Front matter (continued 3)

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

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

"Won't you wait for some tea?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The flush faded, yet Helen shook her head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XII

THE BREAK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His glance moved inquiringly from the Ravells to his wife.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"To see you," he corrected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I wouldn't have done it."

"Done what?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"To turn in on the hay."

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

"No!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The camp? What camp?"

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

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

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

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

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

But he blushed under the Cougar's meaning glance.

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

XIII

THE CAMP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Got a good man in your gang?"

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

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

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

"Oh, give it to him."

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

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

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

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

"No kick there," he muttered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"For what?"

"A railroad."

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

"No."

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

"Correct."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIV

THE RED TEAMSTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, shore, Red!" Sliver remonstrated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He stood immediately behind the stallion, and as he spoke Michigan brought the iron muzzle down with a thwack an the brute's ribs. Snorting, it lashed out, just missing Carter. One huge, steel-shod heel, indeed, passed on either side of his head. Under such circumstances a start was a little more than justifiable; yet after that tribute to surprise Carter stepped quietly beyond range and went on talking to Brady.

"This afternoon you can hitch to the water-cart an' ice the track in to them new skidways."

Then, turning, he eyed Michigan Red. "That's a techy beast of yourn, friend."

"Techy?" Michigan sneered. "There ain't another man in this camp as kin put the leathers on him!"

"No?"

"No!" Swinging his heels against the stall, Michigan added, "Not a damned man."

Picking up a spear of hay, Carter chewed it while he looked over the beast, now foaming with rage. It was a dare. He knew it—saw also the amused interest in the on-lookers. They felt Michigan had him in the door. "The leathers," he remarked, "are on him."

It was a skilful move, throwing the initiative back to the teamster. Not one whit fazed, however, he exclaimed, in mock surprise, "Why, damme, so they are!" Sliding down, he laid a hand on the stallion's crest. Instantly the brute ceased his plunging, uneasy stepping, and while the man stripped off the harness only long, slow shivers told of smothered fury.

"There you are!" He threw collar and harness at Carter's feet.

"Look here, boss!" Brady remonstrated, as Carter picked them up. "I wouldn't go to do it. Shure I wouldn't. The baste is a man-killer be Red's own word. Luk at him for the proof."

Ears laid flat to his neck, glossy hide shivering, the whites of his eyes showing viciously, chisel teeth protruding through grinning lips, the stallion's appearance bore out his reputation.

"I wouldn't!" a dozen teamsters chorused.

Unheeding, Carter entered the stall. As he ranged alongside, the stallion tried to rear, but was snapped back by his halter-chain. So foiled, he humped his shoulders, dropping his head between his knees; then, just when the teamsters expected to see the sixteen hundred pounds of him grind Carter against the stall, he suddenly straightened and stood still as before, save for the slow shivers.

"Mother of God!" Brady exclaimed. "What 'll that mane?"

Carter's hand rested on the beast's crest. What did it mean? Only the red teamster knew. But whether the animal shook to the memory of some torture, or merely mistook the firm hand for that of his master, he moved but once while Carter adjusted and buckled the harness. That was at the cinching of the bellyband; but he quickly quieted. The click of the breeching-snaps sounded like breaking sticks through the stable, and as he stepped out from the stall a score of breaths issued in one huge sigh.

"Now hurry, Brady," he said. "The job will keep you humping till sundown."

Respectful glances followed him away from the stable. He had touched his men in a vulnerable spot, and though, hereafter, they might growl and grumble—the lumberman's sole relaxation—he could count on a fair amount of obedience from all but such malingerers as Shinn and Hines, or a natural anarchist like Michigan Red. The latter took on the yoke of authority only to defy it; and though even his bleak face lit up as sunlight struggles through frost of a winter's morning, he soon found cause for further trouble.

Dropping into the smith's shop a few days later, Carter found Seebach, the German smith, ruefully contemplating a half-dozen disabled sleds. "Herr Gott!" he exclaimed. "In one half-day these haf come in. Alretty yet I works like t'ree tefils, an' this iss the leedle games they play on me. It is that you gifs me a helper or I quit—eh?"

