Again, when Edith Newton rallied her on some crude custom which she maintained was peculiarly American, Helen delivered a sharp riposte. "No, I never saw it done at home; but I have heard that it is quite common among English emigrants on transatlantic liners." Such tiffs were, however, rare; and, to do them justice, men and women hastened to sacrifice national conceit on the altars of her wounded susceptibilities.

Offence came later, and on quite another score. At first she liked the attentions paid her; the gallantry of the men put her on better terms with herself, renewed the confidence which had diminished to the vanishing-point during her months of loneliness. But when constant association thawed the reserve natural to first acquaintance, and freedom evolved into familiarity, her instincts took alarm. Distressed, she observed the other women to see if she had been singled out. But no, they seemed quite comfortable under similar attentions, and they rallied her when she unfolded her misgivings at afternoon tea.

"You shouldn't be so pretty, my dear," Mrs. Jack said, laughing. "What can the poor men do?" Then they made fun of her scruples, satirizing conventions and institutions which she had always regarded as necessary, if not God-ordained.

"Marriage," Edith Newton once cynically exclaimed, "is merely a badge of respectability, useful as a shield from the slings and arrows." Then, from the depths of her own degeneracy, she evolved the utterance: "Men are all beasts beneath the skin. Wise women use them for pleasure or profit."

Helen revolted at that; it transcended her mutiny. But few people are made of martyr stuff—perhaps fortunately so; martyrs are uncomfortable folk, and, wise in her eternal generation, nature sprinkles them lightly over the mass of common clay. The average person easily takes the color of environment, so why not Helen? Thinking that perhaps she was a little prudish, she stifled her fears, tried to imitate the nonchalance of the others. She even made a few tentative attempts at daring. Alas! as well expect a rabbit to ruffle it with wolves. Such immediate and unwelcome results followed that she retired precipitously behind ramparts of blushing reserve. But the damage was done. Thereafter Chapman, Newton, Rhodes, one or another, was constantly at her elbow; she was unpleasantly conscious that, having let down her fences, they looked upon her as free game.

The thought stirred her to fight. Chapman she disposed of with a single rebuff that sent him back to Mrs. Jack's side. But Newton proved unmanageable. Impervious to snubs, his manner conveyed his idea that her modesty was simply a blind for the others. His familiarities bordered on license. A good singer, he always asked her to play his accompaniments of evenings, and she would sicken as he used the pretence of turning a leaf to lean heavily upon her shoulder. At other times he made occasion to touch her—would pick threads from her jacket; lean across her to speak to her neighbor at table.

By such tactics he brought her, one morning, to great confusion. A Cree Indian had driven in from the Assiniboin reserve with bead-work, moccasins, and badger-skin mittens which he wished to trade for flour or bacon. With the other women Helen was bending over to examine his wares, when Newton entered the kitchen. Stepping quietly up from behind, he laid a hand on Helen's hair. Taking him for one of the other women, she suffered his fondling till Mrs. Leslie, who knew he was there, asked his opinion on a tobacco-pouch. Then, before she could move, speak, cast off his hand, he pressed her head against his wife's dark curls.

"Just look at the contrast!" he admiringly exclaimed, and so robbed her anger.

Yet so evident was the intent behind the excuse that even the Cree detected the sham. From Helen his dark glance travelled to Newton and back again. "He your man?" he asked.

Vexed to the point of tears, she shook her head and bent over the bead-work to hide her embarrassment. But the Cree's rude notions of etiquette had been jarred. "He touch your hair!"

So simple, his comment yet pierced to the heart of the matter. Newton had fondled her hair, crown and symbol of her womanhood, a privilege of marriage. In an Indian tribe the offence would have loosed the slipping knife; a settler would have resented it with knarled fist. But here the women tittered, while Chapman, who just then sauntered in, laughed.

Emboldened, perhaps, by immunity, the man's offensiveness developed into actual insult the evening of that same day. They had all been pulling taffy in the kitchen, and, passing through a dark passage to the living-room, Helen felt an arm slip about her waist. Newton's face was still tingling from a vigorous slap when she confronted him before them all in the living-room. Even his hardihood quailed before her flushed and contemptuous anger; he was not quite so ready with his excuse.

"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Carter! Really, I mistook you for my wife."

It was a lie on the face of it, and, barbed with stinging truth, her retort drew a peal of laughter from the others. "Indeed? Your excuse is more remarkable than your mistake."

Offended as much by the laugh as the insult, she seated herself on a lounge by Leslie, the one man with whom she always felt safe. In him the stigma of degeneracy took another form; the tired blood expressed itself in a prodigious simplicity. He lacked even the elements of vice. As his wife put it, "Fred is too stupid to be wicked." Yet, withal, he was very much of a man as far as his chuckleheadedness permitted, and now he offered real sympathy.

"It was a caddish trick, Mrs. Carter, and I mean to tell him so."

"Oh no!" she pleaded. "It wouldn't improve matters to make a scene, and he's not likely to offend again. Please don't? Stay here—with me."

"But I'm your host. Really, he deserves a thrashing."

"No, no! Stay here! I don't feel equal to the others."

"I never do." Sitting again, he turned on her a look of beaming fellowship. "The girls all yawn and look terribly bored when I try to amuse them—except you. They don't seem to care for horses and dogs, the things that interest me."

If, as a conversationalist, he did not shine, he at least brought her the first easy moments she had known that day, and she turned a sympathetic ear to some of his prattle. Indicating Rhodes, who was leaning over Mrs. Leslie, he said: "You know I don't like that sort of thing. Elinor says I'm old-fashioned, and I suppose she knows. Of course she wouldn't do anything that wasn't proper, but a fellow has his feelings, and it doesn't take a crime to hurt them, does it? She's up on the conventions; but it does seem to me that if a fellow has anything to say to another fellow's wife he ought to say it aloud."

Astonished that his dulness should have sensed the pervading sensualism, she studied him while he watched his wife, in his eyes something of that pitiful pleading one sees in those of a beaten dog. His words banished her doubts as to whether her own misgivings did not root in hypercritical standards—restored her viewpoint. All week the atmosphere had thickened, as constant association banished reserve, and to-day freedom had attained its meridian. It was not the matter but the manner of conversation that filled her with a great uneasiness—the whispers, asides, smiling stares, conscious laughter. The vitiated atmosphere caused her a feeling of suffocation, and in the midst of her sick revulsion Leslie dropped a remark that came to her like a breath of ozone.

"I was awfully sorry to hear of the trouble between you and Carter. I always thought him such a fine fellow. He hadn't much use for me—any of us—still I liked him. He was a bit on the rough, of course; but, I tell you, character counts more than culture, strength than refinement."

Character counts more than culture, strength than refinement? To his simplicity had been vouched wisdom worthy of a philosopher. The phrase stabbed her. Before her rose a vision of her husband as she had seen him that last miserable night, cold, stern, inexorable, in the loom of the moonlight. In view of that colossal memory, the Englishmen about her dwarfed to effeminate insignificance. Vividly her own doubting recurred. And she had traded him—for this! The thought brought wretchedness too great for concealment. Her uneasiness was so manifest as to form the theme of a bedroom conversation.

Though comfortable—the one frame house in the settlements, a palace to Canadian eyes—Leslie's house boasted only two bedrooms; so while the men made shift on shake-downs, Helen shared Mrs. Leslie's rooms, Edith Newton and Mrs. Jack the other.

As she braided her hair for the night, the latter lady opened the conversation. "Did you notice how uncomfortable little Carter was this evening? She is a nice little thing, but she doesn't mix. I don't see why Elinor invited her."

"You don't, eh?" Edith Newton mumbled a mouthful of pins. "You are slow, Maud."

"No—only lazy. Why should I puzzle over things when you are here? I'll bet you have pumped everybody dry long ago. Now—dispense!"

"I don't go round with my eyes shut," the other calmly answered. "To begin: Calvert Molyneux is completely gone on little Carter, whose husband, it seems, left her because of some slight."

"Hum!" Mrs. Jack elevated her straight brows. "Foolish man to leave her to Calvert. So that is why he went home! Exits till the tarnished pearl be regulped by the conjugal oyster? Clever!"

"On the contrary"—she curled a full red lip—"he contemplates honorable marriage—dalliance, Dakota, divorce, everything that begins with D, down to eventual desertion, if I know anything of Calvert. But fancy—HE!"

"'The devil in love, the devil a husband would be,'" Mrs. Jack misquoted.

"'The devil married, the devil a husband was he,'" Edith Newton finished. "But he is not married yet. She holds him off—foolishly. For you know Calvert, good in streaks, but ruled by his emotions and ruthless when they command. If she turns him down—"

"She'll need to keep him at longer distance than this house affords. But Elinor?—this doesn't explain her. She's beastly selfish under her jolly little skin. Why is she posing as aid and advocate of love?"

"In love with Carter hubby—or was would be more correct, in view of her carryings-on with Sinclair. But the Carter attack, I understand, was very severe while it lasted. Think of it, Maud, Elinor to fall in love with a settler!"

Mrs. Jack elevated naked shoulders. "Not at all surprising. Just the itch of her rotten blood for a few sound corpuscles. I've felt it myself at times. Don't look so shocked—you know we are rotten."

"Maud! Maud!"

Humming a bar of "La Boheme," Mrs. Jack regarded her companion through narrowed lids. "I believe, Edith, you keep up appearances with yourself. Why not be natural for a change? But, as you say, Elinor seems to have made a complete convalescence. Did you ever see a woman make such a projectile of herself? Positively hurls herself at Sinclair. But tell me more about the Carter man. How did he treat her rabies?"

"Cold-water cure. Turned her down—flat."

"So in revenge she's trying to besmirch the wife? The little devil! I call that pretty raw, Edith."

The other shrugged. "Oh, well, it is her pie, and if she prefers it uncooked it is none of our business. Better keep your fingers out of it, Maud. Struggle with your good intentions."

Mrs. Jack smiled sweetly. "My dear, am I in the habit of messing alien pies?"

"Not unless you covet the meat."

"Well, I'm not hankering after either Calvert or Carter hubby, though I must say that I like his specifications. Showed awfully good taste both in selecting his wife and rejecting Elinor. Fancy! a virtuous man—in this day!"

By this time Edith Newton was disposed in bed. A sleepy answer came from under the clothing. "Proves he hadn't the honor of your acquaintance."

"Nor yours," Mrs. Jack retorted.

Her flippancy masked a disquiet so grave as to drive away the desire for sleep. Clad only in her bed-gown, she drew a chair up to the stove, which returned her thoughtful gaze through two red monocles of isinglass. In her fair-play was associated with its companion virtue frankness, and in no wise could she read a mite of the former quality into Elinor Leslie's intent towards Helen. After many uneasy shruggings, she rose, took the lamp, and walked into the other bedroom.

"Misplaced my comb," she answered Mrs. Leslie's sleepy inquiry. "Lend me yours." Then she paused at the foot of the bed.

Helen had coiled her hair for the night, but its unruly masses had loosened and ran, a perfect cataract of gold, over her pillow. Against that auriferous background lay her head and face, with its delicate creams and pinks sinking into the plumpness of one white arm. The other was folded over the softness of her bosom. Mrs. Jack thought her asleep till her eyes opened, then, returning the girl's smile, she tiptoed back to her fire.

"It's a damned shame," she told herself, profanely, but truly, and with such vigor that Edith Newton sleepily asked: "What's the matter? Aren't you ever coming to bed, Maud?"

"Saying my prayers. Go to sleep."

"Put in a word for me," the other murmured.

"The Lord knows that you need it." Mrs. Jack glanced at the bed, then returned to her musings. "Of course she's a little fool. If she goes back to her husband she will have to settle down to the humdrum of settler life—raise calves, chickens, pigs, and children in the fear of the Lord, with only a church picnic or some such wild dissipation to break the deadly monotony. A pleasing prospect, I must say. But if it suits her—well, I'm not going to see her delivered, bound and bleating, into the hands of the devil, alias Calvert Molyneux. It seems a shame, either way, but she undoubtedly loves her settler hubby, and she's just the kind to eat her heart out through remorse and shame. And here is Elinor blackening her reputation with the pig settlers to whom she must look for a living, making reconciliation impossible! Well, I'm going to speak to the little fool to-morrow."

This she did, making her opportunity by carrying Helen off to her bedroom, where, having disposed her victim in a comfortable chair, she herself snuggled down upon the bed and went with customary frankness straight to the heart of her subject. "I want to know, Helen Carter, why you are here?"

Puzzled, Helen stared; then, interpreting by the smile, she answered, "I—really, I—don't know."

