Front matter (continued 4)

Driving home, she rattled steadily, entertaining Helen with descriptions of her expected guests, giving their pedigrees, aristocratic connections, while she spiced her discourse with malicious fact. Sinclair Rhodes had secured his appointment as land agent at Regis through distant cousinship to the governor-general. And why not? The offices ought to go to well-bred people! He had money, must have, for his salary and expenses were out of all proportion—so much so as to cause comment by malicious people, envious souls! What if he did make a little, as they said, on the side? The government could afford it; and every one knew what Canadians were in office! People who live in glass houses, and so forth! It was simply racial envy! She was also becomingly indignant over the action of certain Canadians who had made trouble for Captain Chapman in the matter of mounted-police supplies. What figure did a few tons of provisions cut in a gentleman's accounts? These commercial intellects, with their mathematical exactness, were horrid. Newton? He was an appointee of Rhodes. No, no relation. She waived further description of the Newtons, omitted the pregnant fact that Charles Newton's presence cut as little figure in his wife's social calculations as Captain Charters' absence did in those of Mrs. Jack.

Caution, doubtless, counselled the omission. The quail is not flushed till the net be spread. Yet the reservation was hardly necessary in the light of Helen's condition. Judgment of another's action is colored by one's own mental state, and she was not so likely to be shocked by one who had defied the conventions against which she herself was in open mutiny. Anyway, she liked Mrs. Jack at first sight, despite the scandalous manner in which she flirted with Charles Newton the first night at table. Big, tall, and fair, large eyes expressed her saving grace, an unparalleled frankness that seemed to sterilize her flirtations and rob them of impropriety. Twice during the meal she retailed Newton's tender asides to his wife, asking, laughingly, if she recognized the vintage.

However, being as yet in happy ignorance of many things that would soon cause her serious disquiet, Helen thoroughly enjoyed that first evening. The well-appointed table, with its sparkling glass, silver, snowy napery; the well-groomed people and their correct speech alike fed her starved æsthetic senses while they aroused dormant social qualities. She laughed, chattered, capped Mrs. Jack's sallies, displaying animation and wit that simply astonished Mrs. Leslie. Her wonder, indeed, caused Edith Newton to whisper in Mrs. Jack's ear:

"Elinor looks as though she had imported a swan in mistake for a duckling. Look at Sinclair—positively smitten. Giving her all his attention, though he took Elinor in. The girl seems to like him, too."

Mrs. Jack's big eyes turned to the laughing face that was raised up to Rhodes. "Don't believe a word he says, my dear," she suddenly called across the table. "And look out for him. He's dangerous."

Though she laughed, Rhodes must have sensed a serious motive, for he glanced up in quick annoyance. "Do I look it?" he asked, turning again to Helen.

Nature does not lie. His narrowly spaced eyes, salient facial angles, dull skin, heavy lips carried her certificate of degeneracy. A physiognomist would have pronounced him dangerous to innocence as a wild beast on less evidence, but to Helen's inexperience he appeared as a man unusually handsome, profile or front face. The significant angles did not alter the good modelling of his nose and chin or affect the regularity of his features. Tall, slim, irreproachable in manner and dress, there was no scratch to reveal the base metal beneath his electroplate refinement.

"You certainly don't," she answered, laughing.

"Then," he said, with mock gravity, "I can patiently suffer the sting of calumny."

"Calumny?" Mrs. Jack echoed, teasingly. "Calumny? What's that?"

"Synonyme for conscience," Edith Newton put in, with a spice of malice. For though the conquest of Rhodes—to which Regis gossip wickedly laid Newton's presence in the land office—was now stale with age and tiresome to herself, she was selfish enough to resent his defection.

"Sinclair found it while rummaging Fred's coat for matches," her husband added. Leslie's simplicity was as much of a joke to them as it was with the Canadian settlers, and, under cover of the laugh, Chapman—a big blond of that cavalry, mustached type which wins England's cricket matches while losing all her wars—leaned over and whispered in Newton's ear: "Leslie will lose more than his conscience if he doesn't look out. La belle Elinor is madly smitten." Aloud, he said, "Sinclair would hardly know what to do with it, Mrs. Newton."

"Hearken not to the tongue of envy, Mrs. Carter," Rhodes retaliated upon his tormentors. "I'm a very responsible person, I assure you."

She laughed at his mock seriousness, and, believing it all fooling, gave him so much of her attention that evening as to cause more than one comment. "Rhodes is making heavy running," Newton remarked once to Chapman, who replied, conceitedly stroking his mustache, "Wait till I get in my innings."

"After me," Newton answered. "I come next at the bat."

Ignorant of this and other by-play, however, Helen thoroughly enjoyed the first days of the party. On the frontier, amusement is a home-made product, and shares the superiority of domestic jams, jellies, and pickles over the article of commerce. They caught the fickle damsel Pleasure coming and going, reaping the satisfaction of both spectator and entertainer. By day they skated, drove, or curled on a rink which the male guests laid out; nights, they sang, danced, played games, and romped like children.

Apart from a certain freedom in their intercourse, which she attributed to long acquaintance, Helen found nothing objectionable in the demeanor of her new friends during those first few days. On the contrary, she thought them a trifle dull. Their preglacial and ponderous humor excited her risibility; she laughed as often at as with them. At other times she could not but feel that they regarded her as alien, a pretty pagan without their social pale, and she would revolt against their enormous egotism, insolent national conceit. She broke many a lance on that impregnable shield.

"You English," she flashed back when, one evening, Newton reflected on American pronunciation of certain English family names—"you English remind me of the Jews, with their sibboleth and shibboleth. Is your aristocracy so doubtful of its own identity that it is compelled to hedge itself against intrusion by the use of passwords. You may call 'Cholmondeley' 'Chumley,' if you choose, but we commit no crime in pronouncing it as spelled."

Again, when Edith Newton rallied her on some crude custom which she maintained was peculiarly American, Helen delivered a sharp riposte. "No, I never saw it done at home; but I have heard that it is quite common among English emigrants on transatlantic liners." Such tiffs were, however, rare; and, to do them justice, men and women hastened to sacrifice national conceit on the altars of her wounded susceptibilities.

Offence came later, and on quite another score. At first she liked the attentions paid her; the gallantry of the men put her on better terms with herself, renewed the confidence which had diminished to the vanishing-point during her months of loneliness. But when constant association thawed the reserve natural to first acquaintance, and freedom evolved into familiarity, her instincts took alarm. Distressed, she observed the other women to see if she had been singled out. But no, they seemed quite comfortable under similar attentions, and they rallied her when she unfolded her misgivings at afternoon tea.

"You shouldn't be so pretty, my dear," Mrs. Jack said, laughing. "What can the poor men do?" Then they made fun of her scruples, satirizing conventions and institutions which she had always regarded as necessary, if not God-ordained.

"Marriage," Edith Newton once cynically exclaimed, "is merely a badge of respectability, useful as a shield from the slings and arrows." Then, from the depths of her own degeneracy, she evolved the utterance: "Men are all beasts beneath the skin. Wise women use them for pleasure or profit."

Helen revolted at that; it transcended her mutiny. But few people are made of martyr stuff—perhaps fortunately so; martyrs are uncomfortable folk, and, wise in her eternal generation, nature sprinkles them lightly over the mass of common clay. The average person easily takes the color of environment, so why not Helen? Thinking that perhaps she was a little prudish, she stifled her fears, tried to imitate the nonchalance of the others. She even made a few tentative attempts at daring. Alas! as well expect a rabbit to ruffle it with wolves. Such immediate and unwelcome results followed that she retired precipitously behind ramparts of blushing reserve. But the damage was done. Thereafter Chapman, Newton, Rhodes, one or another, was constantly at her elbow; she was unpleasantly conscious that, having let down her fences, they looked upon her as free game.

The thought stirred her to fight. Chapman she disposed of with a single rebuff that sent him back to Mrs. Jack's side. But Newton proved unmanageable. Impervious to snubs, his manner conveyed his idea that her modesty was simply a blind for the others. His familiarities bordered on license. A good singer, he always asked her to play his accompaniments of evenings, and she would sicken as he used the pretence of turning a leaf to lean heavily upon her shoulder. At other times he made occasion to touch her—would pick threads from her jacket; lean across her to speak to her neighbor at table.

By such tactics he brought her, one morning, to great confusion. A Cree Indian had driven in from the Assiniboin reserve with bead-work, moccasins, and badger-skin mittens which he wished to trade for flour or bacon. With the other women Helen was bending over to examine his wares, when Newton entered the kitchen. Stepping quietly up from behind, he laid a hand on Helen's hair. Taking him for one of the other women, she suffered his fondling till Mrs. Leslie, who knew he was there, asked his opinion on a tobacco-pouch. Then, before she could move, speak, cast off his hand, he pressed her head against his wife's dark curls.

"Just look at the contrast!" he admiringly exclaimed, and so robbed her anger.

Yet so evident was the intent behind the excuse that even the Cree detected the sham. From Helen his dark glance travelled to Newton and back again. "He your man?" he asked.

Vexed to the point of tears, she shook her head and bent over the bead-work to hide her embarrassment. But the Cree's rude notions of etiquette had been jarred. "He touch your hair!"

So simple, his comment yet pierced to the heart of the matter. Newton had fondled her hair, crown and symbol of her womanhood, a privilege of marriage. In an Indian tribe the offence would have loosed the slipping knife; a settler would have resented it with knarled fist. But here the women tittered, while Chapman, who just then sauntered in, laughed.

Emboldened, perhaps, by immunity, the man's offensiveness developed into actual insult the evening of that same day. They had all been pulling taffy in the kitchen, and, passing through a dark passage to the living-room, Helen felt an arm slip about her waist. Newton's face was still tingling from a vigorous slap when she confronted him before them all in the living-room. Even his hardihood quailed before her flushed and contemptuous anger; he was not quite so ready with his excuse.