Too surprised to laugh over the other's ludicrous anger, Carter puzzled over the breakage. As aforesaid, the sleds had been built on his own plans to carry enormous loads. To four-by-six runners, shod with an inch of steel, hardwood bunkers a foot square were fastened with solid iron knees braced with inch iron. Every bolt and pin was on the same massive plan. The best of a dozen patterns of as many logging-camps had gone into the making of those sleds. Yet, though they ought to have been good for twenty tons oh the roughest kind of a road, they were racked, split, or twisted, bunkers torn off, ironwork on all badly sprung.

Carter whistled. "How did they do it?"

"Brady, he says it vas the new roat into the pridge timbers. In one place it goes like hell over a pank down to a lake, with a quick turn at the pottom. 'The Pig Glide,' Brady calls it."

"I'll go out an' look at it."

A half-hour's walk brought him to the hill. Debouching from heavy timber, the trail inclined for two hundred yards, then sheered down at an angle of forty-five degrees to a lake below. As the smith had said, an abrupt turn at the bottom added to the trail's difficulties. Too steep for ice-sledding, hay had been spread over the face of the hill, and with this to ease the descent Carter could see no reason for the broken sleds.

A man had been told off to respread the hay after each passage, and he grinned at Carter's question. "Bust 'em here? You bet! How? Well, they come down on a gallop. Teams is coming now, so if you set down in the scrub there you'll see 'em do it."

It was as he said. One after the other the teams emerged from the forest, gathered speed on the incline, and came flying down the hill, the great sleds cracking and groaning under the strain of enormous loads as they skidded around the bottom turn. Michigan Red came last, and Carter's anger could not altogether drown a thrill as he watched the red teamster take the hill. Whooping, whip-cracking, blacks stretched on the gallop, he tore down that plumb hill-side and skidded round the turn, load balanced on one runner. It split, with a pistol report, but the steel shoe held and he passed safely on and down the lake.

"He was the first to cut loose," the trackman explained. "T'others followed his dare."

"Well, they'll have to quit it. Warn each man, Joe, an' report all to me that disobey."

When, that evening, Joe reported that all but Michigan Red had obeyed the order, he sensed hot anger under the boss's calm. Expecting an explosion, he was the more surprised when, after a thoughtful pause, Carter dismissed him with an order to take a couple of hand-rakes out on the job the following morning. To the Cougar he gave orders that the red teamster was to load last. Obedient, the Cougar sent Michigan Red to break track into a new skidway; thus all of his fellows had passed on down the glide while Michigan was still loading.

"Load him light—dry logs, an' not too many," Carter had ordered. But, incensed at the delay, the teamster indulged in such sarcastic allusions to the frailty of the loaders' female ancestors that the ribald crew piled the logs on till his load bulked like a hay-stack. None other than the blacks could have started the sled out from the skids; and while, with jerks and sudden snatches, the fierce brutes worked it out of deep snow to the iced tracks, the loaders looked admiringly on. It was a triumph in driving. Man and team worked like a clock, and, returning blasphemous answers to the loaders' compliments, Michigan slid off down the trail.

To make up for his lost time, he urged the blacks to a trot, and so came swinging down the incline at twice his usual speed. Not till he reached the very edge did he see that the hay had been raked off the face of the hill. A mask of ice, it glittered in the sun.

Half-way down Carter stood with Joe. Looking up, they saw Michigan poised on the top log, a red, sinister figure against the sky. He seemed to pause, throw back on his lines—a quick, involuntary movement. Then, craning forward, he glanced down that glittering stretch—a comprehensive look that took in Carter, Joe, and their plan.

"Give him a forkful under the runners as he goes by," Carter whispered. "Otherwise we'll kill his team."

A second, as aforesaid, the red teamster paused; then, loosing his lines, he leaned over and lashed the stallion under the soft of the belly.

"My God!" Joe cried.

He saw the black brute rear, snorting—saw the blacksnake bite the mare's flank—saw the pair plunge over the grade; then water bathed his eyes. He heard, however—heard the rush and roar, a thunder of hoofs as the long, steel calkings cut through the ice and struck fire from the face of the hill. He felt the wind as the sled passed, and waited for the crash—which did not come.