"A—pretty—poor—reason!" She shook her finger in affected anger. "Don't you know that you don't belong? Now don't flare up! If I were Edith Newton, or Elinor, the cat, you might suspect a reflection. It isn't that you are below grade—just the opposite. Frankly, my dear, we are a rotten lot. A sweet girl, with conscience and morality has no business among us. We couldn't scrape up enough of either article to outfit a respectable cat. Don't blush. I'm not envying you your conscience. It is a most uncomfortable asset, and, given choice of two evils, I'd take a harelip. But, as you have one—well, you'd better mizzle—go home, you know."

Having eased herself by this delivery, Mrs. Jack sighed, sat up, rolled herself a cigarette, and went on, after a contented puff: "Don't tell on me, my dear. Not that I care a whoop—that's American, isn't it? I love your slang; it is so expressive and comfortable to the feelings. But, you see, rakishness has no attractions for the fool male of our species. He resents any infringement of his monopoly. Even such a degenerate ass as Charles Newton prefers school-girl simplicity. So one must needs simulate virgin innocence, however painful. That's more of your delightful slang. Now—when are you going?"

The question anticipated the conclusion of Helen's midnight tossings; but, if unchanged in substance, this had nevertheless been modified by cooler morning reflections. She stated the qualifications—Jenny was visiting in Lone Tree, and would not return till Saturday. Only two more days! Her visit would then come to a natural end, so why offend by abrupt departure?

Mrs. Jack laughed. "I don't think Elinor would be so very dreadfully offended. Why? Well, it is ungracious to criticise one's hostess, but—you have trapped her rabbit."

"Her—rabbit?"

"Yes—Sinclair Rhodes."

"Why, he paid me less attention than any of the others; was less—you'll pardon me—offensive. I even thought he tried to keep them away."

"As the lion drives the jackals. Avoid him, my dear. Well, I suppose that a couple more days won't hurt. We are to stay a week longer, and if Elinor asks you—which she won't—you must refuse. Now let us go out before they begin to suspect a conspiracy."

"But first let me thank you. I have been so miserable, and you have done me so much good."

Mrs. Jack gently patted the hand that caught her arm, an action totally at variance with her answer. "Self-interest, I assure you. Elinor is not the only sufferer. You have depleted the entire preserve. Not a man has looked at me the last three days. There, there! You needn't believe it if you don't want to."

Could Mrs. Jack's frank eyes have pierced the immediate future, she would have made her warning against Rhodes more specific. On Thursday of that week Leslie drove his heavy team and bobs into Lone Tree for supplies, and, what of the thawing trails, could not possibly be back till all hours Saturday night. Not knowing this, Mrs. Jack made no objection when, Saturday morning, Danvers drove over with Molyneux's double cutter and carried off herself and the Newtons to visit a friend west of the Assiniboin.

"You'll be here till after supper," she said to Helen, leaving. "So I won't say good-bye."

But she miscalculated both the warmth of the friend's welcome and the heavy sledding. When she returned, long after dark, she found Mrs. Leslie reading a novel by her bedroom stove. In a loose wrapper, crossed feet comfortably propped on the plated stove-rail, a plate of red apples at her elbow, and the light comfortably adjusted on the table behind her, she was the picture of comfort. "Having a jolly good time all by myself," she explained. "Fred's not home yet, and Captain Chapman went over to win a little from Ernest Poole at poker. Helen? Just gone. She waited and waited and waited, but you were so late that we both thought you had concluded to stay the night. Didn't you pass her at the Forks—or hear the bells? That double string of Fred's can be heard to heaven on a still night."

"Oh, was that she? Hired man came for her, I suppose?" Mrs. Jack indifferently inquired, as she laid off her furs.

"No. Sinclair drove her with our ponies. What's the matter?"

Eyes dark and dilated with fear, Mrs. Jack faced her. "Do you mean to tell me—" Breaking hastily off, she ran through bed and living rooms, almost upsetting Newton on her way to the outer door. "Mr. Danvers! Oh, Mr. Danvers! Mr. Danvers! Mr.—Danvers!" she called.

But the night returned only the clash of his bells.

Sweeping back in, she faced Mrs. Leslie, flushed with the one righteous emotion of her fast life. "You let her go out—alone—with that—" Choking, she ran into her own room and slammed the door, leaving the other two women staring.

Edith Newton answered the lift of the other's eyebrows. "Another of Maud's raves."

XVII

—AND ITS FINALE

But for the bells and groan of runners, which drowned sound for them even as it did for Danvers, Helen and Rhodes were near enough to have heard Mrs. Jack's call. Interpreting the latter's warning morally, Helen had accepted Rhodes's escort as the lesser of two evils, or, if she had speculated on tentative attempts at flirtation, had not doubted her own ability to snub them.

A sudden frost, winter's last desperate clutch at the throat of spring, had hardened the sun-rotted trails; and as the cutter sped swiftly over the first mile, she chatted freely, without thought of danger. Of the three male guests, Rhodes had, as aforeseen, pestered her least, so, ignorant of the pitiless brutality masked by his reserve, she was paralyzed—almost fainted—when his arm suddenly dropped from the cutter-rail to her waist.

Recovering, she spoke sharply, "Take it away!"

Instead, he drew her tighter. She could not see his face; but as she struck, madly, blindly, at its dim whiteness, his laugh, heartless, cynical, came out of the dusk, "Kick, bite, scratch all you want, my little beauty," he said, forcing his face against hers, "your struggles are sweet as caresses."

Yet, withal his boast, he found it difficult to hold her. Twice she broke his grip and almost leaped from the sleigh; and as she fought his face away, her hand suddenly touched the reins that were looped over his arm.

In the black confusion he was unable to specify just what happened thereafter. He knew that, alarmed by the scuffling, the ponies had burst into a gallop; but, though he felt her relax, he could not see her throw all of her weight into a sudden jerk on the left rein. Ensued a heaving, tumultuous moment. Pulled from the trail, the ponies plunged into deep drift. The cutter bucked like a live thing, and as it dropped from the high trail a runner cracked with a pistol report. Simultaneously they were thrown out into deep, cold snow.

They fell clear of each other, and Helen heard Rhodes swearing as he ran to the ponies' heads. The sound spurred her to action. She could only count on a minute, and, rising, she ran, stumbling, falling headlong into drifts to rise and plunge on, in her heart the terror of the hunted thing. Each second she expected to hear his pursuing foot. But he had to tie the ponies to a prairie poplar, and by that time she had gained a bluff two hundred yards away, and was crouched like a chased hare in its heart.

That poor covert would not have sufficed against a frontiersman. Tracking by the fainter whiteness of broken snow, he would soon have flushed the trembling game, but it was ample protection from Rhodes's inefficiency. Alarmed when he saw that she was gone, he ran back and forth, shouting, coupling her name with promises of good behavior. As her line of flight had angled but slightly from the trail, she heard him plainly.

"My God! You'll freeze! Mrs. Carter! Oh, Mrs. Carter! Do come out! I was only joking!"

She did not require his assurance as to the freezing. Already her limbs were numb, her teeth chattered so loudly she was afraid he would hear. But she preferred the frost's mercy to his, and so lay, shivering, until, in despair, he got the ponies back to the trail and drove rapidly away. Then she came out and headed homeward like a bolting rabbit. Twice she was scared back into the snow: once when Rhodes turned about and dashed down and back the trail; again just before she picked Leslie's voice from passing bells. He was merely talking to his horses, but never before had his voice fallen so sweetly on pretty ears.

As at some wan ghost, he stared at the dim, draggled figure that came up to him out of the snows; indeed, half frozen and wholly frightened, she was little more than the ghost of herself. "The cad!" he stormed, hearing her story. "I'll punch his head to-morrow!" And he maintained that rude intention up to the moment that he dropped her at her own door.

"Don't!" she called after him. "Elinor won't like it." But the caution was for his own good, and she was not so very much cast down when he persisted.

"Then she can lump it!" he shouted back.

The proverb gives the trampled worm rather more than due credit when one remembers that a barrel-hoop can outturn the very fiercest worm, but it should be remembered in Leslie's favor that he mutinied in the cause of another. Having all of the obstinacy of his dulness, he went straighter to his end because it was allied with that narrow, bull-dog vision which excludes all but one object from the field of sight. Meeting Rhodes, Chapman, and Newton, with lanterns, at the point where the sleigh had capsized, he rushed the former and was living in the strict letter of his intention when the others pulled him away. They could not, however, dam his indignant speech. On that vast, dark stage, with the lanterns shedding a golden aureole about Rhodes and his bleeding mouth, he gave them the undiluted truth, as it is said to flow from the mouths of babes and sucklings.

Arrived home, moreover, he staggered his wife by his stubborn opposition. "It is no use talking, Elinor," he said, closing a bitter argument. "To-morrow I go to the bush for a load of wood, and if that cad is here when I return I'll break a whip on his back." Then, ignoring her bitten lips, clinched hands, the bitter fury that was to produce such woful consequences, he went quietly off to bed.

Of all this, however, Helen remained in ignorance until after the denouement that came a few days later along with a scattering of new snow. Those were days of misery for her—of remorseful brooding, self-reproach, hot shame that set her at bitter introspection that she might find and root out the germs of wickedness that had brought these successive insults. As hundreds of good girls before her, as thousands will after her, she wondered if she were really the possessor of some unsuspected sensuousness. Comparisons, too, were forced upon her. Revolting from the rough settler life, she had turned to the English set only to find that their polished ease was but the veneer of their degeneracy, analogous to the phosphorescence given off in the dark by a poisoned fish, and equally indicative of decay. She could not fail to contrast her husband's sterling worth with their moral and intellectual leprosy.

The nights were still more trying. She would sit, evenings, and stare at the lamp as though it were the veritable flame of life, while her spirit quested after the cause of things and the root of many enigmas. Why, for instance, is it that pitilessness, ferocity, ruth, which were good in the youth of the world, should cause such evil in its old age? For what reason the cause of the lily willed also its blight? Why conditions make fish of one woman, flesh of another, and fowl of a third, and wherefore any one of them should be damned for doing what she couldn't help in following the dictates of her nature? In fact, from the duration of her reveries, she may have entertained all of the hundred and odd questions with which the atom pelts the infinite, and, judging from her dissatisfaction, she received the usual answer—Why? It is nature's wont to deliver her lessons in parables, from which each must extract his or her own meanings; and a momentous page was turned in Helen's lesson the day that she rode over to Leslie's to verify a rumor which Nels had brought from the post-office.

As sleighing was practically over and wheeling not yet begun, she went horseback. As aforesaid, a scattering of new snow covered the prairies, and she rode through a bitter prospect. Everywhere yellow grass tussocks or tall brown weeds thrust through the scant whiteness to wave in the chill wind. Under the sky's enormous gray, scrub and bluff and blackened drifts stood out, harsh studies in black and white. Nature was in the blues, and all sentient things shared her dull humor. Winging north, in V or harrow formations, the wild ducks quacked their discontent. Peevish snipe cursed the weather as they dipped from slough to slough. A lone coyote complained that the season transcended his experience, then broke off his plaint to chase a rabbit, of whose red death Helen was shuddering witness.

The settlement was even less cheerful. Such houses as she passed rose like dirty smudges from the frozen mud of their dooryards. Moreover, the looks of the few settlers she met were not conducive of better spirits. MacCloud, a bigoted Presbyterian of the old Scotch-Canadian school, gave her a malignant grin in exchange for her nod. Three Shinn boys, big louts, burst into a loud guffaw as their wagon rattled by her at the forks of Leslie's trail. Their comment, "Guess she hain't heard!" increased her apprehension.

She could now see the house, smokeless, apparently lifeless, frowning down from a snow-clad ridge. But when, a minute later, she knocked, Leslie answered, and she entered. The living-room, with its associations of gayety, was dank, cold, cheerless. Ash littered the fireless stove; the floor was unswept; the air gave back her breath in a steamy cloud. Through the bedroom door she saw drawers and boxes wide open, their contents tossed and tumbled as though some one had rummaged them for valuable contents. And amid these ruins of a home Leslie sat, head bowed in his hands.

"You poor man!" she cried. "You poor, poor man!"

He turned up his face, and its sick misery reminded her of a worm raising its mangled head from under a passing wheel as though questing a reason for its sudden taking off. His words strengthened the impression: "I couldn't seem to satisfy her, and she was angry because I took your part against him. Of course she isn't so much to blame. I did as well as I could, but I'm neither clever nor ornamental, like Rhodes. But I tried to treat her well, didn't I? You shall judge."

"You did—of course you did, poor man!" she sobbed.

"Then why did she leave me?"

Somehow his blind questioning raised the prairie tragedy in her mind. The rabbit's death-scream was equally sincere in its protest against inscrutable fate in the coyote's green eyes. Its innocence was blameless as this. Yet—how could she answer problems as unsolvable as her own?

