Front matter (continued 5)

"Don't flatter yourself," Bender sternly interrupted. "You kin thank her for the delay. If we'd known, you'd long ago have been either dead or married. But she kep' her own counsel till she thought as some one else's welfare called her to speak. 'Twasn't needed. T'other'd already found you out for herself."

Molyneux blinked under the savage contempt, but answered, stiffly enough: "Now listen. I deny nothing, though she received attentions from one of my pupils, and it might very well have been—"

"You lie!"

The lie never comes so unpleasantly as when asserting a truth; so, though he knew that he had lied, Molyneux's eyes glinted wickedly, his hand tightened on his whip. A glance right and left showed him the river, only a light hand-rail between him and dark waters. There was not room to turn; the giant blocked the way. Under constraint, he spoke quietly: "Neither do I profess sorrow. What is done is done. If the girl had taken me into her confidence—"

"Likely, wasn't it?"

A line of Jenny's letter, a damnable fact, flashed into Molyneux's mind, but he went on: "—I'd have taken care of her—am willing to do so yet, in a certain way. Marriage, of course, is out of the question. We are unfitted for each other—"

"No one's denying that."

He ignored the sarcasm. "—could not be happy together."

"Who said anything about your living together?"

The interruptions were most disconcerting, but he continued: "Now if you, as her representatives, self-appointed or otherwise"—he could not refrain from the sarcasm—"if you will name a sum—"

"What?"

Twenty rods away the camp now slept, steeped in the drug of labor—all but the cook, who came running out of his tent and was thus witness of the event. Looking up-stream, he saw them blackly silhouetted against the moonlit sky, a shadow show, play of marionettes upon the bridge.

"Out of my way! Let go!"

Followed the swish and crack of Molyneux's whip, as he lashed Bender over the face, then fell to flogging his horses. But stinging pain freed in the giant those bulldog passions that had made him king of the camps in other years. He hung on, while the plunging beasts drowned the river's roar in thunder of iron hoofs. Unable to break his grip, they reared—their smooth, elongated bodies conveying to the cook an odd impression of slugs reaching upward through moonlit dew—then, stooping quickly under the nigh beast, the mad giant took its full weight on his shoulder and with a mighty heave sent team and rig crashing sideways off the bridge.

A quick leap saved Molyneux—for the moment. All through the action had moved with kinetoscopic quickness, and it accelerated so that the cook could scarcely establish its sequence. Like an angry bull, Bender shook the hair from his eyes; then, as he rushed, came a report; a puff of smoke curled bluely up from Molyneux's hand; the giant thudded at length on the bridge. Followed a yell, a piercing cry suitable to the animal after which the Cougar was named. As Bender fell, he rushed. The pistol spoke again. While the cook was running twenty yards, a black, furious tangle writhed over the bridge, and as he came darting out from behind a bunch of willow scrub he saw that it was gone. Bender lay alone under the moonlight.

Now this was the cook of a lumber-camp, equivalent to saying that he was a man of parts. He had cooked on B Contract, Superior Construction Division of the Trunk Line, and so had seen a liberal sprinkling of his grumblers go into the dump—a grisly foundation for track, surely yet what better could the builders of the road desire than to be cradled under the ties and sleep, sleep, sleep, to the thundering lullaby of the fast express? Which intimacy with the pale terror is responsible for his prompt action in these unusual premises. Molyneux's bullet had merely grazed Bender's temple. He rose, staggering, as the cook made the bridge, and, seeing that he was too sick and dizzy to handle the situation, the latter took it into his own able hands.

As before mentioned, a drive camp sleeps in its boots, and the shots had brought a score out from their sleep on a hunt for causes. "Man drove offen the bridge!" he yelled. "An' Cougar went after him! They're both under the drive! Scatter down-stream an' skin your eyes for bubbles!"

Thus, on the spur of the moment, the cook wrote history—as accurately, perhaps, as the run of historians; for after the drive once closed serried ranks over the struggling men, they were never seen again, so none could rise with an opposing theory. When, a few days later, the water was drawn off at the first dam, the horses floated out on the shallows. But the men—? The river carried them to its secret places; buried them in some scour or pothole, free at last, one of his passions—the incubus of his generations—the other from his pain. That night, if such things be, the Cougar was joined, after his years of suffering, in perfect knowledge with his "little girl."

XXI

PERSECUTION

Yes, the cook made history, for though the event furnished gossip for the ninety days which, on the lonely frontier, corresponds with the world's nine days' wonder, his story was never questioned. The truth lay buried between him and Bender, and if either visited her grave, it was never in company with the other. Up to the time that delirium tremens removed the cook from the snows of a Rocky Mountain camp to a sphere where pots are said to boil with or without watching, Bender never knew just how much or little he really knew.