A voice, cold, deliberate, restored his vision. "I didn't think it was in horse-flesh." Carter was gazing after team and sled, now a black patch on the snow of the lake. "Beat us this time, Joe," he continued; "but we'll fix him to-morrow."

That evening, however, the red teamster enjoyed the fruits of his exploit. It seasoned the beans at supper, sweetened the stable choring. Opinion agreed that it was now "up" to the boss, but split on his probable action, one-half the stable agreeing with Hines that Michigan surely earned his discharge, the other half holding that settlement by battle would be the certain ending. Neither event, however, had come to pass by bedtime, and the mystery was intensified by the chucklings of the road gang, which came in from work long after the teamsters retired. Next morning, too, the loaders—evidently in the secret—added to the suspense by asking the teamsters if they intended to toboggan down the glide that trip.

"Bet you don't!" they yelled after Michigan Red.

Though not exactly nervous, the mystery yet affected the red teamster. As his load slid through the forest uneasiness manifested itself in thoughtful whistlings, broken song snatches, unnecessary talk to his horses. Not that he was a whit afraid. The half-dozen or so men whom he expected would try to enforce the new order could not have prevented him from at least sending his team at the grade. The fierce soul of him thrilled at the thought of opposition, and, coming out of the forest, he set a pace that would have ridden down opposition.

But he reined in at the hill. Instead of the force of his imaginings, only Joe Legault stood at the foot of the glide. The hay had been respread on its face, but—the road gang had built a rough bridge over a deep gully, and now the glide led, straight as an arrow, out to the lake. The racking curve was utterly abolished.

Grinning, Joe said: "The boss allows that it's your privilege to kill your own horses. So go it if you wanter. Hain't going to hurt his sleds none."

Michigan walked his horses.

Carter had won out. Moreover, he had done it without the loss of prestige that would have ensued by the usual brutal methods in vogue in lumber-camps. Law, of a man or people, cannot endure, of course, without force behind it. Yet behind his imperturbability, quiet taciturnity, the men felt the power to enforce his commands. So his authority was no more called in question. Not that envious spite ceased to dog him. Hines, Shinn, and their coterie stood always ready to stir up discontent, foment trouble.

It was their sympathy that caused the cook to maintain one can of poor baking-powder to be valid excuse for leaving. But Carter disposed of minor troubles with the same easy good-humor that he had given to big ones.

"I reckon you've been scandalously mistreated," he told the cook. "I'm right sorry to lose you. Must you go?"

Mollified, the cook stayed.

Then Baldy, chief of the "tote"-trail teamsters, rose to the point that "thirty hun'red was load enough for drifted trails."

"Thirty it is, Baldy," Carter cheerfully answered, and Baldy yanked forty and forty-five hundred all winter over the worst of trails.

He had proved himself in the mastership of men just at the time that opportunity was holding out her hand, and proof and fruit of his winning came the very day that saw the last load delivered at the dumps. "It is a go!" The wire which announced, with this bit of slang, the successful financing of his railroad projects was brought in by Baldy from Lone Tree, and with it buttoned against his heart Carter made his way to the stables where the teamsters were, as they thought, bedding up for the last time.

"We have feed for three months left," he said, "and I can promise work through the summer. At what?" He turned, smiling, on Brady. "Never mind; all those that want it kin have it till freeze-up. In the mean time I'll feed an' care for your teams till the log-drive is down."

Grumblers from the cradle, kickers born, teamsters and choppers had looked forward to this last day in camp, swearing all that ten dollars a day would not hire them for an hour longer. No, sirree—not an hour! Now they looked their doubt.

"What's the pay?" Brady asked.

"Half a dollar a day more'n you're getting."

"That beats farming in these parts. You kin sign me, boss."

And me—me—me! The answers floated in from all over the stable. Only a few of the older men elected to return to their farms, and after all had spoken Carter turned to Michigan Red, who occupied his old perch on the stallion's stall.

"Well, Red?"

"Didn't s'pose you'd need me."

