Front matter (continued 2)

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!"