"I have been a fool," he went on; and his next words helped to lessen the astonishment, though not the pain, which his calamity had brought her. "A blind fool! When we used to drive out to Regis last summer it was going on—I can see it now. They did their billing and cooing under my very eyes. Yet they were not so clever, after all, were they? I trusted her—with my honor, expecting her to protect it as I would have defended her virtue. Was I at fault? If a man can't trust his wife, what can he do? Surely not lock her up. What could I do?"

Puzzled, she stood and looked down upon him. But under its delicate complexities the feminine mind is ever practical, and her attention quickly turned to his physical welfare. He must be taken away—weaned from his sick brooding, blind questioning. "Have you eaten to-day?" she asked. "Not for three days! Go out and harness your ponies at once, and come home with me to supper." Anticipating objection, she added, "Really, you must, for I am too tired to ride back again."

Her little fiction was hardly necessary, he found it so easy to let her do his thinking. He obeyed as one in a trance; and not till they drove away, leading her pony behind, did action dissipate his lethargy. Then he began to display some signs of animation.

It was a silent and uncomfortable drive. Instead of the usual lively jingle, pole and harness rattled dully, the light snow hushed the merry song of the wheels to a slushy dirge. The raw air, bleak sky, slaty grays of the dull prospect were eminently oppressive. Nature had shed her illusions and, fronting her cold materialism, there was no dodging issues. Facts thrust themselves too rudely upon consciousness. Leslie spoke but once, and the remark proved that the chill realities had set him again at the riddle of life.

"I shall sell out," he said, as the ponies swung in on Carter's trail. "Go to South Africa. My brother is a mining superintendent on the Rand."

She sighed. "I can't go to South Africa."

Rousing from his own trouble, he looked at her. "You don't need to. You'll see. Carter will come home one of these days." And during the few days that he stayed with her he extended such brotherly sympathy that she felt sincerely sorry when, having placed the sale of his farm and effects in the hands of Danvers, he followed his faithless wife out of her life and this story.

XVIII

THE PERSISTENCE OF THE ESTABLISHED

Save for a few dirty drifts in the shadows of the bluffs, the snow was all gone when, one morning a week or so after Leslie's departure, Helen went south under convoy of Jimmy Glaves to open school. The day was beautiful. Once more the prairies wore the burned browns of autumn, but to eyes that had grown to the vast snowscape during a half-year of winter the huge monochrome rioted in color. In fact it had its values. There a passing cloud threw a patch of black. Bowing to the soft breeze, last year's grass sent sunlit waves chasing one another down to the far horizon. Here and there a green stain on the edge of cropped hay-sloughs bespoke the miracle of resurrection, eternal wonder of spring, the young life bubbling forth from the decay and death of parent plants. Also the prospect was checkered with the chocolate of ploughed fields. On these slow ox-teams crawled, and the shouts of the drivers, the snapping crack of long whips, alternated as they drove along with the cheep of running gophers, the "pee-wee" of snipe, song of small birds. Noise was luxury after the months of frozen silence. The warm, damp air, the feel of balmy spring, the sunlight on the grasses were delightfully relaxing. Helen gave herself up to it—permitted sensation to rule and banish for the moment her tire and trouble. She chatted quite happily with the trustee, who, however, seemed gloomy and preoccupied.

A philosopher coined a phrase—"the persistence of the established"—to explain the survival of phenomena after the original cause lies dead in the past. It admirably defines the trustee's mental condition, which was a product of causes set up by Helen in these last months. Ignorant of the change in her feeling towards her English friends, he was vividly aware of the prejudice which her dealings with them had aroused in the settlers. In the beginning he and Flynn had earned severe criticism by giving her the school. Since the Leslie scandal he doubted their ability to keep her in it. At meeting, "bees," on trail, her name was being coupled with grins or gloomy reprobation according to the years and character of the critics. The women had plucked her character clean as a chicken, and were scattering their findings to the four winds. Just now, of course, the heavy work of seeding sadly interfered with these activities and diversions, but Jimmy looked for trouble in the slack season. If, in the mean time, she could be weaned from her liking for the English Ishmael, they might be able to weather the prejudice. To which end he steered the conversation to the greenness, credulity, and execrable agriculture of the remittance-people.

"I kain't see," he said, among other things, "what a fine gal like you kin see in 'em. They're dying stock, an' one o' these days the fool-killer will come along an' brain the hull biling. Brain, did I say? The Lord forgive me! Kedn't scratch up the makings of one outen the hull bunch."

Had she known his mind she might easily have laid his misgivings. Instead, she tried to modify his bitter opinion. "They are certainly inefficient as farmers. But as regards their credulity, don't you think it is largely due to a higher standard of business honor? Now when a Canadian trades horses he expects to be cheated, while they are only looking for a fair exchange."

Jimmy's face wrinkled in contemptuous disparagement. "Hain't that jes' what I said? A man that expects to get his own outen a hoss-trade kain't be killed too quick. It's tempting Providence to leave him loose. As well expect a nigger to leave a fat rooster as a Canadian to keep his hands off sech easy meat. 'Tain't human natur'. As for their honor—" He sniffed. "Pity it didn't extend to their morals."

"It is, indeed."

Afterwards they had many a tilt on this same subject. Smoking in his doorway of evenings, Jimmy would emit sarcasms from the midst of furious clouds, while she, as much for fun as from natural feminine perversity, took the opposite side. And neither knew the other's mind—until too late. But placated by her low answer, he now let the subject rest.

Three feet of green water was slipping over the river ice when they forded Silver Creek, and they had to dodge odd logs, the vanguard of Carter's drive. "Another week," the trustee remarked, "an' we couldn't have crossed."

He was right. That week a warm rain ran the last of the snows off several thousand square miles of watershed, feeding the stream till it waxed fat and kicked like the scriptural ox against the load Carter had saddled upon it. Snarling viciously, it would whirl a timber across a bend, then rush on with mad roar, leaving a mile of logs backed up behind. But such triumph never endured. With axe, pevees, cant-hooks, Bender and his men broke the jams; whereupon, as though peevish at its failure, the river swept out over the level bottoms and stranded timbers in backwaters among dense scrub.

To see this, the first log-drive on Silver Creek, the children who lived near the valley scuttled every day from school, and they would gaze, wide-eyed, at Michigan Red riding a log that spun like a top under his nimble feet, or watch the Cougar, shoulder-deep in snow-water, shoving logs at some ticklish point. Then they would hang about the cook's tent, while that functionary juggled with beans and bacon or made lumberman's cake by the cubic yard. Also there were peeps into the sleeping-tents, where men lay and snored in boots and wet red shirts, just as they had come out of the river. Of all of which they would prattle to Helen next day at school, reciting many tales, chief among them the Homeric narrative of the cutting of a jam—in which she had a special interest, and which proved, among other things, that Michigan Red was again at his old tricks.

It was Susie Flynn who brought this tale. Dipping down, one end of a bridge timber had stuck at an acute angle into the river-bed. A second timber swung broadside on against its end, then, in a trice, the logs had backed up, grinding bark to pulp under their enormous pressure. "Mr. Bender," Susie said, "he was for throwing a rope across from bank to bank so's they ked cut it from above. But one wasn't handy, an' while they was waiting a big red man comes up an' hands Mr. Carter the dare.

"'If you're scairt, gimme the axe an' I'll show you how we trim a jam in Michigan.'

"But Mr. Carter wouldn't give it. 'No,' he says, awful quiet, yet sorter funny, for all the men laughed—'no. They'll need you to show 'em again.' Then he walks out on the jam an' goes to chopping, with Mr. Bender calling for him to come back an' not make a damn fool of himself."

The scene had so impressed the child that she reproduced every detail for her pale audience of one—Carter astride of the key-log; his men, bating their breath with the "huh" of his stroke; Bender's distress; the cynical grin of Michigan Red. Once, she said, a floating chip deflected the axe, and he swore, easily, naturally, turning a smile of annoyance up to the bank. It drew no response from eyes that were glued to the log, now quivering under tons of pressure. A huge baulk, it broke with a thunderous report when cut a quarter through, and loosed a mile of grinding death upon the chopper.

Then came his progress through the welter. As the jam bore down-stream, timbers would dip, somersault, and thrash down on a log that still quivered under the spurn of his leap. Young trees raised on end and swept like battering-rams along the log he rode. Yet, jumping from log to log, he came up from death out of the turmoil in safety to the bank.

"Brought his axe erlong, too!" Susan triumphantly finished. "An' you should have jes' seen that red man—he looked that sick an' green through his wishy-washy smiling. But Mr. Carter! Ain't he a brave one? You must be awful proud of him, ain't you, Miss Helen?"

What could she answer but "Yes," though the trembling admission covered only a small portion of her psychology? Misery, fear, regret made up the rest. The remainder of that day dragged wearily by to a distant drone of lessons. She, who had tried to eject her husband from her life, shuddered as she thought how nearly her wish had come to accomplishment. Death's cold breath chilled resentment, expunged the memory of her months of weary waiting. It would return, but in the mean time she could think of nothing but his danger. Hurrying home, she asked Glaves to saddle her a horse, saying that she would try to gallop off a headache.

Heartache would have been more correct; but she certainly galloped, rode westward, then swung around north on a wide circle that brought her, at dusk of the short spring day, out on a bald headland that sheered down to the river. Beneath her lay the camp, with its cooking-fires flickering like wind-blown roses athwart the velvet pall of dusk, and in either direction from that effulgent bouquet a crimson garland of sentinel fires laid its miles of length along the valley.

Men moved about the nearer fires, appearing to her distant eyes as dim, dark shapes. But what sight refused hearing supplied. She heard the cook cursing his kettles with a volubility that would have brought shame on the witches in Macbeth—the imprecations of some lumber-jack at war with a threatened jam. Above all rose the voice of a violin, quivering its infinite travail, expressing the throbbing pain of the world; then, from far up the valley, a lonely tenor floated down the night.

"He went to cut a key-log an' the jam he went below,

He was the damnedest man that ever I did know."

 

Some lumberman was relieving his watch by chanting the deeds of a hero of the camps, and as, like a dove of night, the voice floated high over the river's growl through a score of verses, it helped to drive home upon Helen a sense of the imminent jeopardy Carter had passed through that day. While her beast pawed its impatience, she sat for an hour trying to pick his voice from the hum of the camp. It was easy to distinguish Bender's. His bass growl formed the substratum of sound. She caught, once, the Cougar's strident tones. Then, just as she was beginning to despair, a command, stern and clear, rose from the void.

"Lay on there with that pevee! Quick! or you'll have 'em piled to heaven! Here!—Bender, Cougar!—lend a hand! this fellow's letting them jam on him!"

She started as under a lash. All that day she had lived in a whirl of feeling, and, just as a resolvent precipitates a chemical mixture, the stern voice reduced her feeling to thought. Unfortunately, the tone was not in harmony with her soft misery. If it had been—well, it was not. Rather it recalled his contempt under the moonlight, her own solitary shame. Whirling her bronco, she cut him over the flank and galloped, at imminent risk of her neck, over the dark prairies in vain attempt to escape the galling recurrence of injured pride, the stings of disappointment.

"He doesn't care for me! He doesn't care for me!" It rang in her brain. Then, when she was able to think, she added, in obedience to the sex instinct which will not admit Love's mortality, "He never did, otherwise he couldn't have left me!" Her conclusion, delivered that night into a wet pillow, revealed the secret hope at the root of her disappointment. "I won't ride that way again."

But she did, and her changed purpose is best explained by a conversation between Carter and Bender as they stood drying themselves at the cook's fire after averting the threatened jam.

Carter began: "I reckon you can get along well enough without me. Of course I'd have liked to seen the drive down to the Assiniboin, but in another week the frost will be out enough to start prairie grading. I'll have to go. Let me see.... One week more on the creek, two on the Assiniboin—three weeks will put the last timber into Brandon. In less than a month you'll join me at the Prairie Portage."

Turning to bring another area of soaked clothing next to the fire, his face came under strong light. These seven months of thought and calculation had left their mark upon it—thinned and refined its lines, tooled the features into an almost intellectual cast. His mouth, perhaps, evidenced the greatest change, showing less humor, because, perhaps, self-repression and the habit of command had drawn the lips in tighter lines. Deeper set, his eyes seemed darker, while a straight look into their depths revealed an underlying sadness. Sternness and sadness, indeed, governed the face, without, however, banishing a certain grave courtesy that found expression in pleasant thanks when, presently, the cook brought them a steaming jug of coffee. Lastly, determination stamped it so positively that only its lively intelligence saved it from obstinacy. One glance explained Bender's answer to Jenny: "He's stiffer'n all hell!"—his attitude to Helen. In him will dominated the emotions. Summed, the face, with its power, dogged resolution, imperturbable confidence, mirrored his past struggles, gave earnest for his future battles.