Carter went on writing. He could afford to be generous. He had beaten the man at every point; to retain him where another would have discharged him was, indeed, the crowning of his victory, and Michigan knew it. Had he doubted, he had but to read it in the countenances of his fellows. A good gambler, however, he hid resentment, and where a poor loser would have taken his discharge he accepted re-employment.

His red beard split in a sneering grin. "Oh, guess I'll trouble you for a little longer."

The day was eventful for another reason. Coming up from a short visit to the settlements, Bender handed Carter a letter that evening, the superscription of which sent the dark blood flooding over his neck, for it was the first he had seen of Helen's writing these months. Was this the answer of his longing? Had she sent—at last? His fingers trembled as he tore the wrapping, then he paused, staring. It was his last check, returned without an explanatory scrap.

"She's hired to teach her old school again." Bender answered his blank look.

XV

TRAVAIL

If the white months seemed to lag with Carter up at the camp, they dragged wearily with Helen down in the settlements. Christmas had been particularly dreary, for it did not require a woman's marvellous memory for anniversaries for her to live over again every incident and experience of last Yuletide. In their living-room Carter had built a chimney and fireplace of mud, Cree style, and on Christmas Eve she had cuddled in against his broad breast and talked of a sweet possibility. They had the usual pretty quarrel over sex and names—has the tongue one good enough for the first-born? Then he had hung her stocking, and none other would suit him, forsooth, but the one she was wearing. He had laughed away her blushing protestations, and had kissed the white foot and toes that squirmed in his big hand. Sitting alone this Christmas, she had blushed at the memory; then a gush of tears had cooled her hot cheeks, tears of mingled sorrow and thankfulness that their pretty dream had not taken form in flesh.

One January morning she sat, chin in hands, and stared across the humming stove at the white drift outside. Nels, the Swedish hired man, had killed three pigs for winter meat the day before, and with a touch of humor that was foreign to his bleached complacency had set them on all-fours in the snow. Stiff, frozen—so hard, indeed, that the house-dog retired disconsolately after a fruitless tug at an iron ear—they poked marble shoulders out of a drift. The eye of one was closed in a cunning wink. His neighbor achieved a grin. The mouth of the third was open and thrown back, as though defying death with derisive laughter.

Steeped in thought, Helen did not see the grim grotesques. These months she had undergone three distinct changes of feeling. First she was becomingly repentant. Viewed under the softening perspectives of time and distance, Carter's crudities waned, while his strength and virtues waxed. The insignificant sloughed away from his personality, leaving only the strong, the virile. During this stage she formed small plans towards reconciliation, and bided patiently at home, ceasing her visits to Mrs. Leslie. Not that she felt them wrong, but, besides the shame natural to her position, she liked to feel that she was gratifying what she deemed her husband's prejudice; she experienced the satisfaction which accrues from a penance self-imposed.

When, however, he did not return, she relapsed into hurt silence—would not speak of him to Jenny, nor listen when Bender dropped in on one of his periodical visits with news from the camp. Lastly came cold resentment, anger at the grass-widowhood that was being thrust upon her, a feeling that was the more unbearable because she secretly admired his boldness in cutting the knot of their difficulties. She recognized the wisdom of the act. Had he not taken the initiative, the process of disenchantment would have continued till she herself might have taken the first step to end their misery. But the knowledge did not mitigate the sting. He had forced the separation! The thought rankled and grew more bitter day by day.

This morning she was in a particularly dangerous mood. Conscious of her original good intention, knowing that her fault had been the product of conditions as much as her own weakness, she was ripe for revolt against the entire scheme of things that had forced the lot of crabbed age upon her flushed youth, compelling her to sit by a lonely fire. And as she sat and brooded a clash of bells broke up her meditations; the door opened, letting in a bitter blast that froze the warm interior air into chilly fog, from the centre of which Mrs. Leslie emerged, heavily furred and voluble as ever.

"Anchorite!" she screamed. "Or is it anchoress? Three, four—no, six visits you owe me. Explain! Bad weather? Hum!" She tilted her pretty nose. "If I couldn't fib more artistically, Helen, I'd adhere to the painful truth. You were afraid—of hubby."

"I—I wasn't!"

Mrs. Leslie surveyed the girl's flushed anger with sarcastic pity. "Tut! tut! More fibs. Huddled over that stove, you make the loveliest study of despair. You have been crying, too."