To others the event appeared under varying complexions. Helen and Jenny were shocked at Molyneux's death, the latter without astonishment, though her firm belief that sin had at last received its full wage was without trace of malignance; both were sorrier than they had any right to be; and both mourned the Cougar. As for the settlers, they regarded the affair rather in the light of a special dispensation of Providence. Flocking to the auction of Molyneux's effects a month later, they caballed against high bidding, paid for chattels they bought at ridiculous prices in long-time notes, for that was the "Black Year," and throughout Manitoba nothing could be sold for cash.

Poverty, sociologists tell us, is the mother of crime, and as those hard times subsequently influenced the settlers in their attitude towards Helen, they are surely worthy of mention. To begin, the country was practically bankrupt. The frost of the preceding fall had left the wheat useless, and but for the fact that the provincial government had imported and distributed free seed, not an acre of grain would have been sown that year. The seriousness of the crisis may be gauged by the legislature's further action in enacting an exemption law that practically excluded all of a farmer's goods and chattels from legal execution. This was good, but in that it was not, nor could be made retroactive, it benefited only the new-comers and left the pioneers, who had spent their little all opening up the country, still liable to foreclosure and execution.

On the northern settlers times had borne particularly hard. During boom years all had assumed loan indebtedness, and whereas creditors had bided patiently successive lean seasons on the chance of a branch railroad and bumper crop, now that the country's credit, its very future was trembling in the balance; implement-men and store-keepers raced with twenty-per-cent. Shylocks to grab what they could from the wreck. That spring the sheriff of Brandon was the busiest man in the country-side. He and his deputies sowed summonses, executions, foreclosures broadcast over the land. Wolves of the law, they harried the farmers till the optimism of the brilliant emigration pamphlets was swamped, submerged beneath inky pessimism. Small wonder that—coupled with idleness, breeder of mischief, in the slack season that Glaves feared between seeding and haying—small wonder that some of the rancor bred by hard conditions should be vented upon Helen.

She may be said to have stood in an uncomfortable position as lightning conductor between this cloud of spleen and the earth, upon which it should have properly been discharged. And looking back, one may see the storm gathering over her fair head, observing in its approach all of the natural phenomena: first the cold wind, social disfavor, the whispers; next, heavy drops thudding in the dust, the snubs and slights; lastly, thunder, lightning, rain, downright persecution.

The whispers, of course, she did not hear, but she could not overlook the difference in trail greetings, which were either far too warm or much too cool, according to the years and disposition of the greeter. Coldness was endurable, but the rude stares, conscious laughter of the younger boors often caused her to fly the hot colors of angry shame. Yet even this hurt less than the sudden, shy suspicion of her pupils. Whereas they were wont to hang upon her skirts, they now held aloof in play hours, and ran straight home from school.

"Mother says I'm not to walk with you any more," one tot explained her haste. How that stung! Having only the faintest of ideas, little more than a suspicion of the strength and nature of this uncomfortable prejudice, she resented it as bitter injustice, and held a proud head until a thing happened that almost broke her spirit.

Of all the settler women, Ruth Murchison was the one girl with whom Helen had been, or could be, on anything like terms of intimacy. Quiet and thoughtful, Ruth had gone through the English common schools, and had taken the Junior Oxford Examination, to which passable education a taste for good reading had formed a further bond. Wherefore Helen was delighted when, one day, news drifted into the post-office that Ruth was to be married to the Probationer, the young minister who preached Merrill's funeral sermon.

Borrowing a beast from Glaves, she rode north one evening to offer congratulations, and as the Murchisons lived several miles north of Silver Creek Valley, night fell while she still lacked half a mile of the homestead. From that distance the windows' yellow blaze advised of fuss and busy preparation. Drawing nearer, voices, laughter, the whir of an egg-beater, clatter of cooking-gear came down the trail merrily freighting the dusk. Infected by the cheer, she gave a shrill halloa, spurred to a gallop, and drew in at the door with a clatter of hoofs.

"Ruth! Oh, Ruth!" she called. "Ruth-y!"

Instantly the voices hushed, then, after an uncomfortable pause, she heard Mrs. Murchison say, in thin, constrained tones, "Mrs. Carter is out there, father."

Followed a shuffling, and the door opened revealing Murchison framed in yellow light. Stout, robust, ruddy, with that mottled-beef English complexion, he came of that stout yeoman stock whose twanging long-bows sounded France's knell at Crecy and Poitiers, of that rich blood the slow drainage of which to her colonies has left England flabby, ensemic, flaccid. He had not wished to leave, but the motherland had become industrial without further place for her yeoman. Over fields that were enriched by the tilth of thirty Murchison generations, a thousand factories were depositing soot and blighting acids. American wheat and beeves had wiped out profits, while enormous rents ate up the farmer's substance. So Murchison, England's best, had become partner in exile with the remittance-men, her worst. Undoubtedly, there was no symptom of remittance weakness in the scowl he turned on Helen.

Behind him Helen could see Ruth, red and embarrassed, hanging her head over the egg-beater. A half-dozen girls and neighboring women, who had come in to help in the baking and brewing, were exchanging meaning glances across the table.

"Ruth? She's well," Murchison answered her question.