"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Carter! Really, I mistook you for my wife."

It was a lie on the face of it, and, barbed with stinging truth, her retort drew a peal of laughter from the others. "Indeed? Your excuse is more remarkable than your mistake."

Offended as much by the laugh as the insult, she seated herself on a lounge by Leslie, the one man with whom she always felt safe. In him the stigma of degeneracy took another form; the tired blood expressed itself in a prodigious simplicity. He lacked even the elements of vice. As his wife put it, "Fred is too stupid to be wicked." Yet, withal, he was very much of a man as far as his chuckleheadedness permitted, and now he offered real sympathy.

"It was a caddish trick, Mrs. Carter, and I mean to tell him so."

"Oh no!" she pleaded. "It wouldn't improve matters to make a scene, and he's not likely to offend again. Please don't? Stay here—with me."

"But I'm your host. Really, he deserves a thrashing."

"No, no! Stay here! I don't feel equal to the others."

"I never do." Sitting again, he turned on her a look of beaming fellowship. "The girls all yawn and look terribly bored when I try to amuse them—except you. They don't seem to care for horses and dogs, the things that interest me."

If, as a conversationalist, he did not shine, he at least brought her the first easy moments she had known that day, and she turned a sympathetic ear to some of his prattle. Indicating Rhodes, who was leaning over Mrs. Leslie, he said: "You know I don't like that sort of thing. Elinor says I'm old-fashioned, and I suppose she knows. Of course she wouldn't do anything that wasn't proper, but a fellow has his feelings, and it doesn't take a crime to hurt them, does it? She's up on the conventions; but it does seem to me that if a fellow has anything to say to another fellow's wife he ought to say it aloud."

Astonished that his dulness should have sensed the pervading sensualism, she studied him while he watched his wife, in his eyes something of that pitiful pleading one sees in those of a beaten dog. His words banished her doubts as to whether her own misgivings did not root in hypercritical standards—restored her viewpoint. All week the atmosphere had thickened, as constant association banished reserve, and to-day freedom had attained its meridian. It was not the matter but the manner of conversation that filled her with a great uneasiness—the whispers, asides, smiling stares, conscious laughter. The vitiated atmosphere caused her a feeling of suffocation, and in the midst of her sick revulsion Leslie dropped a remark that came to her like a breath of ozone.

"I was awfully sorry to hear of the trouble between you and Carter. I always thought him such a fine fellow. He hadn't much use for me—any of us—still I liked him. He was a bit on the rough, of course; but, I tell you, character counts more than culture, strength than refinement."

Character counts more than culture, strength than refinement? To his simplicity had been vouched wisdom worthy of a philosopher. The phrase stabbed her. Before her rose a vision of her husband as she had seen him that last miserable night, cold, stern, inexorable, in the loom of the moonlight. In view of that colossal memory, the Englishmen about her dwarfed to effeminate insignificance. Vividly her own doubting recurred. And she had traded him—for this! The thought brought wretchedness too great for concealment. Her uneasiness was so manifest as to form the theme of a bedroom conversation.

Though comfortable—the one frame house in the settlements, a palace to Canadian eyes—Leslie's house boasted only two bedrooms; so while the men made shift on shake-downs, Helen shared Mrs. Leslie's rooms, Edith Newton and Mrs. Jack the other.

As she braided her hair for the night, the latter lady opened the conversation. "Did you notice how uncomfortable little Carter was this evening? She is a nice little thing, but she doesn't mix. I don't see why Elinor invited her."

"You don't, eh?" Edith Newton mumbled a mouthful of pins. "You are slow, Maud."

"No—only lazy. Why should I puzzle over things when you are here? I'll bet you have pumped everybody dry long ago. Now—dispense!"

"I don't go round with my eyes shut," the other calmly answered. "To begin: Calvert Molyneux is completely gone on little Carter, whose husband, it seems, left her because of some slight."

"Hum!" Mrs. Jack elevated her straight brows. "Foolish man to leave her to Calvert. So that is why he went home! Exits till the tarnished pearl be regulped by the conjugal oyster? Clever!"

"On the contrary"—she curled a full red lip—"he contemplates honorable marriage—dalliance, Dakota, divorce, everything that begins with D, down to eventual desertion, if I know anything of Calvert. But fancy—HE!"

"'The devil in love, the devil a husband would be,'" Mrs. Jack misquoted.

"'The devil married, the devil a husband was he,'" Edith Newton finished. "But he is not married yet. She holds him off—foolishly. For you know Calvert, good in streaks, but ruled by his emotions and ruthless when they command. If she turns him down—"

"She'll need to keep him at longer distance than this house affords. But Elinor?—this doesn't explain her. She's beastly selfish under her jolly little skin. Why is she posing as aid and advocate of love?"

"In love with Carter hubby—or was would be more correct, in view of her carryings-on with Sinclair. But the Carter attack, I understand, was very severe while it lasted. Think of it, Maud, Elinor to fall in love with a settler!"

Mrs. Jack elevated naked shoulders. "Not at all surprising. Just the itch of her rotten blood for a few sound corpuscles. I've felt it myself at times. Don't look so shocked—you know we are rotten."

"Maud! Maud!"

Humming a bar of "La Boheme," Mrs. Jack regarded her companion through narrowed lids. "I believe, Edith, you keep up appearances with yourself. Why not be natural for a change? But, as you say, Elinor seems to have made a complete convalescence. Did you ever see a woman make such a projectile of herself? Positively hurls herself at Sinclair. But tell me more about the Carter man. How did he treat her rabies?"

"Cold-water cure. Turned her down—flat."

"So in revenge she's trying to besmirch the wife? The little devil! I call that pretty raw, Edith."

The other shrugged. "Oh, well, it is her pie, and if she prefers it uncooked it is none of our business. Better keep your fingers out of it, Maud. Struggle with your good intentions."

Mrs. Jack smiled sweetly. "My dear, am I in the habit of messing alien pies?"

"Not unless you covet the meat."

"Well, I'm not hankering after either Calvert or Carter hubby, though I must say that I like his specifications. Showed awfully good taste both in selecting his wife and rejecting Elinor. Fancy! a virtuous man—in this day!"

By this time Edith Newton was disposed in bed. A sleepy answer came from under the clothing. "Proves he hadn't the honor of your acquaintance."

"Nor yours," Mrs. Jack retorted.

Her flippancy masked a disquiet so grave as to drive away the desire for sleep. Clad only in her bed-gown, she drew a chair up to the stove, which returned her thoughtful gaze through two red monocles of isinglass. In her fair-play was associated with its companion virtue frankness, and in no wise could she read a mite of the former quality into Elinor Leslie's intent towards Helen. After many uneasy shruggings, she rose, took the lamp, and walked into the other bedroom.

"Misplaced my comb," she answered Mrs. Leslie's sleepy inquiry. "Lend me yours." Then she paused at the foot of the bed.

Helen had coiled her hair for the night, but its unruly masses had loosened and ran, a perfect cataract of gold, over her pillow. Against that auriferous background lay her head and face, with its delicate creams and pinks sinking into the plumpness of one white arm. The other was folded over the softness of her bosom. Mrs. Jack thought her asleep till her eyes opened, then, returning the girl's smile, she tiptoed back to her fire.

"It's a damned shame," she told herself, profanely, but truly, and with such vigor that Edith Newton sleepily asked: "What's the matter? Aren't you ever coming to bed, Maud?"

"Saying my prayers. Go to sleep."

"Put in a word for me," the other murmured.

"The Lord knows that you need it." Mrs. Jack glanced at the bed, then returned to her musings. "Of course she's a little fool. If she goes back to her husband she will have to settle down to the humdrum of settler life—raise calves, chickens, pigs, and children in the fear of the Lord, with only a church picnic or some such wild dissipation to break the deadly monotony. A pleasing prospect, I must say. But if it suits her—well, I'm not going to see her delivered, bound and bleating, into the hands of the devil, alias Calvert Molyneux. It seems a shame, either way, but she undoubtedly loves her settler hubby, and she's just the kind to eat her heart out through remorse and shame. And here is Elinor blackening her reputation with the pig settlers to whom she must look for a living, making reconciliation impossible! Well, I'm going to speak to the little fool to-morrow."

This she did, making her opportunity by carrying Helen off to her bedroom, where, having disposed her victim in a comfortable chair, she herself snuggled down upon the bed and went with customary frankness straight to the heart of her subject. "I want to know, Helen Carter, why you are here?"

Puzzled, Helen stared; then, interpreting by the smile, she answered, "I—really, I—don't know."

"A—pretty—poor—reason!" She shook her finger in affected anger. "Don't you know that you don't belong? Now don't flare up! If I were Edith Newton, or Elinor, the cat, you might suspect a reflection. It isn't that you are below grade—just the opposite. Frankly, my dear, we are a rotten lot. A sweet girl, with conscience and morality has no business among us. We couldn't scrape up enough of either article to outfit a respectable cat. Don't blush. I'm not envying you your conscience. It is a most uncomfortable asset, and, given choice of two evils, I'd take a harelip. But, as you have one—well, you'd better mizzle—go home, you know."

Having eased herself by this delivery, Mrs. Jack sighed, sat up, rolled herself a cigarette, and went on, after a contented puff: "Don't tell on me, my dear. Not that I care a whoop—that's American, isn't it? I love your slang; it is so expressive and comfortable to the feelings. But, you see, rakishness has no attractions for the fool male of our species. He resents any infringement of his monopoly. Even such a degenerate ass as Charles Newton prefers school-girl simplicity. So one must needs simulate virgin innocence, however painful. That's more of your delightful slang. Now—when are you going?"

The question anticipated the conclusion of Helen's midnight tossings; but, if unchanged in substance, this had nevertheless been modified by cooler morning reflections. She stated the qualifications—Jenny was visiting in Lone Tree, and would not return till Saturday. Only two more days! Her visit would then come to a natural end, so why offend by abrupt departure?