A hint of these last inhered in a remark that Bender slid in between two gulps of coffee. "They're saying as the C.P. will never let you cross their tracks?"

Carter smiled. "Yes? Who's saying it?"

"Oh, everybody. An' the Winnipeg paper said yesterday as 'Old Brass-Bowels'"—he gave the traffic manager his sobriquet—"will enjoin you an' carry the case through the Dominion courts to the British privy council. The newspaper sharp allows that would take about two years, during which the monopoly would either buy out or bust your crowd by building a competing line."

This time Carter laughed heartily, the confident laugh of one sure of himself. "So that's what the paper said? Well, well, well! That scribe person must be something of a psychic. What's that? Oh, a fellow who tells you a whole lot of things he don't know himself. Now, listen." (In view of what occurred six months later, his words are worth remembering.)

"Courts or no courts, privy council to the contrary, we'll run trains across 'Brass-Bowel's' tracks before next freeze-up."

"Hope you do," Bender grinned. "But the old man ain't so very slow."

They talked more of construction—tools, supplies, engineering difficulties, the hundred problems inherent in railroad-building. Midnight still found them by the fire, that twinkled, a lone red star, under the enormous vault of night.

But, though interesting and important, in that the success of the enterprise involved the economic freedom of a province, the conversation—with one exception—is not germane to this story, which goes on from the moment that, two days later, a Pengelly boy carried the news of Carter's departure to Helen at school.

The exception was delivered by the mouth of Bender, as he rose, stretching with a mighty yawn, to go to his tent. "Of course it's none of my damn business, but do you allow to call at the school as you go down to-morrow?"

Carter's brows drew into swift lines, but resentment faded before the big fellow's concern. "I didn't reckon to," he said, gently; yet added the hint, "—since you're so pressing."

But Bender would not down. "Oh, shore!" he pleaded. "Shore! shore!"

Carter looked his impatience, yet yielded another point to the other's distress. "If Mrs. Carter wished to see me, I allow she'd send."

"Then she never will! she never will!" Bender cried, hitting the crux of their problem. "For she's jes' as proud as you."

With that he plunged into the environing darkness, leaving Carter still at the fire. From its glow his face presently raised to the valley's rim, dim and ghostly under a new moon, ridged with shadowy trees. It was only six miles to Glaves's place, a hop, skip, and jump in that country of distances. For some minutes he stood like a stag on gaze; then, with a slow shake of the head, he followed Bender.

"An' he ain't coming back till winter," the small boy informed Helen. "He'll be that busy with his railroading."

After two days of embittered brooding, Helen had come to consider herself as being in the self-same mood that had ruled her the January morning when Mrs. Leslie broke in on her months of loneliness. But this startling news explained certain contradictions in her psychology—for instance, her startings and flushings whenever her north window had shown a moving dot on the valley trail these last two days. Moreover, her pallor was hardly consistent with the assertion, thrice repeated within the hour, that even if he did come she would never, never, never forgive him now! Not that she conceded said contradictions. On the contrary, she put up a gorgeous bluff with herself, affected indifference, and—borrowed Jimmy's pony that evening and rode down to the ford.

Bender had built a rough bridge to serve traffic till the drive should clear the ford. Reining in at the nearer end, Helen looked down on the pool, the famous pool wherein her betrothal had received baptism by total immersion—at least she looked on the place where the pool had been, for shallows and sand-bar were merged in one swirl of yellow water. But the clay bank with its bordering willows was still there, and shone ruddily under the westering sun just as on that memorable evening. Here, on the straight reach, the logs floated under care of an occasional patrol. A rough fellow in blue jeans and red jerkin gave her a curious stare as he passed, whereafter there was no witness to her wet eyes, her rain of tears, convulsive sobbing, the break-up of her indifference—that is, none but her pony. Reaching curiously around, the beast investigated the grief huddled upon his neck with soft muzzle, rubbing and sniffing "cheer up," and she had just straightened to return his mute sympathy when a voice broke in on the bitter and sweet of her reverie.

"Well met, fair lady!"

Turning, startled, she came face to face with Molyneux. The heavy mud of the bottoms had silenced his wheels, and now he sat smiling at the sudden fires that dried up and hid her tears. "Not there yet," he answered her question as to his return home. "Do you imagine I could go by without calling? The school was closed, but a kid—a Flynn, by his upper lip—told me that you had ridden this way; and as it was Friday evening I judged you were going north to Leslie's, and so drove like Jehu on the trail of Ahab. Better turn your horse loose and get in with me. He'll go home all right. Why not?"

Again she shook her head. "Didn't Mr. Danvers write you—?" Remembering that a letter would have crossed him on the Atlantic, she stopped.

"What's the matter? No one dead? Worse?" He laughed in her serious face when she had told. "Oh, well, that's not so bad. After all, Leslie was an awful chump. If a man isn't strong enough to hold a woman's love he shouldn't expect to keep her."

He was yet, of course, in ignorance of all that had transpired in his absence—the house-party and the complete revulsion it had wrought in Helen's feelings. He knew nothing of her shame, vivid remorse, passion of thankfulness for her escape. To him she was still the woman, desperate in her loneliness, who had challenged his love two short months ago. Withal, what possessed him to afford that glimpse of his old nature? It coupled him instantly in her mind with her late unpleasant experience.

Not understanding her silence, he ran gayly on: "I can now testify to the truth of the saying, 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder.' How is it with you? Have I lost or gained?"

Laughing nervously, she answered: "Neither. We are still the same good friends."

He shook his head, frowning. "Not enough. I want love—must, will have it."

Any lingering misapprehension of the state of her feelings which she may have entertained now instantly vanished. How she regretted the weakness which entitled him to speak thus! She knew now. Never, under any conditions, could she have married him, but, warned by dearly boughten experience, she dared not so inform him. Frightened, she fenced and parried, calling to her aid those shifts for men's fooling that centuries of helplessness have bred in woman's bone.

"Well, well!" she laughed. "I thought you more gallant. I on horseback, you in a buggy. Love at such long distance! I wouldn't have believed it of you!"

It was a bad lead, drawing him on instead of away. "That is easily remedied. Get in with me—or, I'll tie up to that poplar."

She checked his eagerness with a quick invention. "No, no! I was only joking. No, I say! There's a man, a river-driver, just behind that bluff." How she wished there were! Praying that some one might come and so afford her safe escape, she switched the conversation to his journey, and when that subject wore out enthused over the sunset. How beautiful was the sky—the shadows that fell like a pall over the bottoms—the lights slow crawling up the headlands!

Preferring her delicate coloring to the blushes of the west, he feasted on her profile, delicately outlined against a golden cloud, until she turned. Then he brought her back to the point. "Well—have you forgotten?"

"What?" She knew too well, but the question killed a moment.

"The answer you promised me?"

She would dearly have loved to give it, to cry aloud: "I love! I love! I love—him, not you!" Ay, she would have flaunted it in all the proud cruelty of love—had she dared. Instead, she answered: "You forget! I am a married woman."

"No, I don't," he urged. "That is easily settled. Three months' residence across the line, in Dakota, and you are free of him."

"But not of myself."

"What do you mean?"

Alarmed by the sudden suffusion of venous blood on his face and neck, the reddish glow of his eye, she forged hasty excuses. "You see, I never thought of it—in that way. I must have time to get used to the idea. Won't you give me a week?" Her winning smile conquered. He had stepped his ponies alongside, and, snatching her hand, he covered it with kisses.

"By God, Helen, you must say yes! I'm mad—mad with love of you. If you refuse—"

"Hush!" She snatched away her hand as a man came in sight from behind a bluff, coming up-stream. "It is Mr. Bender!" she exclaimed—so thankfully. Then, mindful of her part, she added: "What a nuisance! I wonder if he—saw you?"

"Oh, he'll go by."

"No, no! Leave me the shreds of my character. You must go. Must! I said, sir."

"Very well. But remember—one week." Nodding significantly, he drove off, leaving her struggling with mixed feelings of relief and apprehension. She wondered if Bender had seen Molyneux kiss her hand.

Though in a few minutes of shy conversation Bender showed no knowledge of the cause that had set her to rubbing the back of her hand against her skirt, it nevertheless formed the subject of a rough scrawl that Baldy, the tote-trail teamster, delivered to Jenny in Lone Tree two days later. "You said I was to tell if I saw or heard anything more. Well, he is back, and—" Followed the kisses, and the scrawl ended, "If you kin do anything like you thought you ked, do it quick, else I shall have to tell the boss and give him a chance to look after his own."

Jenny did "do it quick," and thereby initiated a sequence of cause and event that was to entirely change the complexion of a dozen lives. An extract from her letter to Helen explains itself: "'Twas on the tip of my tongue to tell it to you every time he druv you home last winter, but 'twas so much easier for me to have you all believing as it was the man that went back to England. But 'twasn't, Miss Helen; 'twas him—Capen Molyneux."

Poor Jenny! She alone knew the magnitude of the man's offence against her weak innocence, but, small stoic, she had hugged the knowledge to her soul while waiting in dull patience for the punishment she never doubted. Immunity would have challenged the existence of the God on whom, despite small heresies of speech, she devoutly leaned. She read his sentence in that most tremendous curse of the oppressor, the One Hundredth and Ninth Psalm, the bitter cry of David: "For he hath rewarded me evil ... hatred for my love. When he shall be judged, let him be condemned; and his prayer become sin.... Let his children be continually vagabonds, seek their bread in desolate places. Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; the stranger despoil his labor. Let there be none to extend mercy to him.... Let his posterity be cut off and his generation blotted out ... that He may cut off the memory of them from the earth." Ay, she had believed that it would come to pass in some way—by lightning-flash, sudden sickness, a weary death. But she had never imagined herself as the instrument which this letter was to make her. What the confession cost her! Tears, shameful agonizings! Small wonder that, in her trembling confusion, she mis-shuffled notes and slid Helen's into Bender's envelope.

XIX

THE WAGES OF SIN

On the afternoon following Baldy's delivery of the shuffled notes, the May sun diffused a tempered warmth upon Molyneux's veranda, thereby intensifying certain comfortable reflections which accompanied his after-dinner pipe. He had material cause of satisfaction. To begin, his father's death placed him in possession of a sum which—a mere pittance in England—loomed large as a fortune in the thrifty settlements. Next, Messrs. Coxhead & Boxhead, exploiters of the Younger Son, and his London solicitors, had forwarded through that morning's mail indentures of apprenticeship to colonial farming of three more innocents at one thousand dollars a head per annum. This more than made up for the defection of Danvers, who, having learned how little there was to be learned in the business, was adventuring farming for himself. It also permitted the retention of the bucolic Englishman and wife, who respectively managed Molyneux's farm and house.

With their service assured, the life was more than tolerable, infinitely superior to that which he would have led at home. There he would have been condemned to the celibate lot of the younger son—to be a "filler" at dinners and dances, useful as the waiters, ineligible and innocuous to the plainest of his girl partners as an Eastern eunuch; or, accepting the alternative, trade, vulgar trade, his pampered wits would have come into competition with abilities that had been whetted to a fine edge through centuries on time's hard stone. Like a leaden plummet, he would have plunged through the social strata to his natural place in the scheme of things. Here, however, he was of some importance, a magnate on means that would hardly have kept up his clothes and clubs at home. A landed proprietor, moreover, he escaped the stigma of trade, and the resultant prejudice, should he ever return to live in England.

Then the life glowed with the colors of romance. His farm occurred on the extreme western edge of that vast forest which blackens the Atlantic seaboard, and so marches west and north over a thousand rugged miles to the limit of trees on the verge of the Barren Lands. Within gunshot the old ferocious struggle for life continued as of yore. Through timbered glades the wolf pursued and made his kill; echo answered the clash of horns as big elk fought for a doe; over lonely woodland lakes, black with water-fowl, the hoo-haugh crane spread ten feet of snowy pinion; across dark waters the loon's weird lament replied to the owl's midnight questioning. In winter the moose came down from their yards to feed at his prairie hay-stacks; any night he could come out on the veranda and thrill to a long howl or the scream of a lynx.

Opening before him now, the view was pleasantly beautiful. His house, a comfortable frame building, and big barn and corrals, all sat within the embrace of a half-moon that prairie-fires had bitten out from the heart of a poplar bluff. Southward his tilled fields ran like strips of brown carpet over the green earth rolls. Beyond them spread the Park Lands, with his cattle feeding knee-deep in the rank pasture between clump poplar. Further still, his horses scented the wind from the crest of a knoll, forming a dull blotch against the soft blue sky. These were growing into money while he smoked, and what of free grazing, free hay, and labor that reversed the natural order of things and paid for the privilege of working, he could see himself comfortably wealthy in not too many seasons. He would still be young enough for a run through Maiden Lane, London's Mecca for the stage and demi-mondaine. However, he put that thought behind him as being inconsistent with contemplation of the last thing necessary for perfect happiness—a pretty wife. Through the haze of sunlit tobacco reek, he saw himself in possession of even that golden asset, and thereafter his reflections took the exact color of those of the rich man before death came in the night: "Soul, soul! Thou hast much goods laid up in store! Eat, drink, take thine ease, and be merry!"