"I—I haven't!" The lines of Huddled Despair flowed into Radiant Anger.

"Your eyes are red?"

"Well, if they are—if I did—it was through anger."

Mrs. Leslie accepted the modified admission. "That's right, my dear. He—no man is worth the compliment of regretful tears. They are all foolish, selfish, fickle as children. They cry for love like a child for the moon, throw it away when the toy wearies, howl if another tries to pick it up. They only value the unattainable. Bah!"

The ejaculation was comical in its feigned disgust, but just then Helen had ears only for the serious or sympathetic—preferably the latter. "Tell me, Elinor," she asked, "do you really think I have deserved this at his hands?"

"No." For once in her life Mrs. Leslie dealt in undiluted truth—because, perhaps, lying would not serve her purpose. "One could understand his pique—" With incredible hardihood, considering the part she herself had played, she commented: "Really, my dear, you ought not to have done it. But he has been altogether too severe—unforgiving. I don't see how you stand it. I should freeze these cold nights without some one to warm my feet on."

"To think"—speech was such a relief after months of bitter silence, and Helen never even noticed the other's funny climax—"to think that this should be dealt to me by a man of whose very existence I was unconscious a short two years ago! Is he a god to exercise such power—to command me to eat the bread-and-water of affliction during his pleasure? Why, I was twenty-two before I ever saw him! Doesn't it seem ridiculous—silly as though one pebble on a beach were to establish limits for another? They roll and rub where and with whom they list, and why shouldn't I?" Ignoring the fact that monogamy was her sex's greatest achievement, and that the first woman who bartered love for protection, cookery for maintenance, had not driven such a bad bargain, she finished: "Wouldn't it be funny if pebbles were condemned to rub and roll in definite pairs till winds and waves had buried one or other affinity deep in the sands. Why—"

"In other words," Mrs. Leslie interrupted, "why should vertical distances count for more than horizontal—death for more than distance—seven feet under the sod carry advantages and opportunities that do not go with seventy miles above? There isn't any reason. It is just so."

"Well, I won't stand it!" Rebellion inhered in Helen's stamp. "I won't! I won't! I won't!"

Mrs. Leslie shrugged her hopelessness. "Thousands of women have to. What can you do, my dear?"

"Do?" the girl answered, hotly. "I have already done it—applied for and secured my old school. Unfortunately, I must remain here till the spring term opens."

Now to accuse Mrs. Leslie of trailing a definite purpose were to reveal lamentable ignorance of her ruling traits. She was no fell adventuress of romance, stealthy of plot, remorseless in pursuit. Persistence was foreign to her light character. Unstable as water, she veered like a shuttlecock under the breath of emotion, yet, withal, grasped speedily at such straws as the winds of opportunity brought within reach. If she lacked force to plot Carter's capture, or to revenge herself for his slight through Helen, she was willing enough now that the wind served.

"In the mean time," she said, "you will stay with me?"

"Oh, I couldn't do that!" Oh, complex feminine nature! Helen balked at the freedom of her agonizings. The quick earnestness of her answer told of the hope that still glowed in the ashes of despair.

But Mrs. Leslie turned hope against her. "Oh yes," she mocked. "You were not afraid of him; certainly not. But that is not the way to get him back, my dear. If you would regain your recreant, give him a rival."

Now, though this piece of worldly wisdom was strictly in line with Helen's crooked parable of the pebbles, the idea sounded grossly common in plain words. Hastily she said, "You don't suppose that I would—"

"No! no!" Mrs. Leslie skilfully retrieved her error. "I only meant that it would be as well to keep him on the anxious seat. Never let a man feel too sure of you—it isn't healthy, for him or you. I wouldn't wait here till it pleased him to extend magnificent forgiveness for so small a fault. Go out—visit—let him see that you can be happy without him—that you have still attractions for others."

"But I don't care. Why do you persist, Elinor, in hinting that I still love him? I don't."

"Then you'll come with me?"

"I'd like to, but I can't leave Jenny alone with Nels."