Mrs. Jack laughed. "I don't think Elinor would be so very dreadfully offended. Why? Well, it is ungracious to criticise one's hostess, but—you have trapped her rabbit."

"Her—rabbit?"

"Yes—Sinclair Rhodes."

"Why, he paid me less attention than any of the others; was less—you'll pardon me—offensive. I even thought he tried to keep them away."

"As the lion drives the jackals. Avoid him, my dear. Well, I suppose that a couple more days won't hurt. We are to stay a week longer, and if Elinor asks you—which she won't—you must refuse. Now let us go out before they begin to suspect a conspiracy."

"But first let me thank you. I have been so miserable, and you have done me so much good."

Mrs. Jack gently patted the hand that caught her arm, an action totally at variance with her answer. "Self-interest, I assure you. Elinor is not the only sufferer. You have depleted the entire preserve. Not a man has looked at me the last three days. There, there! You needn't believe it if you don't want to."

Could Mrs. Jack's frank eyes have pierced the immediate future, she would have made her warning against Rhodes more specific. On Thursday of that week Leslie drove his heavy team and bobs into Lone Tree for supplies, and, what of the thawing trails, could not possibly be back till all hours Saturday night. Not knowing this, Mrs. Jack made no objection when, Saturday morning, Danvers drove over with Molyneux's double cutter and carried off herself and the Newtons to visit a friend west of the Assiniboin.

"You'll be here till after supper," she said to Helen, leaving. "So I won't say good-bye."

But she miscalculated both the warmth of the friend's welcome and the heavy sledding. When she returned, long after dark, she found Mrs. Leslie reading a novel by her bedroom stove. In a loose wrapper, crossed feet comfortably propped on the plated stove-rail, a plate of red apples at her elbow, and the light comfortably adjusted on the table behind her, she was the picture of comfort. "Having a jolly good time all by myself," she explained. "Fred's not home yet, and Captain Chapman went over to win a little from Ernest Poole at poker. Helen? Just gone. She waited and waited and waited, but you were so late that we both thought you had concluded to stay the night. Didn't you pass her at the Forks—or hear the bells? That double string of Fred's can be heard to heaven on a still night."

"Oh, was that she? Hired man came for her, I suppose?" Mrs. Jack indifferently inquired, as she laid off her furs.

"No. Sinclair drove her with our ponies. What's the matter?"

Eyes dark and dilated with fear, Mrs. Jack faced her. "Do you mean to tell me—" Breaking hastily off, she ran through bed and living rooms, almost upsetting Newton on her way to the outer door. "Mr. Danvers! Oh, Mr. Danvers! Mr. Danvers! Mr.—Danvers!" she called.

But the night returned only the clash of his bells.

Sweeping back in, she faced Mrs. Leslie, flushed with the one righteous emotion of her fast life. "You let her go out—alone—with that—" Choking, she ran into her own room and slammed the door, leaving the other two women staring.

Edith Newton answered the lift of the other's eyebrows. "Another of Maud's raves."

XVII

—AND ITS FINALE

But for the bells and groan of runners, which drowned sound for them even as it did for Danvers, Helen and Rhodes were near enough to have heard Mrs. Jack's call. Interpreting the latter's warning morally, Helen had accepted Rhodes's escort as the lesser of two evils, or, if she had speculated on tentative attempts at flirtation, had not doubted her own ability to snub them.

A sudden frost, winter's last desperate clutch at the throat of spring, had hardened the sun-rotted trails; and as the cutter sped swiftly over the first mile, she chatted freely, without thought of danger. Of the three male guests, Rhodes had, as aforeseen, pestered her least, so, ignorant of the pitiless brutality masked by his reserve, she was paralyzed—almost fainted—when his arm suddenly dropped from the cutter-rail to her waist.

Recovering, she spoke sharply, "Take it away!"

Instead, he drew her tighter. She could not see his face; but as she struck, madly, blindly, at its dim whiteness, his laugh, heartless, cynical, came out of the dusk, "Kick, bite, scratch all you want, my little beauty," he said, forcing his face against hers, "your struggles are sweet as caresses."

Yet, withal his boast, he found it difficult to hold her. Twice she broke his grip and almost leaped from the sleigh; and as she fought his face away, her hand suddenly touched the reins that were looped over his arm.

In the black confusion he was unable to specify just what happened thereafter. He knew that, alarmed by the scuffling, the ponies had burst into a gallop; but, though he felt her relax, he could not see her throw all of her weight into a sudden jerk on the left rein. Ensued a heaving, tumultuous moment. Pulled from the trail, the ponies plunged into deep drift. The cutter bucked like a live thing, and as it dropped from the high trail a runner cracked with a pistol report. Simultaneously they were thrown out into deep, cold snow.

They fell clear of each other, and Helen heard Rhodes swearing as he ran to the ponies' heads. The sound spurred her to action. She could only count on a minute, and, rising, she ran, stumbling, falling headlong into drifts to rise and plunge on, in her heart the terror of the hunted thing. Each second she expected to hear his pursuing foot. But he had to tie the ponies to a prairie poplar, and by that time she had gained a bluff two hundred yards away, and was crouched like a chased hare in its heart.

That poor covert would not have sufficed against a frontiersman. Tracking by the fainter whiteness of broken snow, he would soon have flushed the trembling game, but it was ample protection from Rhodes's inefficiency. Alarmed when he saw that she was gone, he ran back and forth, shouting, coupling her name with promises of good behavior. As her line of flight had angled but slightly from the trail, she heard him plainly.

"My God! You'll freeze! Mrs. Carter! Oh, Mrs. Carter! Do come out! I was only joking!"

She did not require his assurance as to the freezing. Already her limbs were numb, her teeth chattered so loudly she was afraid he would hear. But she preferred the frost's mercy to his, and so lay, shivering, until, in despair, he got the ponies back to the trail and drove rapidly away. Then she came out and headed homeward like a bolting rabbit. Twice she was scared back into the snow: once when Rhodes turned about and dashed down and back the trail; again just before she picked Leslie's voice from passing bells. He was merely talking to his horses, but never before had his voice fallen so sweetly on pretty ears.

As at some wan ghost, he stared at the dim, draggled figure that came up to him out of the snows; indeed, half frozen and wholly frightened, she was little more than the ghost of herself. "The cad!" he stormed, hearing her story. "I'll punch his head to-morrow!" And he maintained that rude intention up to the moment that he dropped her at her own door.

"Don't!" she called after him. "Elinor won't like it." But the caution was for his own good, and she was not so very much cast down when he persisted.

"Then she can lump it!" he shouted back.

The proverb gives the trampled worm rather more than due credit when one remembers that a barrel-hoop can outturn the very fiercest worm, but it should be remembered in Leslie's favor that he mutinied in the cause of another. Having all of the obstinacy of his dulness, he went straighter to his end because it was allied with that narrow, bull-dog vision which excludes all but one object from the field of sight. Meeting Rhodes, Chapman, and Newton, with lanterns, at the point where the sleigh had capsized, he rushed the former and was living in the strict letter of his intention when the others pulled him away. They could not, however, dam his indignant speech. On that vast, dark stage, with the lanterns shedding a golden aureole about Rhodes and his bleeding mouth, he gave them the undiluted truth, as it is said to flow from the mouths of babes and sucklings.

Arrived home, moreover, he staggered his wife by his stubborn opposition. "It is no use talking, Elinor," he said, closing a bitter argument. "To-morrow I go to the bush for a load of wood, and if that cad is here when I return I'll break a whip on his back." Then, ignoring her bitten lips, clinched hands, the bitter fury that was to produce such woful consequences, he went quietly off to bed.

Of all this, however, Helen remained in ignorance until after the denouement that came a few days later along with a scattering of new snow. Those were days of misery for her—of remorseful brooding, self-reproach, hot shame that set her at bitter introspection that she might find and root out the germs of wickedness that had brought these successive insults. As hundreds of good girls before her, as thousands will after her, she wondered if she were really the possessor of some unsuspected sensuousness. Comparisons, too, were forced upon her. Revolting from the rough settler life, she had turned to the English set only to find that their polished ease was but the veneer of their degeneracy, analogous to the phosphorescence given off in the dark by a poisoned fish, and equally indicative of decay. She could not fail to contrast her husband's sterling worth with their moral and intellectual leprosy.

The nights were still more trying. She would sit, evenings, and stare at the lamp as though it were the veritable flame of life, while her spirit quested after the cause of things and the root of many enigmas. Why, for instance, is it that pitilessness, ferocity, ruth, which were good in the youth of the world, should cause such evil in its old age? For what reason the cause of the lily willed also its blight? Why conditions make fish of one woman, flesh of another, and fowl of a third, and wherefore any one of them should be damned for doing what she couldn't help in following the dictates of her nature? In fact, from the duration of her reveries, she may have entertained all of the hundred and odd questions with which the atom pelts the infinite, and, judging from her dissatisfaction, she received the usual answer—Why? It is nature's wont to deliver her lessons in parables, from which each must extract his or her own meanings; and a momentous page was turned in Helen's lesson the day that she rode over to Leslie's to verify a rumor which Nels had brought from the post-office.

As sleighing was practically over and wheeling not yet begun, she went horseback. As aforesaid, a scattering of new snow covered the prairies, and she rode through a bitter prospect. Everywhere yellow grass tussocks or tall brown weeds thrust through the scant whiteness to wave in the chill wind. Under the sky's enormous gray, scrub and bluff and blackened drifts stood out, harsh studies in black and white. Nature was in the blues, and all sentient things shared her dull humor. Winging north, in V or harrow formations, the wild ducks quacked their discontent. Peevish snipe cursed the weather as they dipped from slough to slough. A lone coyote complained that the season transcended his experience, then broke off his plaint to chase a rabbit, of whose red death Helen was shuddering witness.