"It is really time that I settled," he murmured. "Thirty-four, my next birthday. By Jove! six more years and I shall be forty!"

The thought deflected his meditation into channels highly becoming to a person of the age he was contemplating, and from virtuous altitudes he looked back with something of the reproving tolerance that kindly age accords to youthful indiscretion. He maintained the "you-were-a-sad-dog" point of view till a sudden thought stung his virtuous complacency through to the quick. "Oh, well"—he ousted reproach with exculpatory murmur—"if the girl had only let me, I would have got her away from here and have done something handsome for her afterwards. But it was just as well—seeing that it passed off so quietly. I wonder how she managed it? Nobody seems to know." Then, ignoring the fact that every seeding brings its harvest, not knowing that the measure of that cruel sowing was even then coming home to him on a fast trot, he smothered conviction under the trite reflection, "A fellow must sow his wild oats."

Still the thought had marred his reverie, and, tapping his pipe on the chair-rung, he rose. He intended a visit to the barn, where his man was dipping seed wheat in bluestone solution to kill the smut; but just then a wagon, which had been rattling along the Lone Tree trail, turned into his private lane.

"It is Glaves," he muttered. "And his wife. What can they want? Must have a message—from her; otherwise they would never come here."

His thought did not malign the trustee, who had positively refused the commission till assured that its performance would sever Helen's relations with his natural foes. Yet he did not like it, and though retribution might have presented herself in more tragic guise, she could not have assumed a more forbidding face than that which he now turned down to Molyneux.

Than they two there have been no more violent contrast. Beak-nosed, hollow-eyed, the hoar of fifty winters environed the trustee's face, which wind and weather had warped, seamed, and wrinkled into the semblance of a scorched hide. He was true to the frontier type; and beside his bronzed ruggedness, the Englishman, though much the larger man, seemed, with his soft hands, smooth skin, and polished manner, to be small and effeminate.

As might be expected, the trustee refused Molyneux's invitation to put in and feed. "No; me an' the wife is going up to see her brother, north of Assissippii, an' we have thirty miles to make afore sundown."

He did, however, return curt answers to a few questions, though it would be a mistake to set his scant conversational efforts to the account of politeness. Rather they were the meed of malignance, for, while talking, he secretly exulted over the thought of Molyneux's coming disappointment. They would be gone a week, he said. The mails? Mrs. Carter would attend to sech letters as straggled in. She'd be there alone? Yes. Lonesome? Mebbe, but she was that well-plucked she'd laughed at the idea of spending her nights at Flynn's. A fine girl, sirree! Having accorded five minutes to Helen's perfections, the trustee drove off, but turned, as he rattled out of the yard, and nudged his wife, grinning, to look at Molyneux.

Stark and still as one of his own veranda-posts, the man stood and stared down at Jenny's pitiful letter. Across the top Helen had written, "This explains itself," and that scrap of writing represented three letters now torn up and consigned to the flames. The first antedated her receipt of Jenny's letter, and had run: "I want you to believe me innocent of coquetry, and you must pardon me if I have, by speech or action, seemed to sanction the hope you expressed the other day. I now perceive that it was my desperate loneliness that caused me to lean so heavily upon your friendship. I might have told you this personally but for certain experiences which have made me timid." There was more—regret, pleasant hope that the future might bring with it friendly relations, wishes for his happiness. This letter she had withdrawn from the mail to burn, along with one that was full of reproach, and a third that sizzled with indignation.

Suffused with dark, venous blood, Molyneux faced discovered sin. If ever, this was the accepted time for his attempts at reconstruction to bring forth fruit. He had pictured himself remorseful, but now that the wage of sin was demanded, he flinched like a selfish child, reneged in the game he had played with the gods. It was not in him to play a losing hand to the logical end. Instead of remorse, anger possessed him, for, tearing the letter, he cried in a gust of passion:

"She sha'n't throw me a second time! By God, she sha'n't!"

Needs not to follow his turbulent thought as he hurried out to the barn—his flushes, the paroxysms that set his face in the colors of apoplexy. Sufficient that flooding passion swept clean the superstructure of false morality, sophistical idealism, that he had erected on the rotten foundation of his vicious heredity. A minute of action explains a volume of psychology. Hitching his ponies, he drove madly southward, one idea standing clearly out in his whirl of thought—she would be alone that night.

Just about the time that Molyneux swung out on the Lone Tree trail, Helen arrived home from school with the eldest Flynn boy, who had volunteered to help her with the chores, her undertaking of which had made possible Mrs. Glaves's rare holiday. Under distress of their bursting udders, the cows had come in of their own accord from the fat, rank pastures, and now called for easement, with low, persistent "mooing," while she changed her dress. When she finally came out, with sleeves rolled above elbows that had regained their plump whiteness, they even fought for precedence, horning each other aside until the bell-cow made good her prerogative as leader; then frothing streams soon drew tinkling music from her pail. For his part, the boy fed pigs and calves, carried in the milk, then departed, leaving her to skim and strain, and wash pans and pails, itself no light task in view of Mrs. Glaves's difficult standards of cleanliness. That done and her supper eaten, she placed a lamp on the table and sat down to think over the events of the day.

A little fatigued, she leaned a smooth cheek on her hand, staring at the lamp, whose golden light toned while it revealed the changes these distressful months had wrought in her appearance. Her eyes were weary, her face tired; but if she was paler than of yore, the pallor was becoming, in that it was altogether a mental product and accorded well with her plump, well-nourished body. Her mouth, if wofully pouted in agreement with her sad thought, was scarlet and pretty as ever. In every way she was good as new.

At first she had found it extremely difficult to realize the full meaning of the letter which the Cougar had brought in from the camp early that morning. For Bender would trust it in no other hand; whereby he discovered not only his wisdom, but also an unexpected fund of tact in his rough messenger. Anticipating some display of emotion, the Cougar discharged his office in the privacy of Helen's own room; and if her red eyes afterwards excited Jimmy Glaves's insatiable curiosity, only the Cougar witnessed her breakdown—sorrowful tremblings, blushes, tearful anger. Not that she had doubted the girl's word. Only it had seemed monstrous, incredible, impossible, until, through the day, jots and tittles of evidence had filtered out of the past. She had connected Jenny's gloomings on the occasions that Molyneux drove her (Helen) home with his refusals to enter and warm himself after their cold drives. Even from the far days of the child's trouble, small significances had come to piece out the solid proof. So now nothing was left for her but bitter self-communion.

These days it did seem as though the fates were bent on squeezing the last acrid drop into her cup; for to the consciousness of error was now added knowledge of the utter worthlessness of her tempter. She burned as she recalled their solitary rides; writhed slim fingers in a passion of thankfulness as she thought of her several escapes; was taxing herself for her folly when a sudden furious baying outside brought her, startled, to her feet.

It was merely the house-dog exchanging defiances with a lone coyote; but—after she had satisfied herself of the fact—it yet brought home upon her a vivid sense of her lonely position. Sorry now that she had not gone home with the Flynn boy, she glanced nervously about the room, which, if small, was yet large enough to own shadowy corners. On top of the pigeon-holed mailing-desk, moreover, a few books were piled in such a way as to cast a shadow, the silhouette of a man's profile, upon the wall. Lean, hard, indescribably cruel, its thin lips split in a merciless grin as she moved the lamp, then suddenly lengthened into the semblance of a hand and pointing finger. Then she laughed, nervously, yet laughed because it indicated one of the hundred summonses, writs of execution, and findings in judgment that were pasted up on the walls.

"By these summons," Victoria Regina called upon her subject, James Glaves, to pay the moneys and taxed costs herein set forth under pain of confiscation of his goods and chattels. Usually recording debt and disaster, the instruments certified, in Jimmy's case, to numerous victories over implement trusts, cordage monopolies, local or foreign Shylocks. "Execution proof," in that his wife owned their real property in her own right, he could sit and smoke at home, the cynosure of the country-side, in seasons when the sheriff travelled with the thresher and took in all the grain. To each document he could append a story, the memory of such a one having caused Helen's laugh.

Indicating this particular specimen with his pipe-stem one evening, he had remarked: "Yon jest tickled the jedge to death. 'Mr. Glaves,' he says, when he handed it down, 'they've beat you on the jedgment, now it's up to you to fool 'em on the execution.' An' you bet I did."

Reassured, Helen returned to her musings, only to start up, a minute later, with a nervous glance over her shoulder at the window. Is there anything in thought transference? At that moment Molyneux was rattling down into the dark valley, and is it possible that his heated imaginings bridged the miles and impressed themselves upon her nervous mental surfaces? Or was it merely a coincidence of thought that caused her to see his face pressed against the black pane. Be this as it may, she could not regain her composure. Taking the lamp, she locked herself in her bedroom; then she sought that last refuge of frightened femininity, the invulnerable shield of the bedclothes.

XX

—IS DEATH

Though Silver Creek still ran fat and full, its sources were now nearly drained of flood-waters; any day might see it suddenly shrink to its usual summer trickle. Anticipating the event, Bender went miles down-stream that morning to superintend the building of the first dam, and so did not see the Cougar till that worthy came into camp at night from his own place at the tail of the drive.

This, the hour for changing shifts, was the liveliest of camp life—the social hour, one might term it, replete with a certain rough comfort. With them, from up and down river, the reliefs poured in, a stream of red shirts, drowning with oaths, song, and laughter the rattle of tin-ware in the cook-tent. Spread over fifteen miles of river, the arrival was equally irregular, and those who had already eaten were grouped about a huge camp-fire, the red glow of which enriched weathered skins and softened the corrugations of iron faces. After the cold and wet of the day, its warmth spelled luxury in capitals—luxury such as no millionaire may command from his palatial clubs, for pleasure may only be measured in degrees of health with accompanying intensity of sensation. As they moved and turned like huge red capons on an old-style spit, bringing fresh areas of soaked clothing under the blaze, they smoked and revamped the day's haps, its dips, jams, duckings, while the river—the river that yielded their hard bread in exchange for annual toll of a life or two—rebuked with angry growl their jokes and jestings.

A candle in Bender's tent showed the giant squatted upon his blankets, chin on hands, big torso hunched between knees and elbows. A night and day of heavy brooding had sunk his eyes; despair had cross-ploughed and deepened the furrows across his blue, scarred face. The attitude bespoke deepest dejection, and his look, when the Cougar entered, caused the latter's weird fierceness to flux in vast sympathy.

"Well?" Bender inquired.

The Cougar pulled a paper out of his shirt-bosom. "Here's your letter that she got by mistake."

It was only a scrap to say that she would do her best—she had done it, too, poor girl!—that and an admonition to be careful in drying his clothes at nights. Usually the warning would have dissolved Bender's grimness, but it caused no relaxation of his gravity.

"How did she take it?"

"Hard. Cried an' said as 'twas more'n she deserved at the little gal's hands. Blamed herself—dreadful cut up. Seems, too, as 'twasn't necessary, as she'd already mailed Mr. Man his walking-papers."

"Too late—now. It's done."

The Cougar looked awkwardly down upon him. Pity had been foreign to their rough comradeship; it was, indeed, nearest of kin to shame; the words of sympathy choked in his throat. "Come, come!" he presently growled. "Chipper up! 'Tain't any worse than it was."

A convulsion seized and shook the big body. "You don't know, Cougar. You don't know what it is—" He stopped, aghast at the sudden appalling change in the other. He had straightened from his crouch, and his eyes flared like blue, alcohol flames in his livid face. As at the touch of a secret spring, the man's fierce taciturnity raised, exposing the tortured soul behind.

"I—don't?" The whisper issued like a dry wind from drawn lips. "Me?—that saw my wife an' baby—" Though frontiersmen tell, shivering, of the horror he mentioned, no pen has been found callous enough to set it forth on paper. "God, man!" His arms snapped outward and his head fell forward in the attitude of the crucifixion.

"Cougar!" Bender grasped his shoulder. "Cougar! Cougar, man! I'd forgotten."

But as one in a trance the man went on: "It's always with me—through these years—day an' night. I'd have killed myself—long ago—on'y whenever I'd think of that, she'd come—sweet an' smiling—with a shake of her pretty head. She wouldn't let me do it." The thought of her smile seemed to calm him, and he continued, more quietly: "I never could make out why 'twas done to her. A sky-pilot tol' me onct as 'twas the will o' God, but I shocked him clean out of his boots.