Mrs. Leslie might have replied that this was exactly what she would have to do when school opened; instead, she contemplated the love which masqueraded behind this unparalleled obstinacy from sphinxlike eyes. "Jenny must be dying to see her friends in Lone Tree," she suggested. "Let her take a vacation. As for Nels—he can bach it."

Helen looked troubled. It was really astonishing to see how she ran from liberty. But she had, perforce, to make some show of living up to her professions, so she called Jenny and anxiously inquired if she didn't want to visit her friends. Unfortunately, Jennie had been oppressed these many days with a longing to see the good doctor, and the expression of her wish carried the day for Mrs. Leslie.

"Oh, well," she sighed; and Mrs. Leslie prudently confined her laugh within her own hollow sepultures.

Accepting the invitation with misgivings, she was astonished, on her return home, to find how thoroughly she had enjoyed her two weeks' visit. Yet it was only natural. Besides the change, Mrs. Leslie had been at pains to amuse and entertain her. There were cosey chats over the teacups on matters dear to the feminine heart, and daily sleigh-rides—mad dashes over hard-packed trails to music of jingling bells. Once the drive was extended as far as Regis barracks, twenty miles to the west, and Helen was introduced to captains of the mounted police in scarlet splashed with gold, their ladies, the agents and clerks of the government land office—pleasant people at first sight, of whom she was to learn more. Of nights, Molyneux and other remittance-bachelors would drop in, and, with drawn curtains excluding the vast arctic night, there would be music, songs, games. Small wonder that she enjoyed herself, or that, the ice thus broken, she gravitated between home and the Leslies' during the remainder of that winter.

Speaking of Molyneux, a greater surprise inhered in the fact that she had been able to meet him without embarrassment, a condition that was due to the tact and real consideration which he displayed. At their first meeting he paused only for a pleasant greeting; next, he ventured a chat; and these lengthened until he felt safe in staying out an evening.

He marked his greatest gain the day that—Leslie being under the weather with a cold—she allowed him to drive her home. By those gentlemen, the romanticists, this fact would not have been accorded a tender implication. They paint love in colors fast as patent dyes: good girls love once; or, if a second passion be grudgingly allowed, it is only after the first is safely bestowed in cold storage underground. In face of the fact that the little god occasionally shoots a double arrow, that the sigh of many a wife would be unwelcome if intelligible to her husband, that many a maid has slipped into spinsterhood between two passions, they lay down as the basic principle of ethical romance the canon that neither wife nor maid can entertain two loves other than in sequence.

Now Helen may not have been in this case, and if she had it goes without saying that she would never have admitted the preference even to herself. For she had been raised in the very shadow of the aforesaid canon. Yet he had certainly won on her—for good reason. In person he was above the average of good looks; his manners touched standard. In that he, alone of the English set, had been able to wring a living from the stern northland without the aid of a fat allowance, he commanded her respect. Also she thought that he was trying to sink his past—he entertained the same illusion—and as every good girl loves to imagine herself as an "influence," the thought gave her satisfaction. Molyneux had no cause of complaint.

To do him justice, he tried, in a slovenly fashion, yet still tried, to live up to this, the one pure love of his life—purity must be interpreted as applying to his intention rather than motive. Of all the remittance-men who frequented Mrs. Leslie's house, he, at this time, showed the least moral taint. Often he thrust in between Helen and things offensive. Though, during Helen's visits, Mrs. Leslie made some attempt to put her house in order, she could not always bridle her male guests, who smoked Leslie's imported tobacco and offered herself veiled love. But Molyneux sterilized most of their blackguardism, nipping entendre with a chilly stare, destroying double meanings by instant and literal interpretation—did it so effectually that she never noticed the pervading sensualism. Indeed, he did it so much as to draw Mrs. Leslie's fire. "Virtuous boy," she said, teasing him one day. "You almost convert me to the true-love theory."