The settlement was even less cheerful. Such houses as she passed rose like dirty smudges from the frozen mud of their dooryards. Moreover, the looks of the few settlers she met were not conducive of better spirits. MacCloud, a bigoted Presbyterian of the old Scotch-Canadian school, gave her a malignant grin in exchange for her nod. Three Shinn boys, big louts, burst into a loud guffaw as their wagon rattled by her at the forks of Leslie's trail. Their comment, "Guess she hain't heard!" increased her apprehension.

She could now see the house, smokeless, apparently lifeless, frowning down from a snow-clad ridge. But when, a minute later, she knocked, Leslie answered, and she entered. The living-room, with its associations of gayety, was dank, cold, cheerless. Ash littered the fireless stove; the floor was unswept; the air gave back her breath in a steamy cloud. Through the bedroom door she saw drawers and boxes wide open, their contents tossed and tumbled as though some one had rummaged them for valuable contents. And amid these ruins of a home Leslie sat, head bowed in his hands.

"You poor man!" she cried. "You poor, poor man!"

He turned up his face, and its sick misery reminded her of a worm raising its mangled head from under a passing wheel as though questing a reason for its sudden taking off. His words strengthened the impression: "I couldn't seem to satisfy her, and she was angry because I took your part against him. Of course she isn't so much to blame. I did as well as I could, but I'm neither clever nor ornamental, like Rhodes. But I tried to treat her well, didn't I? You shall judge."

"You did—of course you did, poor man!" she sobbed.

"Then why did she leave me?"

Somehow his blind questioning raised the prairie tragedy in her mind. The rabbit's death-scream was equally sincere in its protest against inscrutable fate in the coyote's green eyes. Its innocence was blameless as this. Yet—how could she answer problems as unsolvable as her own?

"I have been a fool," he went on; and his next words helped to lessen the astonishment, though not the pain, which his calamity had brought her. "A blind fool! When we used to drive out to Regis last summer it was going on—I can see it now. They did their billing and cooing under my very eyes. Yet they were not so clever, after all, were they? I trusted her—with my honor, expecting her to protect it as I would have defended her virtue. Was I at fault? If a man can't trust his wife, what can he do? Surely not lock her up. What could I do?"

Puzzled, she stood and looked down upon him. But under its delicate complexities the feminine mind is ever practical, and her attention quickly turned to his physical welfare. He must be taken away—weaned from his sick brooding, blind questioning. "Have you eaten to-day?" she asked. "Not for three days! Go out and harness your ponies at once, and come home with me to supper." Anticipating objection, she added, "Really, you must, for I am too tired to ride back again."

Her little fiction was hardly necessary, he found it so easy to let her do his thinking. He obeyed as one in a trance; and not till they drove away, leading her pony behind, did action dissipate his lethargy. Then he began to display some signs of animation.

It was a silent and uncomfortable drive. Instead of the usual lively jingle, pole and harness rattled dully, the light snow hushed the merry song of the wheels to a slushy dirge. The raw air, bleak sky, slaty grays of the dull prospect were eminently oppressive. Nature had shed her illusions and, fronting her cold materialism, there was no dodging issues. Facts thrust themselves too rudely upon consciousness. Leslie spoke but once, and the remark proved that the chill realities had set him again at the riddle of life.

"I shall sell out," he said, as the ponies swung in on Carter's trail. "Go to South Africa. My brother is a mining superintendent on the Rand."

She sighed. "I can't go to South Africa."

Rousing from his own trouble, he looked at her. "You don't need to. You'll see. Carter will come home one of these days." And during the few days that he stayed with her he extended such brotherly sympathy that she felt sincerely sorry when, having placed the sale of his farm and effects in the hands of Danvers, he followed his faithless wife out of her life and this story.

XVIII

THE PERSISTENCE OF THE ESTABLISHED

Save for a few dirty drifts in the shadows of the bluffs, the snow was all gone when, one morning a week or so after Leslie's departure, Helen went south under convoy of Jimmy Glaves to open school. The day was beautiful. Once more the prairies wore the burned browns of autumn, but to eyes that had grown to the vast snowscape during a half-year of winter the huge monochrome rioted in color. In fact it had its values. There a passing cloud threw a patch of black. Bowing to the soft breeze, last year's grass sent sunlit waves chasing one another down to the far horizon. Here and there a green stain on the edge of cropped hay-sloughs bespoke the miracle of resurrection, eternal wonder of spring, the young life bubbling forth from the decay and death of parent plants. Also the prospect was checkered with the chocolate of ploughed fields. On these slow ox-teams crawled, and the shouts of the drivers, the snapping crack of long whips, alternated as they drove along with the cheep of running gophers, the "pee-wee" of snipe, song of small birds. Noise was luxury after the months of frozen silence. The warm, damp air, the feel of balmy spring, the sunlight on the grasses were delightfully relaxing. Helen gave herself up to it—permitted sensation to rule and banish for the moment her tire and trouble. She chatted quite happily with the trustee, who, however, seemed gloomy and preoccupied.

A philosopher coined a phrase—"the persistence of the established"—to explain the survival of phenomena after the original cause lies dead in the past. It admirably defines the trustee's mental condition, which was a product of causes set up by Helen in these last months. Ignorant of the change in her feeling towards her English friends, he was vividly aware of the prejudice which her dealings with them had aroused in the settlers. In the beginning he and Flynn had earned severe criticism by giving her the school. Since the Leslie scandal he doubted their ability to keep her in it. At meeting, "bees," on trail, her name was being coupled with grins or gloomy reprobation according to the years and character of the critics. The women had plucked her character clean as a chicken, and were scattering their findings to the four winds. Just now, of course, the heavy work of seeding sadly interfered with these activities and diversions, but Jimmy looked for trouble in the slack season. If, in the mean time, she could be weaned from her liking for the English Ishmael, they might be able to weather the prejudice. To which end he steered the conversation to the greenness, credulity, and execrable agriculture of the remittance-people.

"I kain't see," he said, among other things, "what a fine gal like you kin see in 'em. They're dying stock, an' one o' these days the fool-killer will come along an' brain the hull biling. Brain, did I say? The Lord forgive me! Kedn't scratch up the makings of one outen the hull bunch."

Had she known his mind she might easily have laid his misgivings. Instead, she tried to modify his bitter opinion. "They are certainly inefficient as farmers. But as regards their credulity, don't you think it is largely due to a higher standard of business honor? Now when a Canadian trades horses he expects to be cheated, while they are only looking for a fair exchange."

Jimmy's face wrinkled in contemptuous disparagement. "Hain't that jes' what I said? A man that expects to get his own outen a hoss-trade kain't be killed too quick. It's tempting Providence to leave him loose. As well expect a nigger to leave a fat rooster as a Canadian to keep his hands off sech easy meat. 'Tain't human natur'. As for their honor—" He sniffed. "Pity it didn't extend to their morals."

"It is, indeed."

Afterwards they had many a tilt on this same subject. Smoking in his doorway of evenings, Jimmy would emit sarcasms from the midst of furious clouds, while she, as much for fun as from natural feminine perversity, took the opposite side. And neither knew the other's mind—until too late. But placated by her low answer, he now let the subject rest.

Three feet of green water was slipping over the river ice when they forded Silver Creek, and they had to dodge odd logs, the vanguard of Carter's drive. "Another week," the trustee remarked, "an' we couldn't have crossed."

He was right. That week a warm rain ran the last of the snows off several thousand square miles of watershed, feeding the stream till it waxed fat and kicked like the scriptural ox against the load Carter had saddled upon it. Snarling viciously, it would whirl a timber across a bend, then rush on with mad roar, leaving a mile of logs backed up behind. But such triumph never endured. With axe, pevees, cant-hooks, Bender and his men broke the jams; whereupon, as though peevish at its failure, the river swept out over the level bottoms and stranded timbers in backwaters among dense scrub.

To see this, the first log-drive on Silver Creek, the children who lived near the valley scuttled every day from school, and they would gaze, wide-eyed, at Michigan Red riding a log that spun like a top under his nimble feet, or watch the Cougar, shoulder-deep in snow-water, shoving logs at some ticklish point. Then they would hang about the cook's tent, while that functionary juggled with beans and bacon or made lumberman's cake by the cubic yard. Also there were peeps into the sleeping-tents, where men lay and snored in boots and wet red shirts, just as they had come out of the river. Of all of which they would prattle to Helen next day at school, reciting many tales, chief among them the Homeric narrative of the cutting of a jam—in which she had a special interest, and which proved, among other things, that Michigan Red was again at his old tricks.

It was Susie Flynn who brought this tale. Dipping down, one end of a bridge timber had stuck at an acute angle into the river-bed. A second timber swung broadside on against its end, then, in a trice, the logs had backed up, grinding bark to pulp under their enormous pressure. "Mr. Bender," Susie said, "he was for throwing a rope across from bank to bank so's they ked cut it from above. But one wasn't handy, an' while they was waiting a big red man comes up an' hands Mr. Carter the dare.

"'If you're scairt, gimme the axe an' I'll show you how we trim a jam in Michigan.'

"But Mr. Carter wouldn't give it. 'No,' he says, awful quiet, yet sorter funny, for all the men laughed—'no. They'll need you to show 'em again.' Then he walks out on the jam an' goes to chopping, with Mr. Bender calling for him to come back an' not make a damn fool of himself."

The scene had so impressed the child that she reproduced every detail for her pale audience of one—Carter astride of the key-log; his men, bating their breath with the "huh" of his stroke; Bender's distress; the cynical grin of Michigan Red. Once, she said, a floating chip deflected the axe, and he swore, easily, naturally, turning a smile of annoyance up to the bank. It drew no response from eyes that were glued to the log, now quivering under tons of pressure. A huge baulk, it broke with a thunderous report when cut a quarter through, and loosed a mile of grinding death upon the chopper.