"'I'll know on the Jedgment Day, will I?' I asks him. 'Shorely,' he answers, pat. 'An' I'll be close in to the great white throne you was talking about?' He nods. 'Then do you know what I'll do?' I asks him again. 'If I find out as how that God o' yourn ordered that done to my little gal, I'll stick a knife into Him an' turn it round.'

"At that he turned green an' tried to saddle the dirty business onto the devil. But, Lordy, he didn't know. She does, though, else she wouldn't come smiling. She knows; so I've allus reckoned as if she could bear her pain I can worry through to the end. There! there! I'm all right again. You didn't go to do it. An', after all, I don't know but that you are right. For while my gal's at peace, yourn has to live out her pain. It's puzzling—all of it. Now there's him. Where does he come in? What about him?"

"What about him?" Bender's bulk seemed to swell in the dim light to huge, amorphous proportions. "That's simple. He's got to marry her."

What the conclusion had cost him!—the suffering, self-sacrifice. To the sophisticated, both sacrifice and conclusion may seem absurd, provoking the question as to just how wrong may be righted by the marriage of a clean girl with an impure man; yet it was strictly in accord with backwoods philosophy. As yet the scepticism of modernity had not infected the plains, nor had the leprosy of free thought rotted their creeds and institutions. To Bender's simplicity, marriage appealed as the one cure for such ills as Jenny's, while both he and the Cougar had seen the dose administered with aid of a Colt's forty-five. So, absurd or not, the conclusion earned the latter's instant approval.

There was something pathetic, too, in the serious way in which, after discussing ways and means, they spoke of Jenny's future. "She'll be a lady," the Cougar commented. "Too big to look at you an' me."

Bender's nod incarnated self-effacement, but he bristled when the Cougar suggested that Molyneux might not treat her rightly, and his scowl augured a quick widowhood in such premises. "We'll go up for him to-morrow."

"An' after it's all over?"

"Oregon for you an' me—the camps an' the big timber."

The big timber! The Cougar's bleak face lit up with sudden warmth. Giant pines of Oregon woods; rose-brown shade of cathedral redwoods; the roaring unrest of lacy cataracts; peace of great rivers that float the rafts and drives from snow-capped Rockies down to the blue Pacific; these, and the screaming saw-mills that spew their product over the meridians, the pomp of that great piracy; the sights, sounds, resinous odors that the Cougar would never experience again were vividly projected into his consciousness.

"Man!" He drew a deep breath. "It can't come too quick for me. I'm sick of these plains, where a man throws a shadow clean to the horizon. I'm hungry for the loom of the mountains." After a pause, he added, "Coming back to yourself—have you eaten to-day?"

The language he accorded to Bender's negative would shake the type from a respectable printer's fingers, yet, in essence, was exactly equivalent to the "You poor dear!" of an anxious wife or mother. Striding off, he quickly returned with coffee and food, which Bender was ordered to eat under pain of instant loss of his liver, lights, and sundry other useful organs. Then, being besotted in his belief in action as a remedy for mental disorders, he suggested a visit to the turn above the bridge where the logs had jammed twice that afternoon.

Another day would put the last log under the bridge and see the temporary structure dismantled and afloat; but though only the tail of the drive remained above, the jams had backed it up for a couple of miles, so that the logs now filled the river from bank to bank. They floated silently, or nearly so, for the soft thud of collisions, mutter of grinding bark, merged with the low roar of the stream. But a brilliant northern moon lit the serried array; when the men crossed they could pick the yellow sawed ends from the black of the mass.

Under urge of the same thought, they paused on the other side and looked back along the northern trail. With the exception of the cook, whose pots proclaimed his labors with shrill tintinnabulation, the camp now slept, its big watch-fire burning red and low. Beneath that bright moon scrub, bluff, scour, ravine, and headland stood out, lacking only the colors of day, and they could see the trail's twin ruts writhing like black snakes across the ashen bottoms into the gorge by which it gained the prairies.

The Cougar's quick eye first discerned a moving blot, but Bender gave it identity. "That's shore Molyneux's rig. He'd a loose spoke when he went by t'other day. Hear it rattle."

It was clear and sharp as the clatter of a boy's stick along a wooden paling, and the Cougar whispered: "It's sure him. Where kin he be going? Do you reckon—"

The same thought was in Bender's mind. "An' she there alone. No one ever starts out for Lone Tree this time o' night." After a grim pause, he added, "But that's where he's going."

A strident chuckle told that the Cougar had caught his meaning. "That's right. Saved us trouble, hain't he? Kind of him. Jes' step into the shadow till he's fairly on the bridge."

If they had remained in the moonlight he would never have seen them. Dusk had brought no surcease of his mad thought; rather its peace stimulated his excitement by shutting him out from the visible world. What were his thoughts? It takes a strong man to face his contemplated villanies. From immemorial time your scoundrel has been able to justify his acts by some sort of crooked reasoning, and Molyneux was no exception to the rule. "Why do you muddy the water when I am drinking?" the wolf asked of the lamb. "How could I, sir, seeing that the stream flows from you to me?" the lamb filed in exception. "None of your insolence!" the wolf roared as he made his kill.

In the same way Molyneux excluded from thought everything that conflicted with his intention—the first rudeness that lost him Helen's maiden confidence, his insidious attempts to wean her from her husband, her undoubted right to reject his advances. He twisted his own crime to her demerit. "She didn't know about that when she was drawing me on!" he exclaimed, whenever Jenny's letter thrust into his meditation. "Why should it cut any ice now? It is just an excuse to throw me a second time. But she sha'n't do it, by God! no, she sha'n't, she sha'n't! She's a coquette!—a damned coquette! I'll—" Then a red rage, a heaving, tumultuous passion, would drown articulate thought so that his intention never took form in words. But one thing is certain—he was thoroughly dangerous. In that mood Helen would have fared as illy at his hands as the lamb at the paws of the wolf.

The sudden stoppage of his ponies, midway of the bridge, broke up his reverie. As the moon struck full in his own face, he saw the two men only as shadows; but there was no mistaking Bender's bulk, and, after a single startled glance, Molyneux hailed him. "Is that you, Mr. Bender?"

"It's me, all right. Where might you be heading for?"

It was the usual trail greeting, preliminary to conversation, but Molyneux sensed a difference of tone, savor of command, menace of authority, that galled his haughty spirit. Vexed by the impossibility of explanation, his disdain of the settler tribe in general would not permit him to lie; from which conflict of feeling his stiff answer was born.

"I don't see that it is any of your business."

"You don't?" Equally stiff, the reply issued from the huge, dim shape. "Well, I'll make it mine. You're going to Lone Tree."

Puzzled, Molyneux glanced from Bender's indefiniteness to the Cougar's dim crouch. He was not afraid. In him the courage of his vices was reinforced by enormous racial and family pride—the combination that made the British fool the finest of officers until mathematics and quick-firing artillery replaced the sword and mêlée. Mistaking the situation, he attempted to carry it off with a laugh.

"What have you chaps been drinking? Here; pass the bottle."

"Not till we wet your wedding," the Cougar interjected, dryly.

Astonished now, as well as puzzled, Molyneux yet rejected a sudden suspicion as impossible. Out of patience, galled by this mysterious opposition, he said, testily: "Are you crazy? I do not intend—"

"—To go to Lone Tree," Bender interrupted. "Yes, we know. You was heading up for Glaves's place."

Seriously disconcerted, Molyneux hid it under an ironical laugh. "I must say that I marvel at your intimate knowledge of my affairs. And since you are so well posted, perhaps you can tell me why I am going to Lone Tree?"

"I kin that." The huge, dim figure, with its crouched, attendant shadow, moved a pace nearer, then the man's stern bass launched on the quivering moonlight, reciting to an accompaniment of rushing waters this oldest of woodland sagas. Beginning at the night he picked Jenny up on the trail, he told all—Jed Hines's cruel fury; birth and burial of his, Molyneux's child; the outcast girl's subsequent illness; Helen's kindness; the doctor's philanthropy; the kindly conspiracy that protected her from social infamy. "An' us that saw her through her trouble," he finished, "are bound to see her righted."

If the lime-lights of history and fiction were thrown more often upon motives and psychology, and less on deeds and action, characters would not appear in such hard colors of black and white. It were false to paint Molyneux irredeemably black. "Your child!" He winced at the phrase, and, perhaps for the first time, an inkling of the enormity of his offence was borne in upon him. His child? It was the flesh of his own loins that had suffered midnight burial at the hands of Carter and the kindly priest! The thought struck with enormous force—then faded. For back of him was that vicious generation whose most cultured exponent wrote to his own son that a seduction or two was necessary to the education of a gentleman. Through pride of family, the dead hands of haughty and licentious forebears reached to throttle remorse.

Was he to be called to account by common settlers, the savages of the scornful English phrase? Anger colored his next remark: "Waited till you were good and ready, didn't you? Your diligence falls short of your zeal, my friends, or—"

"Don't flatter yourself," Bender sternly interrupted. "You kin thank her for the delay. If we'd known, you'd long ago have been either dead or married. But she kep' her own counsel till she thought as some one else's welfare called her to speak. 'Twasn't needed. T'other'd already found you out for herself."

Molyneux blinked under the savage contempt, but answered, stiffly enough: "Now listen. I deny nothing, though she received attentions from one of my pupils, and it might very well have been—"

"You lie!"

The lie never comes so unpleasantly as when asserting a truth; so, though he knew that he had lied, Molyneux's eyes glinted wickedly, his hand tightened on his whip. A glance right and left showed him the river, only a light hand-rail between him and dark waters. There was not room to turn; the giant blocked the way. Under constraint, he spoke quietly: "Neither do I profess sorrow. What is done is done. If the girl had taken me into her confidence—"

"Likely, wasn't it?"

A line of Jenny's letter, a damnable fact, flashed into Molyneux's mind, but he went on: "—I'd have taken care of her—am willing to do so yet, in a certain way. Marriage, of course, is out of the question. We are unfitted for each other—"

"No one's denying that."

He ignored the sarcasm. "—could not be happy together."

"Who said anything about your living together?"

The interruptions were most disconcerting, but he continued: "Now if you, as her representatives, self-appointed or otherwise"—he could not refrain from the sarcasm—"if you will name a sum—"

"What?"

Twenty rods away the camp now slept, steeped in the drug of labor—all but the cook, who came running out of his tent and was thus witness of the event. Looking up-stream, he saw them blackly silhouetted against the moonlit sky, a shadow show, play of marionettes upon the bridge.

"Out of my way! Let go!"

Followed the swish and crack of Molyneux's whip, as he lashed Bender over the face, then fell to flogging his horses. But stinging pain freed in the giant those bulldog passions that had made him king of the camps in other years. He hung on, while the plunging beasts drowned the river's roar in thunder of iron hoofs. Unable to break his grip, they reared—their smooth, elongated bodies conveying to the cook an odd impression of slugs reaching upward through moonlit dew—then, stooping quickly under the nigh beast, the mad giant took its full weight on his shoulder and with a mighty heave sent team and rig crashing sideways off the bridge.

A quick leap saved Molyneux—for the moment. All through the action had moved with kinetoscopic quickness, and it accelerated so that the cook could scarcely establish its sequence. Like an angry bull, Bender shook the hair from his eyes; then, as he rushed, came a report; a puff of smoke curled bluely up from Molyneux's hand; the giant thudded at length on the bridge. Followed a yell, a piercing cry suitable to the animal after which the Cougar was named. As Bender fell, he rushed. The pistol spoke again. While the cook was running twenty yards, a black, furious tangle writhed over the bridge, and as he came darting out from behind a bunch of willow scrub he saw that it was gone. Bender lay alone under the moonlight.

Now this was the cook of a lumber-camp, equivalent to saying that he was a man of parts. He had cooked on B Contract, Superior Construction Division of the Trunk Line, and so had seen a liberal sprinkling of his grumblers go into the dump—a grisly foundation for track, surely yet what better could the builders of the road desire than to be cradled under the ties and sleep, sleep, sleep, to the thundering lullaby of the fast express? Which intimacy with the pale terror is responsible for his prompt action in these unusual premises. Molyneux's bullet had merely grazed Bender's temple. He rose, staggering, as the cook made the bridge, and, seeing that he was too sick and dizzy to handle the situation, the latter took it into his own able hands.

As before mentioned, a drive camp sleeps in its boots, and the shots had brought a score out from their sleep on a hunt for causes. "Man drove offen the bridge!" he yelled. "An' Cougar went after him! They're both under the drive! Scatter down-stream an' skin your eyes for bubbles!"