His grimace gauged the depth of his reformation. To him as to Mrs. Leslie the text could be fitted: "Can the leopard change his spots or the Ethiop his skin?" Really he had not changed in quality or purpose; it was the same Molyneux in pursuit of the same end. His tactics were merely altered to suit his game. He would, of course, have denied this—probably with the warmth of honest conviction. At times his reflections on the subject attained highly moral altitudes. He had known from the first that Helen could never live with Carter! Duty certainly called him to end her bondage! Yes, he believed himself honest, and would continue to so believe until some unexpected check loosed the Old Adam again. This was proved by the flashes of passion at the very thought of failure. It would have been much more natural for him to have attempted a raid on Carter's Eden. But, warned by previous experience, he waited, waited, waited, and watched as the snake may have watched the maiden Eve over the threshold of Adam's garden. Now that time seemed to have verified his prediction, that, albeit with hesitant steps, Helen was approaching the gate of her own accord, he held back the hot hand that fain would have plucked her forth lest he should startle her into flight.

There were many watchers of the girl's progression during the winter months: Mrs. Leslie, who might be said to await the moment when a shove might throw the girl off her balance headlong into Molyneux's arms; the settlers, who anticipated such a denouement with scandalous tongues; the remittance-men, who betted on the result, basing odds on her lonely condition. To these there could be but one end. Always the human soul reaches for happiness, and the fact that she had once mistaken Dead Sea fruit for love's golden apples would not prevent her from tiptoeing to pluck again. Would she pluck?

Molyneux, for one, was sure that she would, and, having the courage of his conviction, put his hope into speech, choosing an opportune time. Nels always drove her over to Leslie's, and at first brought her home. But by the middle of February the latter part of the task fell by consent of all to Molyneux, and he spoke while driving her home one afternoon.

"Read this," he said, handing her a telegram that called him to his father's death-bed.

"Oh, I'm so sorry!" she exclaimed, impulsively.

"For what," he questioned, "his sickness or my absence?"

"Both," she frankly answered. "You have been—very nice to me. I shall miss you."

Now this was all very proper, but when he stated that he should be gone at least seven weeks she ought to have veiled her concern. But she did not, and the regret that swam in the hazel eyes strengthened his purpose. "Before I go I must say something. How long is our present relation to last?"

The raise of her eyebrows might have meant anything. He took it as encouragement, and ran on, "You know that I love—have always loved you."

Here, according to the canons, she ought to have withered him. Instead she gave him the truth. "I am not blind."

"Thanks for your candor. Now, a step further—do you intend to remain his bondwoman?"

This was harder, yet her answer correctly interpreted her feeling. "I—I—really don't know."

The doubt spurred him. "You do not love him. You could not—after the way he has treated you. You must have love. A glance at your face would tell a dullard that it is as necessary to your existence as air or water. You cannot be happy without it. It is life to you; more than sustenance. You must be wrapped in it, touch it at every point, feel it everywhere around you. Your being cries out for a passion all-absorbing; you will take nothing less. I would—"

"Give me such love?" She had thrilled under his truthful analysis of her nature, and now she cried out the passion of her sex, the eternal desire for a love everlasting as that of a mother. "Is such possible?—a love that never stales, that endures after the hot blood cools and beauty fades? Could you love me through old age? No, no! A woman can, but never a man!"

"I can! By God! I can!" he cried, blazing in response to her passion. "I'll prove it, for sooner or later you are going to love me."

She laughed a little wearily. "There spake the bold man. Well—you have my good wishes."

"Your—good—wishes?"

"Don't flatter yourself." Her staying hand checked his enthusiasm. "You said just now that I didn't love—my husband. Perhaps you are right. I don't know. I have no standard by which to judge, and only love could supply one. So far—you have failed to do so. I like you—very much; but—if I ever love again, the man must lift me out of myself, make me forget—him, myself, the whole world."

"I'll do it!" he confidently exclaimed; then, sobering, added: "I want you to promise one thing. It isn't much—simply to give serious thought to your position while I am away—to remember what I have just told you and to forget that first foolish mistake that cost me so much. Now will you?"

"Surely," she honestly answered.

"And—if possible—give me an answer?"

She nodded, and he was content to leave it there. They were now on the last mile, and they made it in silence, he plunged in delicious reverie, she very thoughtful. Looking up as the cutter rolled and bumped over the frozen stable-yard, he caught her looking at him with soft compassion.

"Well?"

She smiled. "Did you really—suffer?"