Then came his progress through the welter. As the jam bore down-stream, timbers would dip, somersault, and thrash down on a log that still quivered under the spurn of his leap. Young trees raised on end and swept like battering-rams along the log he rode. Yet, jumping from log to log, he came up from death out of the turmoil in safety to the bank.

"Brought his axe erlong, too!" Susan triumphantly finished. "An' you should have jes' seen that red man—he looked that sick an' green through his wishy-washy smiling. But Mr. Carter! Ain't he a brave one? You must be awful proud of him, ain't you, Miss Helen?"

What could she answer but "Yes," though the trembling admission covered only a small portion of her psychology? Misery, fear, regret made up the rest. The remainder of that day dragged wearily by to a distant drone of lessons. She, who had tried to eject her husband from her life, shuddered as she thought how nearly her wish had come to accomplishment. Death's cold breath chilled resentment, expunged the memory of her months of weary waiting. It would return, but in the mean time she could think of nothing but his danger. Hurrying home, she asked Glaves to saddle her a horse, saying that she would try to gallop off a headache.

Heartache would have been more correct; but she certainly galloped, rode westward, then swung around north on a wide circle that brought her, at dusk of the short spring day, out on a bald headland that sheered down to the river. Beneath her lay the camp, with its cooking-fires flickering like wind-blown roses athwart the velvet pall of dusk, and in either direction from that effulgent bouquet a crimson garland of sentinel fires laid its miles of length along the valley.

Men moved about the nearer fires, appearing to her distant eyes as dim, dark shapes. But what sight refused hearing supplied. She heard the cook cursing his kettles with a volubility that would have brought shame on the witches in Macbeth—the imprecations of some lumber-jack at war with a threatened jam. Above all rose the voice of a violin, quivering its infinite travail, expressing the throbbing pain of the world; then, from far up the valley, a lonely tenor floated down the night.

"He went to cut a key-log an' the jam he went below,

He was the damnedest man that ever I did know."

Some lumberman was relieving his watch by chanting the deeds of a hero of the camps, and as, like a dove of night, the voice floated high over the river's growl through a score of verses, it helped to drive home upon Helen a sense of the imminent jeopardy Carter had passed through that day. While her beast pawed its impatience, she sat for an hour trying to pick his voice from the hum of the camp. It was easy to distinguish Bender's. His bass growl formed the substratum of sound. She caught, once, the Cougar's strident tones. Then, just as she was beginning to despair, a command, stern and clear, rose from the void.

"Lay on there with that pevee! Quick! or you'll have 'em piled to heaven! Here!—Bender, Cougar!—lend a hand! this fellow's letting them jam on him!"

She started as under a lash. All that day she had lived in a whirl of feeling, and, just as a resolvent precipitates a chemical mixture, the stern voice reduced her feeling to thought. Unfortunately, the tone was not in harmony with her soft misery. If it had been—well, it was not. Rather it recalled his contempt under the moonlight, her own solitary shame. Whirling her bronco, she cut him over the flank and galloped, at imminent risk of her neck, over the dark prairies in vain attempt to escape the galling recurrence of injured pride, the stings of disappointment.

"He doesn't care for me! He doesn't care for me!" It rang in her brain. Then, when she was able to think, she added, in obedience to the sex instinct which will not admit Love's mortality, "He never did, otherwise he couldn't have left me!" Her conclusion, delivered that night into a wet pillow, revealed the secret hope at the root of her disappointment. "I won't ride that way again."

But she did, and her changed purpose is best explained by a conversation between Carter and Bender as they stood drying themselves at the cook's fire after averting the threatened jam.

Carter began: "I reckon you can get along well enough without me. Of course I'd have liked to seen the drive down to the Assiniboin, but in another week the frost will be out enough to start prairie grading. I'll have to go. Let me see.... One week more on the creek, two on the Assiniboin—three weeks will put the last timber into Brandon. In less than a month you'll join me at the Prairie Portage."

Turning to bring another area of soaked clothing next to the fire, his face came under strong light. These seven months of thought and calculation had left their mark upon it—thinned and refined its lines, tooled the features into an almost intellectual cast. His mouth, perhaps, evidenced the greatest change, showing less humor, because, perhaps, self-repression and the habit of command had drawn the lips in tighter lines. Deeper set, his eyes seemed darker, while a straight look into their depths revealed an underlying sadness. Sternness and sadness, indeed, governed the face, without, however, banishing a certain grave courtesy that found expression in pleasant thanks when, presently, the cook brought them a steaming jug of coffee. Lastly, determination stamped it so positively that only its lively intelligence saved it from obstinacy. One glance explained Bender's answer to Jenny: "He's stiffer'n all hell!"—his attitude to Helen. In him will dominated the emotions. Summed, the face, with its power, dogged resolution, imperturbable confidence, mirrored his past struggles, gave earnest for his future battles.

A hint of these last inhered in a remark that Bender slid in between two gulps of coffee. "They're saying as the C.P. will never let you cross their tracks?"

Carter smiled. "Yes? Who's saying it?"

"Oh, everybody. An' the Winnipeg paper said yesterday as 'Old Brass-Bowels'"—he gave the traffic manager his sobriquet—"will enjoin you an' carry the case through the Dominion courts to the British privy council. The newspaper sharp allows that would take about two years, during which the monopoly would either buy out or bust your crowd by building a competing line."

This time Carter laughed heartily, the confident laugh of one sure of himself. "So that's what the paper said? Well, well, well! That scribe person must be something of a psychic. What's that? Oh, a fellow who tells you a whole lot of things he don't know himself. Now, listen." (In view of what occurred six months later, his words are worth remembering.)

"Courts or no courts, privy council to the contrary, we'll run trains across 'Brass-Bowel's' tracks before next freeze-up."

"Hope you do," Bender grinned. "But the old man ain't so very slow."

They talked more of construction—tools, supplies, engineering difficulties, the hundred problems inherent in railroad-building. Midnight still found them by the fire, that twinkled, a lone red star, under the enormous vault of night.

But, though interesting and important, in that the success of the enterprise involved the economic freedom of a province, the conversation—with one exception—is not germane to this story, which goes on from the moment that, two days later, a Pengelly boy carried the news of Carter's departure to Helen at school.

The exception was delivered by the mouth of Bender, as he rose, stretching with a mighty yawn, to go to his tent. "Of course it's none of my damn business, but do you allow to call at the school as you go down to-morrow?"

Carter's brows drew into swift lines, but resentment faded before the big fellow's concern. "I didn't reckon to," he said, gently; yet added the hint, "—since you're so pressing."

But Bender would not down. "Oh, shore!" he pleaded. "Shore! shore!"

Carter looked his impatience, yet yielded another point to the other's distress. "If Mrs. Carter wished to see me, I allow she'd send."

"Then she never will! she never will!" Bender cried, hitting the crux of their problem. "For she's jes' as proud as you."

With that he plunged into the environing darkness, leaving Carter still at the fire. From its glow his face presently raised to the valley's rim, dim and ghostly under a new moon, ridged with shadowy trees. It was only six miles to Glaves's place, a hop, skip, and jump in that country of distances. For some minutes he stood like a stag on gaze; then, with a slow shake of the head, he followed Bender.

"An' he ain't coming back till winter," the small boy informed Helen. "He'll be that busy with his railroading."

After two days of embittered brooding, Helen had come to consider herself as being in the self-same mood that had ruled her the January morning when Mrs. Leslie broke in on her months of loneliness. But this startling news explained certain contradictions in her psychology—for instance, her startings and flushings whenever her north window had shown a moving dot on the valley trail these last two days. Moreover, her pallor was hardly consistent with the assertion, thrice repeated within the hour, that even if he did come she would never, never, never forgive him now! Not that she conceded said contradictions. On the contrary, she put up a gorgeous bluff with herself, affected indifference, and—borrowed Jimmy's pony that evening and rode down to the ford.

Bender had built a rough bridge to serve traffic till the drive should clear the ford. Reining in at the nearer end, Helen looked down on the pool, the famous pool wherein her betrothal had received baptism by total immersion—at least she looked on the place where the pool had been, for shallows and sand-bar were merged in one swirl of yellow water. But the clay bank with its bordering willows was still there, and shone ruddily under the westering sun just as on that memorable evening. Here, on the straight reach, the logs floated under care of an occasional patrol. A rough fellow in blue jeans and red jerkin gave her a curious stare as he passed, whereafter there was no witness to her wet eyes, her rain of tears, convulsive sobbing, the break-up of her indifference—that is, none but her pony. Reaching curiously around, the beast investigated the grief huddled upon his neck with soft muzzle, rubbing and sniffing "cheer up," and she had just straightened to return his mute sympathy when a voice broke in on the bitter and sweet of her reverie.

"Well met, fair lady!"

Turning, startled, she came face to face with Molyneux. The heavy mud of the bottoms had silenced his wheels, and now he sat smiling at the sudden fires that dried up and hid her tears. "Not there yet," he answered her question as to his return home. "Do you imagine I could go by without calling? The school was closed, but a kid—a Flynn, by his upper lip—told me that you had ridden this way; and as it was Friday evening I judged you were going north to Leslie's, and so drove like Jehu on the trail of Ahab. Better turn your horse loose and get in with me. He'll go home all right. Why not?"

Again she shook her head. "Didn't Mr. Danvers write you—?" Remembering that a letter would have crossed him on the Atlantic, she stopped.

"What's the matter? No one dead? Worse?" He laughed in her serious face when she had told. "Oh, well, that's not so bad. After all, Leslie was an awful chump. If a man isn't strong enough to hold a woman's love he shouldn't expect to keep her."