Thus, on the spur of the moment, the cook wrote history—as accurately, perhaps, as the run of historians; for after the drive once closed serried ranks over the struggling men, they were never seen again, so none could rise with an opposing theory. When, a few days later, the water was drawn off at the first dam, the horses floated out on the shallows. But the men—? The river carried them to its secret places; buried them in some scour or pothole, free at last, one of his passions—the incubus of his generations—the other from his pain. That night, if such things be, the Cougar was joined, after his years of suffering, in perfect knowledge with his "little girl."

XXI

PERSECUTION

Yes, the cook made history, for though the event furnished gossip for the ninety days which, on the lonely frontier, corresponds with the world's nine days' wonder, his story was never questioned. The truth lay buried between him and Bender, and if either visited her grave, it was never in company with the other. Up to the time that delirium tremens removed the cook from the snows of a Rocky Mountain camp to a sphere where pots are said to boil with or without watching, Bender never knew just how much or little he really knew.

To others the event appeared under varying complexions. Helen and Jenny were shocked at Molyneux's death, the latter without astonishment, though her firm belief that sin had at last received its full wage was without trace of malignance; both were sorrier than they had any right to be; and both mourned the Cougar. As for the settlers, they regarded the affair rather in the light of a special dispensation of Providence. Flocking to the auction of Molyneux's effects a month later, they caballed against high bidding, paid for chattels they bought at ridiculous prices in long-time notes, for that was the "Black Year," and throughout Manitoba nothing could be sold for cash.

Poverty, sociologists tell us, is the mother of crime, and as those hard times subsequently influenced the settlers in their attitude towards Helen, they are surely worthy of mention. To begin, the country was practically bankrupt. The frost of the preceding fall had left the wheat useless, and but for the fact that the provincial government had imported and distributed free seed, not an acre of grain would have been sown that year. The seriousness of the crisis may be gauged by the legislature's further action in enacting an exemption law that practically excluded all of a farmer's goods and chattels from legal execution. This was good, but in that it was not, nor could be made retroactive, it benefited only the new-comers and left the pioneers, who had spent their little all opening up the country, still liable to foreclosure and execution.

On the northern settlers times had borne particularly hard. During boom years all had assumed loan indebtedness, and whereas creditors had bided patiently successive lean seasons on the chance of a branch railroad and bumper crop, now that the country's credit, its very future was trembling in the balance; implement-men and store-keepers raced with twenty-per-cent. Shylocks to grab what they could from the wreck. That spring the sheriff of Brandon was the busiest man in the country-side. He and his deputies sowed summonses, executions, foreclosures broadcast over the land. Wolves of the law, they harried the farmers till the optimism of the brilliant emigration pamphlets was swamped, submerged beneath inky pessimism. Small wonder that—coupled with idleness, breeder of mischief, in the slack season that Glaves feared between seeding and haying—small wonder that some of the rancor bred by hard conditions should be vented upon Helen.

She may be said to have stood in an uncomfortable position as lightning conductor between this cloud of spleen and the earth, upon which it should have properly been discharged. And looking back, one may see the storm gathering over her fair head, observing in its approach all of the natural phenomena: first the cold wind, social disfavor, the whispers; next, heavy drops thudding in the dust, the snubs and slights; lastly, thunder, lightning, rain, downright persecution.

The whispers, of course, she did not hear, but she could not overlook the difference in trail greetings, which were either far too warm or much too cool, according to the years and disposition of the greeter. Coldness was endurable, but the rude stares, conscious laughter of the younger boors often caused her to fly the hot colors of angry shame. Yet even this hurt less than the sudden, shy suspicion of her pupils. Whereas they were wont to hang upon her skirts, they now held aloof in play hours, and ran straight home from school.

"Mother says I'm not to walk with you any more," one tot explained her haste. How that stung! Having only the faintest of ideas, little more than a suspicion of the strength and nature of this uncomfortable prejudice, she resented it as bitter injustice, and held a proud head until a thing happened that almost broke her spirit.

Of all the settler women, Ruth Murchison was the one girl with whom Helen had been, or could be, on anything like terms of intimacy. Quiet and thoughtful, Ruth had gone through the English common schools, and had taken the Junior Oxford Examination, to which passable education a taste for good reading had formed a further bond. Wherefore Helen was delighted when, one day, news drifted into the post-office that Ruth was to be married to the Probationer, the young minister who preached Merrill's funeral sermon.

Borrowing a beast from Glaves, she rode north one evening to offer congratulations, and as the Murchisons lived several miles north of Silver Creek Valley, night fell while she still lacked half a mile of the homestead. From that distance the windows' yellow blaze advised of fuss and busy preparation. Drawing nearer, voices, laughter, the whir of an egg-beater, clatter of cooking-gear came down the trail merrily freighting the dusk. Infected by the cheer, she gave a shrill halloa, spurred to a gallop, and drew in at the door with a clatter of hoofs.

"Ruth! Oh, Ruth!" she called. "Ruth-y!"

Instantly the voices hushed, then, after an uncomfortable pause, she heard Mrs. Murchison say, in thin, constrained tones, "Mrs. Carter is out there, father."

Followed a shuffling, and the door opened revealing Murchison framed in yellow light. Stout, robust, ruddy, with that mottled-beef English complexion, he came of that stout yeoman stock whose twanging long-bows sounded France's knell at Crecy and Poitiers, of that rich blood the slow drainage of which to her colonies has left England flabby, ensemic, flaccid. He had not wished to leave, but the motherland had become industrial without further place for her yeoman. Over fields that were enriched by the tilth of thirty Murchison generations, a thousand factories were depositing soot and blighting acids. American wheat and beeves had wiped out profits, while enormous rents ate up the farmer's substance. So Murchison, England's best, had become partner in exile with the remittance-men, her worst. Undoubtedly, there was no symptom of remittance weakness in the scowl he turned on Helen.

Behind him Helen could see Ruth, red and embarrassed, hanging her head over the egg-beater. A half-dozen girls and neighboring women, who had come in to help in the baking and brewing, were exchanging meaning glances across the table.

"Ruth? She's well," Murchison answered her question.

She knew what to expect now, but nerved herself to face the situation. "Can't I see her?"

"No."

"Why?"

"Because she don't run with your kind."

"Oh, Mr. Murchison!"

He felt the heart sickness, yet glowered relentlessly, for it had been the habit of his forebears to thrash their women into good behavior. He itched to do it now for the good of her soul, but, lacking the power, he growled:

"If you don't like it—keep better company."

If he had been alone, she would undoubtedly have challenged his reproach and, while clearing herself in his eyes, have turned away future trouble. But a titter from within fired her pride. "Very well, please give her my congratulations." And turning she rode away.

Good-hearted as rough, Murchison stared after, stricken with sudden compunction. He knew that she must have intended to stay the night, and here she was a timorous woman riding out into the darkness. "Here!" he shouted. "Come back!"

But she held on, eyes snapping, cheeks aflame, throat convulsed under the strain of suppressing imminent hysteria. Beyond earshot she broke down, venting her injured loneliness in broken speech between bursts of sobbing. "They hate—me. Condemn me—because—my husband left me. It wasn't my—fault—that is, altogether." She hastily corrected herself. "Of course—I failed him. But I was—sorry—would have done better—if he had—given me a chance. He's so stern—and stiff—" She would not even let this undoubted truth pass unmodified. "But then—he thought I didn't—love him. Perhaps I didn't—then. I was a little fool. But I do! I do!" She stretched wild arms to the darkness. "I do! I do! I do!" But the velvet night returned nothing to her embrace and she collapsed, sobbing, upon the pony's neck. Still the cry did her good, tided over hysteria, composed and quieted her so that she was able to meet the trustee's glance of spectacled inquiry as she entered the cabin.

Kindliness as well as curiosity inhered in his glance, for, besides the cash and educational prestige which she had brought to his cabin, Jimmy had come to like her for herself. The frost and grizzle of fifty winters thawed under his smile as he threw a Winnipeg paper across the table. "Catch! Just kem in. Yes, there's a story 'bout him. Now, don't eat it."

Metaphorically, she did, indeed, devour the article, and while she read the trustee watched with something of puzzled astonishment the lovely tide that flowed out from the lace at her neck, and drowned her pale creams to the roots of her hair. He had ample opportunity for study as the article was long. Just then Carter's line, with its promise of competition, focussed the interest of the entire province, and some enterprising scribe had risen to the opportunity afforded by a visit west of the general manager of the trunk line, to interview him upon the probable action of his road in proceedings to condemn a crossing of its right of way. Time, however, had not abated one iota of the manager's sphinx like quality. While affable, he had declined to discuss railroad politics, remarking that his company did not "cross bridges before they were built." Interviewed in his turn upon the significance of the aforesaid remark, Carter had ventured the opinion that the trunk-line people would not oppose the crossing, and thereby had provoked a flaming editorial upon his artlessness.

"If the people behind Mr. Carter imagine that the greediest monopoly in history will loose its grip on this province till the law's crowbar pries off its fingers one by one, they are mightily mistaken," the editor hotly declared. "Forewarned is forearmed, and we hereby present them, gratis, with this piece of information—while they are running their grades in peaceful confidence that will be most appropriate in the innocent age when lion and lamb lie down together, the monopoly is gathering men and means, preparing to crush their enterprise by force should the crooked enginery of the law fail its purpose. Why else have five hundred extra men been distributed among the sections on either side of the proposed crossing? Why does a gravel-train stand there permanently across the proposed right of way? Soon Mr. Carter will receive unmistakable answer to these questions."

"He's dead right there, that editor man," the trustee said when, all rosy red, Helen looked up from her reading. "Old Brass-Bowels was born with a nateral insight into the nater of a dead cinch."

"But won't the law support my"—she paused, then proudly finished—"my husband? Can't he compel a crossing?"

"The law?" Sniffing, Jimmy indicated the legal patchwork on the wall with a comprehensive sweep of his pipe. "The law said as I was to pay them, but did I? Humph!"

"But they'll hardly dare to fly in the face of the province? Public opinion is a great moral force." She quoted a sentence from the editorial with gusto.

"Yes, but 'tain't much of a club. Did you ever see one of my hawgs stan' aside, even when he was full, to let another have a go at the trough? Not till I hit him on the snout. Well, they ain't agoin' to cross the trunk line these two years, an' for my part I don't care if they never cross."

"Why?" Her eyes dilated widely. "Wouldn't a competing line benefit you—all of the province?"

Nodding, he regarded her from half-shut eyes. "Oh, I ain't expecting to walk on gold this side o' the pearly gates. As for my reasons, they ain't a mile away from here. I'm not wishing too much success for a man that deserts his wife."

Touched and very much flushed as to the face by his genuine, if crabbed sympathy, the Reasons yet shook her head and spoke up for the recreant husband stoutly as she had defended him against herself. She made, however, small headway against his obduracy.

"Well, that's the way I see it. By-the-way," he added, heading off a disposition for further argument, "did you see the evangelist? Pitched his tent over by Flynn's. You want to go. Beats a three-ring circus when old man Cummings hits up to his gait."

"Jimmy! Jimmy!" His wife looked up from her ironing; then daunted, perhaps, by his twinkle, she addressed Helen. "He hadn't orter talk that away, my dear. If Mr. Cummings does go on the rampage a bit when he gets het up, at least he's sincere. As for him—" She turned a severe eye on her husband. "We'll get him yet."

"Yes, I see myself. Her idea of heaven"—he shrugged at the ironing-board—"is an eternal class-meeting with everybody giving their experience—love-feast she calls it. I like something solider. Give me plenty to eat, a pipe by a warm fire, an' something to read, an' I'll sign away my harp an' crown." Ignoring his better-half's remark that he would not lack the fire, he finished: "She's going. Wouldn't miss a meeting. Kedn't keep her away with a club. So if you'd alike to see some fun—"

"If 'twas jes' out of curiosity I'd ask her to stay at home," his wife interrupted. "But she's not that kind, an' I'll be glad to take her."

"If you will?" Helen assented, and so, returning to the analogy, placed herself directly beneath the leaden belly of the lowering storm.

XXII

DENUNCIATION

A molten sun was smouldering in the ashes of day when, the following evening, Helen with Mrs. Glaves, drove up to the gospel-tent. It still lacked half an hour of meeting-time, so, while her companion joined the early arrivals who were passing time by holding a service of song inside, Helen remained in the buckboard and watched the sunset, observed herself by a group of remittance-men and a scattering of settler youths who sprawled near by on the grass.

Enthralled, she scarcely saw them; had eyes only for the ruby sun that stained the prairies with amber incandescences, the ribbed glories of the fiery cloud pillars that seemed to uphold the darkling vault above. As the orb slid into his blankets of rose and gold, shy stars peeped down at the violet shadows that crawled slowly up the slopes and knolls; over all fell the hush of evening.