"Hell!"

Grasping her hand, he had almost kissed it when she jerked it suddenly away. "There's Karl—and Jenny—standing in the door." Noting his sudden discomposure, she added: "Never mind, she didn't see you. Won't you come in?"

"Can't—put me late for the choring."

This was only one of a dozen times that he had refused the invitation. A little surprised, she watched him turn and drive away, then she saw Nels coming up from the stable, and the thought was lost in wonder as to whether or no he had seen Molyneux take her hand.

Now, as a matter of fact, Nels had; moreover, he mentioned it to Jenny as he helped her wipe the supper dishes, and thereby earned much trouble. "I tank," he observed, "something is doings. Cappan he taken the mistress hand. Pratty soon the boss no have womans."

His chuckle died under her wrathful stare. "Mention that to any one, Nels, an' Mr. Bender 'll break every bone in your body."

It was not so easy to dispose of her own misgivings. As, that evening, she arranged the dishes in the homemade plate-rack, she turned sombre eyes on Helen, musing by the stove. Often her lips opened, but sound trembled on its thresholds. She kept her own counsel till Bender dropped in on his next visit.

It was perfectly natural for her to turn to him for counsel. Coming to her as he did, in the moment of her sore trouble, her girl's heart had opened and vented on him the love that had been prisoned since the death of her mother; and ever since a perfect understanding of kindred natures had obtained between them.

"They're talking about her in the settlements something scan'lous," she told him. "Tongues is clacking from here to Lone Tree. Why don't Mr. Carter come home? Kain't you persuade him?"

But Bender shook his head. "No, he's stiffer'n all he— Beg your pardon! I mean he's dreadful sot in his mind. I wouldn't envy the one that went to advise him."

Before going away Bender touched on a matter that was now old history in their intercourse. "Changed your mind yet, little girl?"

It was now Jenny's turn to sorrowfully shake her head. "It would be my an' pleasure to be wife to a big, good man like you. But I just kain't bring myself to put you where any man could cast my shame in your face."

"Oh, shore!" he protested. "You was that little—a teeny bit of a thing, jes' seventeen—on'y a baby. Who'd be holding it agin you? Besides—he's in England."

"Yes—he's in England," Jenny slowly repeated. "But—"

He did not see the queer look she sent after him as he rode away.

XVI

A HOUSE-PARTY

One morning, some three weeks after Molyneux's departure, Helen sat in her doorway reading, as certain an indication of coming spring as the honk of the wild geese speeding northward on the back of the amorous south wind. As yet the prairie sloughs wore mail of ice, but from dizzy heights those keen-eyed voyagers discerned tricklings and wee pools under sheltered forest banks, sufficient till the laggard sun should smite the snows and fill the air with tinklings and gurglings, loose the strange sound of running waters on the frozen silence. Another month would do it. Already the drifts were packing, and the hard trails traversed the sinking snows like mountain chains on a relief map. In Helen's door-yard stratas of yellow chips, debris of the winter's furious firing, were beginning to appear; with them, lost articles; indeed, Nels was gobbling joyously over the retrieval of an axe, when Leslie's team and cutter came swinging into the yard.

Mrs. Leslie was driving, and, seeing Helen, she screamed from a hundred yards: "They are coming! All of 'em!"

"Who?" Helen asked, when the ponies stopped at the door.

"Why, Edith Newton, Mrs. Jack Charters, Sinclair Rhodes—you remember? I told you that I should give a house-party for the Regis folks when the frosts let up. Hurry and pack up your war-paint! They'll be here to-morrow, and I need your help. No refusal! Fred is going in to Lone Tree to-morrow and Jenny can go down with him. Nels will cook for himself, won't you, Nels?"

"I tank I can cook, yes." Nels ceased his jubilations over the axe long enough to season his assent with a bleached grin.

"There! It's all fixed." Bustling inside, she talked volubly while assisting in Helen's selections. "Yes, take that; you look your sweetest in it; and I imported Captain Chapman especially for you. That also; you'll need it evenings. No, Captain Charters isn't coming. Some Indian trouble called him west. Oh, Mrs. Jack won't care—I'm the loser, for he was always my cavalier."