He was yet, of course, in ignorance of all that had transpired in his absence—the house-party and the complete revulsion it had wrought in Helen's feelings. He knew nothing of her shame, vivid remorse, passion of thankfulness for her escape. To him she was still the woman, desperate in her loneliness, who had challenged his love two short months ago. Withal, what possessed him to afford that glimpse of his old nature? It coupled him instantly in her mind with her late unpleasant experience.

Not understanding her silence, he ran gayly on: "I can now testify to the truth of the saying, 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder.' How is it with you? Have I lost or gained?"

Laughing nervously, she answered: "Neither. We are still the same good friends."

He shook his head, frowning. "Not enough. I want love—must, will have it."

Any lingering misapprehension of the state of her feelings which she may have entertained now instantly vanished. How she regretted the weakness which entitled him to speak thus! She knew now. Never, under any conditions, could she have married him, but, warned by dearly boughten experience, she dared not so inform him. Frightened, she fenced and parried, calling to her aid those shifts for men's fooling that centuries of helplessness have bred in woman's bone.

"Well, well!" she laughed. "I thought you more gallant. I on horseback, you in a buggy. Love at such long distance! I wouldn't have believed it of you!"

It was a bad lead, drawing him on instead of away. "That is easily remedied. Get in with me—or, I'll tie up to that poplar."

She checked his eagerness with a quick invention. "No, no! I was only joking. No, I say! There's a man, a river-driver, just behind that bluff." How she wished there were! Praying that some one might come and so afford her safe escape, she switched the conversation to his journey, and when that subject wore out enthused over the sunset. How beautiful was the sky—the shadows that fell like a pall over the bottoms—the lights slow crawling up the headlands!

Preferring her delicate coloring to the blushes of the west, he feasted on her profile, delicately outlined against a golden cloud, until she turned. Then he brought her back to the point. "Well—have you forgotten?"

"What?" She knew too well, but the question killed a moment.

"The answer you promised me?"

She would dearly have loved to give it, to cry aloud: "I love! I love! I love—him, not you!" Ay, she would have flaunted it in all the proud cruelty of love—had she dared. Instead, she answered: "You forget! I am a married woman."

"No, I don't," he urged. "That is easily settled. Three months' residence across the line, in Dakota, and you are free of him."

"But not of myself."

"What do you mean?"

Alarmed by the sudden suffusion of venous blood on his face and neck, the reddish glow of his eye, she forged hasty excuses. "You see, I never thought of it—in that way. I must have time to get used to the idea. Won't you give me a week?" Her winning smile conquered. He had stepped his ponies alongside, and, snatching her hand, he covered it with kisses.

"By God, Helen, you must say yes! I'm mad—mad with love of you. If you refuse—"

"Hush!" She snatched away her hand as a man came in sight from behind a bluff, coming up-stream. "It is Mr. Bender!" she exclaimed—so thankfully. Then, mindful of her part, she added: "What a nuisance! I wonder if he—saw you?"

"Oh, he'll go by."

"No, no! Leave me the shreds of my character. You must go. Must! I said, sir."

"Very well. But remember—one week." Nodding significantly, he drove off, leaving her struggling with mixed feelings of relief and apprehension. She wondered if Bender had seen Molyneux kiss her hand.

Though in a few minutes of shy conversation Bender showed no knowledge of the cause that had set her to rubbing the back of her hand against her skirt, it nevertheless formed the subject of a rough scrawl that Baldy, the tote-trail teamster, delivered to Jenny in Lone Tree two days later. "You said I was to tell if I saw or heard anything more. Well, he is back, and—" Followed the kisses, and the scrawl ended, "If you kin do anything like you thought you ked, do it quick, else I shall have to tell the boss and give him a chance to look after his own."

Jenny did "do it quick," and thereby initiated a sequence of cause and event that was to entirely change the complexion of a dozen lives. An extract from her letter to Helen explains itself: "'Twas on the tip of my tongue to tell it to you every time he druv you home last winter, but 'twas so much easier for me to have you all believing as it was the man that went back to England. But 'twasn't, Miss Helen; 'twas him—Capen Molyneux."

Poor Jenny! She alone knew the magnitude of the man's offence against her weak innocence, but, small stoic, she had hugged the knowledge to her soul while waiting in dull patience for the punishment she never doubted. Immunity would have challenged the existence of the God on whom, despite small heresies of speech, she devoutly leaned. She read his sentence in that most tremendous curse of the oppressor, the One Hundredth and Ninth Psalm, the bitter cry of David: "For he hath rewarded me evil ... hatred for my love. When he shall be judged, let him be condemned; and his prayer become sin.... Let his children be continually vagabonds, seek their bread in desolate places. Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; the stranger despoil his labor. Let there be none to extend mercy to him.... Let his posterity be cut off and his generation blotted out ... that He may cut off the memory of them from the earth." Ay, she had believed that it would come to pass in some way—by lightning-flash, sudden sickness, a weary death. But she had never imagined herself as the instrument which this letter was to make her. What the confession cost her! Tears, shameful agonizings! Small wonder that, in her trembling confusion, she mis-shuffled notes and slid Helen's into Bender's envelope.

XIX

THE WAGES OF SIN

On the afternoon following Baldy's delivery of the shuffled notes, the May sun diffused a tempered warmth upon Molyneux's veranda, thereby intensifying certain comfortable reflections which accompanied his after-dinner pipe. He had material cause of satisfaction. To begin, his father's death placed him in possession of a sum which—a mere pittance in England—loomed large as a fortune in the thrifty settlements. Next, Messrs. Coxhead & Boxhead, exploiters of the Younger Son, and his London solicitors, had forwarded through that morning's mail indentures of apprenticeship to colonial farming of three more innocents at one thousand dollars a head per annum. This more than made up for the defection of Danvers, who, having learned how little there was to be learned in the business, was adventuring farming for himself. It also permitted the retention of the bucolic Englishman and wife, who respectively managed Molyneux's farm and house.

With their service assured, the life was more than tolerable, infinitely superior to that which he would have led at home. There he would have been condemned to the celibate lot of the younger son—to be a "filler" at dinners and dances, useful as the waiters, ineligible and innocuous to the plainest of his girl partners as an Eastern eunuch; or, accepting the alternative, trade, vulgar trade, his pampered wits would have come into competition with abilities that had been whetted to a fine edge through centuries on time's hard stone. Like a leaden plummet, he would have plunged through the social strata to his natural place in the scheme of things. Here, however, he was of some importance, a magnate on means that would hardly have kept up his clothes and clubs at home. A landed proprietor, moreover, he escaped the stigma of trade, and the resultant prejudice, should he ever return to live in England.

Then the life glowed with the colors of romance. His farm occurred on the extreme western edge of that vast forest which blackens the Atlantic seaboard, and so marches west and north over a thousand rugged miles to the limit of trees on the verge of the Barren Lands. Within gunshot the old ferocious struggle for life continued as of yore. Through timbered glades the wolf pursued and made his kill; echo answered the clash of horns as big elk fought for a doe; over lonely woodland lakes, black with water-fowl, the hoo-haugh crane spread ten feet of snowy pinion; across dark waters the loon's weird lament replied to the owl's midnight questioning. In winter the moose came down from their yards to feed at his prairie hay-stacks; any night he could come out on the veranda and thrill to a long howl or the scream of a lynx.

Opening before him now, the view was pleasantly beautiful. His house, a comfortable frame building, and big barn and corrals, all sat within the embrace of a half-moon that prairie-fires had bitten out from the heart of a poplar bluff. Southward his tilled fields ran like strips of brown carpet over the green earth rolls. Beyond them spread the Park Lands, with his cattle feeding knee-deep in the rank pasture between clump poplar. Further still, his horses scented the wind from the crest of a knoll, forming a dull blotch against the soft blue sky. These were growing into money while he smoked, and what of free grazing, free hay, and labor that reversed the natural order of things and paid for the privilege of working, he could see himself comfortably wealthy in not too many seasons. He would still be young enough for a run through Maiden Lane, London's Mecca for the stage and demi-mondaine. However, he put that thought behind him as being inconsistent with contemplation of the last thing necessary for perfect happiness—a pretty wife. Through the haze of sunlit tobacco reek, he saw himself in possession of even that golden asset, and thereafter his reflections took the exact color of those of the rich man before death came in the night: "Soul, soul! Thou hast much goods laid up in store! Eat, drink, take thine ease, and be merry!"

"It is really time that I settled," he murmured. "Thirty-four, my next birthday. By Jove! six more years and I shall be forty!"

The thought deflected his meditation into channels highly becoming to a person of the age he was contemplating, and from virtuous altitudes he looked back with something of the reproving tolerance that kindly age accords to youthful indiscretion. He maintained the "you-were-a-sad-dog" point of view till a sudden thought stung his virtuous complacency through to the quick. "Oh, well"—he ousted reproach with exculpatory murmur—"if the girl had only let me, I would have got her away from here and have done something handsome for her afterwards. But it was just as well—seeing that it passed off so quietly. I wonder how she managed it? Nobody seems to know." Then, ignoring the fact that every seeding brings its harvest, not knowing that the measure of that cruel sowing was even then coming home to him on a fast trot, he smothered conviction under the trite reflection, "A fellow must sow his wild oats."

Still the thought had marred his reverie, and, tapping his pipe on the chair-rung, he rose. He intended a visit to the barn, where his man was dipping seed wheat in bluestone solution to kill the smut; but just then a wagon, which had been rattling along the Lone Tree trail, turned into his private lane.

"It is Glaves," he muttered. "And his wife. What can they want? Must have a message—from her; otherwise they would never come here."

His thought did not malign the trustee, who had positively refused the commission till assured that its performance would sever Helen's relations with his natural foes. Yet he did not like it, and though retribution might have presented herself in more tragic guise, she could not have assumed a more forbidding face than that which he now turned down to Molyneux.