It was one of the moments when the Riddle of Infinity, Puzzles of Time, Space, Eternity appear as concrete though unthinkable realities; weigh down and oppress the soul with a sense of its insignificance. Against the black-blue vault the stars loomed as worlds; she could see beyond, around them. Through vast voids planets were rushing on their courses; suns with attendant systems swung on measured arcs obedient to—what? ... A thin minor, querulous plaint stole out on the hush:

"Poor crawling Worm of Earth,

A Child of Sin am I—"

 

It was an honest attempt at the riddle, but its incongruity, futile insufficiency caused her to shrug with sudden annoyance. She wondered if, somewhere in planetary space, other "pinches of sentient dust" were equally afflicted with a sense of their central importance in the scheme of things. The apologetic whine spoiled the sunset; she impatiently turned to watch the arrivals—the wagons, buck-boards, horsemen—that were streaming in on every trail.

"How are you, Mrs. Carter?"

It was Danvers, Molyneux's old pupil. An honest lad and merry, she always liked him, and now made him welcome to the seat beside her, and laughed at his fire of chaff. Indicating Cummings, whose ovine expression had sustained no diminution since the day he bearded the general manager, he remarked: "He's great, Mrs. Carter; puts it all over Henry Irving. And there's the sky pilot! What a Jovelike port!"

There was, of course, little wit and less humor in his chaff, but his intentions were honorable, so, ignoring the sour looks of the arriving settlers, she gave him smiling attention up to the moment they entered the tent together, and so prepared the way for what followed. For though, going in, she left levity without, her modest and devout bearing could not mitigate her offence in allying herself with the English Ishmael. It was aggravated, moreover, by her remaining with him in close proximity to the remittance crowd on the back benches. Thereafter nothing could save her; she remained a target for sour glances throughout the service.

This was on the usual pattern—rousing hymns, prayer, testimony, and exhortation—then when groans and ejaculations testified to the spiritual temperature, the evangelist, a stout man of bull-like build, proceeded to cut off yards of the "undying worm," and to measure bushels of the "fire that quencheth not" for the portion of such as refused to view the problems of Infinity through aught but his own wildly gleaming spectacles. His discourse, indeed, bristled with those cant terms which, while entirely devoid of meaning, are still eminently conducive of religious hysteria, and his efforts were the more successful because of the absence of the Probationer, a thoughtful young fellow whose rare common-sense could be depended upon to prevent religious emotion from degenerating into epilepsy.

Lacking his wholesome presence, the evangelist paced the platform under the yellow lantern-light, stretching long, black arms, hovering over the people like some huge, dark bird as he pleaded, threatened, thundered, launching his fiery periods on a groaning wave of "amens" and "hallelujahs." As he went on, painting heaven and hell into his lurid scheme of things, sighs and exclamations grew in volume, flooding feeling pulsed through the audience, wild settler youths, who had come to scoff, exchanged uneasy glances on the back benches, sure sign of a coming stampede.

This was the psychological moment, and, skilled in his trade, the revivalist pounced upon it. Stilling the groaning chorus with upheld hand, he solemnly invited all who were not against the Lord Jesus to stand, an old revival trick and one which now, as always, turned. For, as before said, the plains were not yet infected with the leprosy of agnosticism, and, Episcopalians to a man, even the Englishmen were not willing to pose as the open enemies of God.

Once standing and pilloried in the public eye, it was but a question of minutes until the back benches began to yield up penitents. One by one the settler youths were gathered into the mourning bench, until at last Helen stood alone with the Englishmen.

"Come ye! Come ye to the Lord!" The preacher pleaded, but, haughty and coldly constrained, the remittance-men ignored the invitation; and so, for the space of a thunderous hymn of praise, gnostic civilization and the fervid frontier faced each other across the middle benches. From that dramatic setting anything might come. Moment, feeling, atmosphere, all pointed to the event that came to pass as the hymn died.

Leaping upon a bench, and so adding its height to unusual tallness, a woman pointed a warning hand at the unbelievers. Thin, family-worn, and naturally cadaverously yellow, she was now flushed with the fever of delirium. "In that day," she screeched, "the Tares shall be separated from the Wheat and cast with the grass into the oven!" Then, while her finger indicated man after man, she raised the grewsome hymn:

"'I heard the Sinners Wailing, Wailing, Wailing,

I heard the Sinners Wailing on that Great Day!'"

 

Travelling around the benches, her skinny finger finally fastened on Helen, and, as the lugubrious refrain came to an end, she burst forth in tremendous paraphrase: "Beware ye of the Scarlet Woman! Avoid ye, for her portals lead down to Death; her feet take hold of Hell!"

The silence of paralysis followed. So still it was that a mosquito's thin whine sounded through the tent, the tinkle of a cow-bell came in from far pastures, a dog could be heard barking a long way off. Swinging from the tent-pole, a circle of lanterns lit dark, flushed faces, and thus, for the space of a long breath, Helen faced the virago, the one glowering, malignant, the other pale with astonishment, mutely indignant. She was not confused. On the contrary, thought and vision were surprisingly clear; she noted Mrs. Glaves's shocked look, the vindictive settler faces, the Englishmen's blank expressions.

"We had better go. May I drive home, Mrs. Carter?" Danvers, the witless, the foolish, rose to the situation.

Low-pitched, his voice yet carried to every ear, as did her clear reply:

"After the service is over."

It was defiance as well as answer, and as she threw it in the lowering face of the congregation, her glance fixed on the evangelist who, till then, had stood, mouth open, hand arrested midway of a gesture, a bearded, spectacled effigy of ridiculous surprise. Starting under her pale scorn, he flushed, looked for a second through shining, bewildered glasses, then strode forward and seized the virago's arm.

"Sister, sister! Judge not that ye be not judged!" Then, himself again, he swept a pudgy hand over the benches. "Sit down, all! Brother Cummings will lead in prayer."

It mercifully happens that sudden calamity carries its own anæsthetic in that it blinds, confuses, destroys feeling, numbs the faculties that ought to register its importance. Under Helen's unnatural calmness she was dimly conscious of a sick excitement, but this was unrelated with her thought. She saw and sensed as usual; was aware of curious backward glances, the sympathy of the Englishmen at her side; heard every word of Cummings's sputtering prayer, the following hymn and benediction; only her mind refused commerce with these things. Divorced from the present, it juggled the terms of an equation in that day's lesson up to the moment that the remittance-men came crowding about Danvers' rig after the meeting.

Aside from their looseness and general inefficiency, the lads were brave enough, and though some of them had won or lost bets on her reputation, winners were no more eager than losers to avenge the insult that had been provoked by her association with themselves.

"Just say the word, Mrs. Carter," Danvers pleaded, "and we'll lick the crowd."

"And put a head on the preacher," young Poole added, sinfully licking his chops.

From the darkness that enveloped the press of rigs and wagons rose jeering voices, sneers, laughter, the conscious cackle of scandal. Several times she heard her own name. There was provocation and to spare, but though a word would have started a racial riot, she desired only solitude, to flutter home like a wounded bird to its nest.

"No, no!" she answered them. "Take me home! Only take me home!"

Arrived there, she flew to her own room leaving Danvers to enlighten the trustee. Lying face down on her bed, she heard the rumble of their conversation, Jimmy's violent reflections upon revivals particular and general, his wife's whimpering protests when she returned. His growl extended far into the night, and when it was finally extinguished by a robust snoring, the girl was afflicted with a sense of lost companionship; thereafter she had to suffer it out by herself.

There would be more pain than profit in describing her reflections, agonizings. Sufficient to know that a knife in the breast hurts a woman less than a stab at her reputation, and her thought was none the sweeter for the knowledge that she had drawn the blow by giving way to her pique. Her resolve as expressed next morning to Jimmy Glaves is of more concern.

She had turned impatiently from Mrs. Glaves's tearful apologies, but when the old trustee laid a kindly hand on her shoulder, as she passed him in the garden on her way to school, she gave him honest eyes.

"Now, you ain't to bother. 'Twas on'y Betsy Rodd, the old harridan. Nobody minds her."

But she shook her head in accordance with her resolution to face truth. "She was expressing what was in everybody's minds. I know it, and though I didn't intend it, I'm partly to blame, for their suspicion." Her mouth drew thin and firm as she finished. "I shall live it down."

"Course you will!" he heartily agreed. "That's my brave girl!" But his face darkened after she had passed on, and he slowly wagged a grave head as he plied his hoe in the garden.

For he knew the difficulty, impossibility of the task she had marked out for herself. Of Scotch descent, dogmatic, wedded to convention, intense clannishness reinforced in the settlers bitter morality, racial hatred, the condemnation of sin. With them the offence of the fathers was visited upon the children to the fourth generation. It was remembered, for instance, against Donald Ross that his great-grandfather had died a drunkard, and the fact had limited his choice of a wife; the daughters of Hector MacCloud took inferior husbands because their grandmother had been born on the easy side of the knot. Handing such cold charity around among themselves, what mercy were they likely to extend to the suspected stranger within their gates? Jimmy was still wagging his head when, half an hour later, the Probationer reined in at the end of the garden.

Hearing of the scandal on the Lone Tree trail, the young man had turned aside to express his sorrow, and now listened patiently while the trustee drew invidious parallels between the religious movement then proceeding and his own misfit horticulture. "You see them?" Removing his pipe from between his teeth, he waved it at some half-dozen straggling apple-shoots. "Hardiest variety of Siberian crabs. Professor at the gove'nment experimental station warranted 'em to grow at the north pole. Remind me of your revival, they do."

"Why? Don't they grow?" The Probationer smiled.

"Grow? I should swan! four feet every summer, an' freeze off to the roots every winter—jes' like your converts. Get all het up at meetings, blossom with grace, then comes the backsliding, the frost, an' nips the leafage. Where's the sense of it?"

Now the Probationer had his own doubts. Having turned a prentice hand at revival work, he was painfully familiar with its characteristic phenomena—first, hot enthusiasm, slow cooling, obstinate adherence to the form after the spirit has fled, finally the reaction which would leave his people less charitable, not quite so kindly, a little poorer in the things which make for the kingdom of Christ on earth. He had tried to be a real shepherd to his flock—to upraise by precept, example, counsel, and admonition. Avoiding dogma, he had brought them together irrespective of cult and creed on the broad basis of love and a common humanity, and just when he was beginning to expect fruit from that liberal sowing, this bitter theologian, the revivalist, had been loosed upon him. And this was first fruit of his work!

Jimmy's illustration coincided exactly with his own experience, yet fealty to his Church demanded some sort of defence. "Isn't an annual growth better than none?" he asked. "The green shoots certainly improve the appearance of your garden."

Jimmy blew a derisive cloud over the few cabbages, two sickly cauliflowers, a bed of onions, salvage from worms and spring frost of half an acre's planting. "But you don't get results. One sound cabbage is worth an acre of sick saplings; a cheerful sinner discounts a hundred puckered saints. I'm scairt as the black knot has got inter that orchard o' yourn, sir?"

"I'm afraid so," the young fellow sadly agreed. "Well, I must try and prune it out."

"I'd advise the axe," Jimmy grimly commented. "An' begin with Betsy Rodd."

Sorrowing, the Probationer drove on to the school, where a very cold young lady answered his call at the door. A slant of sunshine struck in under the porch twining an aureole about her golden head, creating an auriferous nimbus for her shapely figure. Standing there, so cold and pale, she might have passed for a statue of purity, and the Probationer, being young and still impressionable albeit engaged, wondered that any should have dared to doubt her. Thawing when he mentioned Ruth, she froze again as soon as he touched, apologetically, upon the event of the night before.

"If religion strips them of common charity, they would be better without it," she answered his apology, and turned but a cold ear to his plea for his people.

"They were altogether subject to emotion, incapable of a reasoned rule of life," he said. "With the fear of God removed from their hearts, they would drop to unmentionable levels, to say nothing of the hope and consolation religion brought to sweeten their hard lives."

But he made little headway. "I don't doubt they are not quite so bad as they would like to be. But there, let us drop the subject. Won't you come in and examine the children?"

From this conversation it will be seen that her resolve to "live it down" was not exactly founded upon grounds that would appeal to a professor of ethics; yet her attitude was very natural, and not so deplorable as would at first appear. Was she so much to blame? Hardness breeds hardness, opposition its like. Fire flies from the impact of rock and iron. Always like begets like, heredity applies to mental forces. Moreover, injured pride has stiffened more weak spines and given better results than the command to turn the other cheek; the desire to "show people" lies at the root of many a bravery. Lastly, once rehabilitated socially, softness comes later to the injured member, increasing in ratio to the respect of his or her community. And so it would have been with Helen—with a different people.