Than they two there have been no more violent contrast. Beak-nosed, hollow-eyed, the hoar of fifty winters environed the trustee's face, which wind and weather had warped, seamed, and wrinkled into the semblance of a scorched hide. He was true to the frontier type; and beside his bronzed ruggedness, the Englishman, though much the larger man, seemed, with his soft hands, smooth skin, and polished manner, to be small and effeminate.

As might be expected, the trustee refused Molyneux's invitation to put in and feed. "No; me an' the wife is going up to see her brother, north of Assissippii, an' we have thirty miles to make afore sundown."

He did, however, return curt answers to a few questions, though it would be a mistake to set his scant conversational efforts to the account of politeness. Rather they were the meed of malignance, for, while talking, he secretly exulted over the thought of Molyneux's coming disappointment. They would be gone a week, he said. The mails? Mrs. Carter would attend to sech letters as straggled in. She'd be there alone? Yes. Lonesome? Mebbe, but she was that well-plucked she'd laughed at the idea of spending her nights at Flynn's. A fine girl, sirree! Having accorded five minutes to Helen's perfections, the trustee drove off, but turned, as he rattled out of the yard, and nudged his wife, grinning, to look at Molyneux.

Stark and still as one of his own veranda-posts, the man stood and stared down at Jenny's pitiful letter. Across the top Helen had written, "This explains itself," and that scrap of writing represented three letters now torn up and consigned to the flames. The first antedated her receipt of Jenny's letter, and had run: "I want you to believe me innocent of coquetry, and you must pardon me if I have, by speech or action, seemed to sanction the hope you expressed the other day. I now perceive that it was my desperate loneliness that caused me to lean so heavily upon your friendship. I might have told you this personally but for certain experiences which have made me timid." There was more—regret, pleasant hope that the future might bring with it friendly relations, wishes for his happiness. This letter she had withdrawn from the mail to burn, along with one that was full of reproach, and a third that sizzled with indignation.

Suffused with dark, venous blood, Molyneux faced discovered sin. If ever, this was the accepted time for his attempts at reconstruction to bring forth fruit. He had pictured himself remorseful, but now that the wage of sin was demanded, he flinched like a selfish child, reneged in the game he had played with the gods. It was not in him to play a losing hand to the logical end. Instead of remorse, anger possessed him, for, tearing the letter, he cried in a gust of passion:

"She sha'n't throw me a second time! By God, she sha'n't!"

Needs not to follow his turbulent thought as he hurried out to the barn—his flushes, the paroxysms that set his face in the colors of apoplexy. Sufficient that flooding passion swept clean the superstructure of false morality, sophistical idealism, that he had erected on the rotten foundation of his vicious heredity. A minute of action explains a volume of psychology. Hitching his ponies, he drove madly southward, one idea standing clearly out in his whirl of thought—she would be alone that night.

Just about the time that Molyneux swung out on the Lone Tree trail, Helen arrived home from school with the eldest Flynn boy, who had volunteered to help her with the chores, her undertaking of which had made possible Mrs. Glaves's rare holiday. Under distress of their bursting udders, the cows had come in of their own accord from the fat, rank pastures, and now called for easement, with low, persistent "mooing," while she changed her dress. When she finally came out, with sleeves rolled above elbows that had regained their plump whiteness, they even fought for precedence, horning each other aside until the bell-cow made good her prerogative as leader; then frothing streams soon drew tinkling music from her pail. For his part, the boy fed pigs and calves, carried in the milk, then departed, leaving her to skim and strain, and wash pans and pails, itself no light task in view of Mrs. Glaves's difficult standards of cleanliness. That done and her supper eaten, she placed a lamp on the table and sat down to think over the events of the day.

A little fatigued, she leaned a smooth cheek on her hand, staring at the lamp, whose golden light toned while it revealed the changes these distressful months had wrought in her appearance. Her eyes were weary, her face tired; but if she was paler than of yore, the pallor was becoming, in that it was altogether a mental product and accorded well with her plump, well-nourished body. Her mouth, if wofully pouted in agreement with her sad thought, was scarlet and pretty as ever. In every way she was good as new.

At first she had found it extremely difficult to realize the full meaning of the letter which the Cougar had brought in from the camp early that morning. For Bender would trust it in no other hand; whereby he discovered not only his wisdom, but also an unexpected fund of tact in his rough messenger. Anticipating some display of emotion, the Cougar discharged his office in the privacy of Helen's own room; and if her red eyes afterwards excited Jimmy Glaves's insatiable curiosity, only the Cougar witnessed her breakdown—sorrowful tremblings, blushes, tearful anger. Not that she had doubted the girl's word. Only it had seemed monstrous, incredible, impossible, until, through the day, jots and tittles of evidence had filtered out of the past. She had connected Jenny's gloomings on the occasions that Molyneux drove her (Helen) home with his refusals to enter and warm himself after their cold drives. Even from the far days of the child's trouble, small significances had come to piece out the solid proof. So now nothing was left for her but bitter self-communion.

These days it did seem as though the fates were bent on squeezing the last acrid drop into her cup; for to the consciousness of error was now added knowledge of the utter worthlessness of her tempter. She burned as she recalled their solitary rides; writhed slim fingers in a passion of thankfulness as she thought of her several escapes; was taxing herself for her folly when a sudden furious baying outside brought her, startled, to her feet.

It was merely the house-dog exchanging defiances with a lone coyote; but—after she had satisfied herself of the fact—it yet brought home upon her a vivid sense of her lonely position. Sorry now that she had not gone home with the Flynn boy, she glanced nervously about the room, which, if small, was yet large enough to own shadowy corners. On top of the pigeon-holed mailing-desk, moreover, a few books were piled in such a way as to cast a shadow, the silhouette of a man's profile, upon the wall. Lean, hard, indescribably cruel, its thin lips split in a merciless grin as she moved the lamp, then suddenly lengthened into the semblance of a hand and pointing finger. Then she laughed, nervously, yet laughed because it indicated one of the hundred summonses, writs of execution, and findings in judgment that were pasted up on the walls.

"By these summons," Victoria Regina called upon her subject, James Glaves, to pay the moneys and taxed costs herein set forth under pain of confiscation of his goods and chattels. Usually recording debt and disaster, the instruments certified, in Jimmy's case, to numerous victories over implement trusts, cordage monopolies, local or foreign Shylocks. "Execution proof," in that his wife owned their real property in her own right, he could sit and smoke at home, the cynosure of the country-side, in seasons when the sheriff travelled with the thresher and took in all the grain. To each document he could append a story, the memory of such a one having caused Helen's laugh.

Indicating this particular specimen with his pipe-stem one evening, he had remarked: "Yon jest tickled the jedge to death. 'Mr. Glaves,' he says, when he handed it down, 'they've beat you on the jedgment, now it's up to you to fool 'em on the execution.' An' you bet I did."

Reassured, Helen returned to her musings, only to start up, a minute later, with a nervous glance over her shoulder at the window. Is there anything in thought transference? At that moment Molyneux was rattling down into the dark valley, and is it possible that his heated imaginings bridged the miles and impressed themselves upon her nervous mental surfaces? Or was it merely a coincidence of thought that caused her to see his face pressed against the black pane. Be this as it may, she could not regain her composure. Taking the lamp, she locked herself in her bedroom; then she sought that last refuge of frightened femininity, the invulnerable shield of the bedclothes.

XX

—IS DEATH

Though Silver Creek still ran fat and full, its sources were now nearly drained of flood-waters; any day might see it suddenly shrink to its usual summer trickle. Anticipating the event, Bender went miles down-stream that morning to superintend the building of the first dam, and so did not see the Cougar till that worthy came into camp at night from his own place at the tail of the drive.

This, the hour for changing shifts, was the liveliest of camp life—the social hour, one might term it, replete with a certain rough comfort. With them, from up and down river, the reliefs poured in, a stream of red shirts, drowning with oaths, song, and laughter the rattle of tin-ware in the cook-tent. Spread over fifteen miles of river, the arrival was equally irregular, and those who had already eaten were grouped about a huge camp-fire, the red glow of which enriched weathered skins and softened the corrugations of iron faces. After the cold and wet of the day, its warmth spelled luxury in capitals—luxury such as no millionaire may command from his palatial clubs, for pleasure may only be measured in degrees of health with accompanying intensity of sensation. As they moved and turned like huge red capons on an old-style spit, bringing fresh areas of soaked clothing under the blaze, they smoked and revamped the day's haps, its dips, jams, duckings, while the river—the river that yielded their hard bread in exchange for annual toll of a life or two—rebuked with angry growl their jokes and jestings.

A candle in Bender's tent showed the giant squatted upon his blankets, chin on hands, big torso hunched between knees and elbows. A night and day of heavy brooding had sunk his eyes; despair had cross-ploughed and deepened the furrows across his blue, scarred face. The attitude bespoke deepest dejection, and his look, when the Cougar entered, caused the latter's weird fierceness to flux in vast sympathy.

"Well?" Bender inquired.

The Cougar pulled a paper out of his shirt-bosom. "Here's your letter that she got by mistake."

It was only a scrap to say that she would do her best—she had done it, too, poor girl!—that and an admonition to be careful in drying his clothes at nights. Usually the warning would have dissolved Bender's grimness, but it caused no relaxation of his gravity.

"How did she take it?"

"Hard. Cried an' said as 'twas more'n she deserved at the little gal's hands. Blamed herself—dreadful cut up. Seems, too, as 'twasn't necessary, as she'd already mailed Mr. Man his walking-papers."

"Too late—now. It's done."

The Cougar looked awkwardly down upon him. Pity had been foreign to their rough comradeship; it was, indeed, nearest of kin to shame; the words of sympathy choked in his throat. "Come, come!" he presently growled. "Chipper up! 'Tain't any worse than it was."

A convulsion seized and shook the big body. "You don't know, Cougar. You don't know what it is—" He stopped, aghast at the sudden appalling change in the other. He had straightened from his crouch, and his eyes flared like blue, alcohol flames in his livid face. As at the touch of a secret spring, the man's fierce taciturnity raised, exposing the tortured soul behind.

"I—don't?" The whisper issued like a dry wind from drawn lips. "Me?—that saw my wife an' baby—" Though frontiersmen tell, shivering, of the horror he mentioned, no pen has been found callous enough to set it forth on paper. "God, man!" His arms snapped outward and his head fell forward in the attitude of the crucifixion.

"Cougar!" Bender grasped his shoulder. "Cougar! Cougar, man! I'd forgotten."

But as one in a trance the man went on: "It's always with me—through these years—day an' night. I'd have killed myself—long ago—on'y whenever I'd think of that, she'd come—sweet an' smiling—with a shake of her pretty head. She wouldn't let me do it." The thought of her smile seemed to calm him, and he continued, more quietly: "I never could make out why 'twas done to her. A sky-pilot tol' me onct as 'twas the will o' God, but I shocked him clean out of his boots.

"'I'll know on the Jedgment Day, will I?' I asks him. 'Shorely,' he answers, pat. 'An' I'll be close in to the great white throne you was talking about?' He nods. 'Then do you know what I'll do?' I asks him again. 'If I find out as how that God o' yourn ordered that done to my little gal, I'll stick a knife into Him an' turn it round.'

"At that he turned green an' tried to saddle the dirty business onto the devil. But, Lordy, he didn't know. She does, though, else she wouldn't come smiling. She knows; so I've allus reckoned as if she could bear her pain I can worry through to the end. There! there! I'm all right again. You didn't go to do it. An', after all, I don't know but that you are right. For while my gal's at peace, yourn has to live out her pain. It's puzzling—all of it. Now there's him. Where does he come in? What about him?"

"What about him?" Bender's bulk seemed to swell in the dim light to huge, amorphous proportions. "That's simple. He's got to marry her."

What the conclusion had cost him!—the suffering, self-sacrifice. To the sophisticated, both sacrifice and conclusion may seem absurd, provoking the question as to just how wrong may be righted by the marriage of a clean girl with an impure man; yet it was strictly in accord with backwoods philosophy. As yet the scepticism of modernity had not infected the plains, nor had the leprosy of free thought rotted their creeds and institutions. To Bender's simplicity, marriage appealed as the one cure for such ills as Jenny's, while both he and the Cougar had seen the dose administered with aid of a Colt's forty-five. So, absurd or not, the conclusion earned the latter's instant approval.

There was something pathetic, too, in the serious way in which, after discussing ways and means, they spoke of Jenny's future. "She'll be a lady," the Cougar commented. "Too big to look at you an' me."

Bender's nod incarnated self-effacement, but he bristled when the Cougar suggested that Molyneux might not treat her rightly, and his scowl augured a quick widowhood in such premises. "We'll go up for him to-morrow."

"An' after it's all over?"

"Oregon for you an' me—the camps an' the big timber."

The big timber! The Cougar's bleak face lit up with sudden warmth. Giant pines of Oregon woods; rose-brown shade of cathedral redwoods; the roaring unrest of lacy cataracts; peace of great rivers that float the rafts and drives from snow-capped Rockies down to the blue Pacific; these, and the screaming saw-mills that spew their product over the meridians, the pomp of that great piracy; the sights, sounds, resinous odors that the Cougar would never experience again were vividly projected into his consciousness.

"Man!" He drew a deep breath. "It can't come too quick for me. I'm sick of these plains, where a man throws a shadow clean to the horizon. I'm hungry for the loom of the mountains." After a pause, he added, "Coming back to yourself—have you eaten to-day?"

The language he accorded to Bender's negative would shake the type from a respectable printer's fingers, yet, in essence, was exactly equivalent to the "You poor dear!" of an anxious wife or mother. Striding off, he quickly returned with coffee and food, which Bender was ordered to eat under pain of instant loss of his liver, lights, and sundry other useful organs. Then, being besotted in his belief in action as a remedy for mental disorders, he suggested a visit to the turn above the bridge where the logs had jammed twice that afternoon.

Another day would put the last log under the bridge and see the temporary structure dismantled and afloat; but though only the tail of the drive remained above, the jams had backed it up for a couple of miles, so that the logs now filled the river from bank to bank. They floated silently, or nearly so, for the soft thud of collisions, mutter of grinding bark, merged with the low roar of the stream. But a brilliant northern moon lit the serried array; when the men crossed they could pick the yellow sawed ends from the black of the mass.

Under urge of the same thought, they paused on the other side and looked back along the northern trail. With the exception of the cook, whose pots proclaimed his labors with shrill tintinnabulation, the camp now slept, its big watch-fire burning red and low. Beneath that bright moon scrub, bluff, scour, ravine, and headland stood out, lacking only the colors of day, and they could see the trail's twin ruts writhing like black snakes across the ashen bottoms into the gorge by which it gained the prairies.

The Cougar's quick eye first discerned a moving blot, but Bender gave it identity. "That's shore Molyneux's rig. He'd a loose spoke when he went by t'other day. Hear it rattle."

It was clear and sharp as the clatter of a boy's stick along a wooden paling, and the Cougar whispered: "It's sure him. Where kin he be going? Do you reckon—"

The same thought was in Bender's mind. "An' she there alone. No one ever starts out for Lone Tree this time o' night." After a grim pause, he added, "But that's where he's going."

A strident chuckle told that the Cougar had caught his meaning. "That's right. Saved us trouble, hain't he? Kind of him. Jes' step into the shadow till he's fairly on the bridge."

If they had remained in the moonlight he would never have seen them. Dusk had brought no surcease of his mad thought; rather its peace stimulated his excitement by shutting him out from the visible world. What were his thoughts? It takes a strong man to face his contemplated villanies. From immemorial time your scoundrel has been able to justify his acts by some sort of crooked reasoning, and Molyneux was no exception to the rule. "Why do you muddy the water when I am drinking?" the wolf asked of the lamb. "How could I, sir, seeing that the stream flows from you to me?" the lamb filed in exception. "None of your insolence!" the wolf roared as he made his kill.

In the same way Molyneux excluded from thought everything that conflicted with his intention—the first rudeness that lost him Helen's maiden confidence, his insidious attempts to wean her from her husband, her undoubted right to reject his advances. He twisted his own crime to her demerit. "She didn't know about that when she was drawing me on!" he exclaimed, whenever Jenny's letter thrust into his meditation. "Why should it cut any ice now? It is just an excuse to throw me a second time. But she sha'n't do it, by God! no, she sha'n't, she sha'n't! She's a coquette!—a damned coquette! I'll—" Then a red rage, a heaving, tumultuous passion, would drown articulate thought so that his intention never took form in words. But one thing is certain—he was thoroughly dangerous. In that mood Helen would have fared as illy at his hands as the lamb at the paws of the wolf.

The sudden stoppage of his ponies, midway of the bridge, broke up his reverie. As the moon struck full in his own face, he saw the two men only as shadows; but there was no mistaking Bender's bulk, and, after a single startled glance, Molyneux hailed him. "Is that you, Mr. Bender?"

"It's me, all right. Where might you be heading for?"

It was the usual trail greeting, preliminary to conversation, but Molyneux sensed a difference of tone, savor of command, menace of authority, that galled his haughty spirit. Vexed by the impossibility of explanation, his disdain of the settler tribe in general would not permit him to lie; from which conflict of feeling his stiff answer was born.

"I don't see that it is any of your business."

"You don't?" Equally stiff, the reply issued from the huge, dim shape. "Well, I'll make it mine. You're going to Lone Tree."

Puzzled, Molyneux glanced from Bender's indefiniteness to the Cougar's dim crouch. He was not afraid. In him the courage of his vices was reinforced by enormous racial and family pride—the combination that made the British fool the finest of officers until mathematics and quick-firing artillery replaced the sword and mêlée. Mistaking the situation, he attempted to carry it off with a laugh.

"What have you chaps been drinking? Here; pass the bottle."

"Not till we wet your wedding," the Cougar interjected, dryly.

Astonished now, as well as puzzled, Molyneux yet rejected a sudden suspicion as impossible. Out of patience, galled by this mysterious opposition, he said, testily: "Are you crazy? I do not intend—"

"—To go to Lone Tree," Bender interrupted. "Yes, we know. You was heading up for Glaves's place."

Seriously disconcerted, Molyneux hid it under an ironical laugh. "I must say that I marvel at your intimate knowledge of my affairs. And since you are so well posted, perhaps you can tell me why I am going to Lone Tree?"

"I kin that." The huge, dim figure, with its crouched, attendant shadow, moved a pace nearer, then the man's stern bass launched on the quivering moonlight, reciting to an accompaniment of rushing waters this oldest of woodland sagas. Beginning at the night he picked Jenny up on the trail, he told all—Jed Hines's cruel fury; birth and burial of his, Molyneux's child; the outcast girl's subsequent illness; Helen's kindness; the doctor's philanthropy; the kindly conspiracy that protected her from social infamy. "An' us that saw her through her trouble," he finished, "are bound to see her righted."

If the lime-lights of history and fiction were thrown more often upon motives and psychology, and less on deeds and action, characters would not appear in such hard colors of black and white. It were false to paint Molyneux irredeemably black. "Your child!" He winced at the phrase, and, perhaps for the first time, an inkling of the enormity of his offence was borne in upon him. His child? It was the flesh of his own loins that had suffered midnight burial at the hands of Carter and the kindly priest! The thought struck with enormous force—then faded. For back of him was that vicious generation whose most cultured exponent wrote to his own son that a seduction or two was necessary to the education of a gentleman. Through pride of family, the dead hands of haughty and licentious forebears reached to throttle remorse.

Was he to be called to account by common settlers, the savages of the scornful English phrase? Anger colored his next remark: "Waited till you were good and ready, didn't you? Your diligence falls short of your zeal, my friends, or—"