She knew what to expect now, but nerved herself to face the situation. "Can't I see her?"

"No."

"Why?"

"Because she don't run with your kind."

"Oh, Mr. Murchison!"

He felt the heart sickness, yet glowered relentlessly, for it had been the habit of his forebears to thrash their women into good behavior. He itched to do it now for the good of her soul, but, lacking the power, he growled:

"If you don't like it—keep better company."

If he had been alone, she would undoubtedly have challenged his reproach and, while clearing herself in his eyes, have turned away future trouble. But a titter from within fired her pride. "Very well, please give her my congratulations." And turning she rode away.

Good-hearted as rough, Murchison stared after, stricken with sudden compunction. He knew that she must have intended to stay the night, and here she was a timorous woman riding out into the darkness. "Here!" he shouted. "Come back!"

But she held on, eyes snapping, cheeks aflame, throat convulsed under the strain of suppressing imminent hysteria. Beyond earshot she broke down, venting her injured loneliness in broken speech between bursts of sobbing. "They hate—me. Condemn me—because—my husband left me. It wasn't my—fault—that is, altogether." She hastily corrected herself. "Of course—I failed him. But I was—sorry—would have done better—if he had—given me a chance. He's so stern—and stiff—" She would not even let this undoubted truth pass unmodified. "But then—he thought I didn't—love him. Perhaps I didn't—then. I was a little fool. But I do! I do!" She stretched wild arms to the darkness. "I do! I do! I do!" But the velvet night returned nothing to her embrace and she collapsed, sobbing, upon the pony's neck. Still the cry did her good, tided over hysteria, composed and quieted her so that she was able to meet the trustee's glance of spectacled inquiry as she entered the cabin.

Kindliness as well as curiosity inhered in his glance, for, besides the cash and educational prestige which she had brought to his cabin, Jimmy had come to like her for herself. The frost and grizzle of fifty winters thawed under his smile as he threw a Winnipeg paper across the table. "Catch! Just kem in. Yes, there's a story 'bout him. Now, don't eat it."

Metaphorically, she did, indeed, devour the article, and while she read the trustee watched with something of puzzled astonishment the lovely tide that flowed out from the lace at her neck, and drowned her pale creams to the roots of her hair. He had ample opportunity for study as the article was long. Just then Carter's line, with its promise of competition, focussed the interest of the entire province, and some enterprising scribe had risen to the opportunity afforded by a visit west of the general manager of the trunk line, to interview him upon the probable action of his road in proceedings to condemn a crossing of its right of way. Time, however, had not abated one iota of the manager's sphinx like quality. While affable, he had declined to discuss railroad politics, remarking that his company did not "cross bridges before they were built." Interviewed in his turn upon the significance of the aforesaid remark, Carter had ventured the opinion that the trunk-line people would not oppose the crossing, and thereby had provoked a flaming editorial upon his artlessness.

"If the people behind Mr. Carter imagine that the greediest monopoly in history will loose its grip on this province till the law's crowbar pries off its fingers one by one, they are mightily mistaken," the editor hotly declared. "Forewarned is forearmed, and we hereby present them, gratis, with this piece of information—while they are running their grades in peaceful confidence that will be most appropriate in the innocent age when lion and lamb lie down together, the monopoly is gathering men and means, preparing to crush their enterprise by force should the crooked enginery of the law fail its purpose. Why else have five hundred extra men been distributed among the sections on either side of the proposed crossing? Why does a gravel-train stand there permanently across the proposed right of way? Soon Mr. Carter will receive unmistakable answer to these questions."

"He's dead right there, that editor man," the trustee said when, all rosy red, Helen looked up from her reading. "Old Brass-Bowels was born with a nateral insight into the nater of a dead cinch."

"But won't the law support my"—she paused, then proudly finished—"my husband? Can't he compel a crossing?"

"The law?" Sniffing, Jimmy indicated the legal patchwork on the wall with a comprehensive sweep of his pipe. "The law said as I was to pay them, but did I? Humph!"

"But they'll hardly dare to fly in the face of the province? Public opinion is a great moral force." She quoted a sentence from the editorial with gusto.

"Yes, but 'tain't much of a club. Did you ever see one of my hawgs stan' aside, even when he was full, to let another have a go at the trough? Not till I hit him on the snout. Well, they ain't agoin' to cross the trunk line these two years, an' for my part I don't care if they never cross."

"Why?" Her eyes dilated widely. "Wouldn't a competing line benefit you—all of the province?"

Nodding, he regarded her from half-shut eyes. "Oh, I ain't expecting to walk on gold this side o' the pearly gates. As for my reasons, they ain't a mile away from here. I'm not wishing too much success for a man that deserts his wife."

Touched and very much flushed as to the face by his genuine, if crabbed sympathy, the Reasons yet shook her head and spoke up for the recreant husband stoutly as she had defended him against herself. She made, however, small headway against his obduracy.

"Well, that's the way I see it. By-the-way," he added, heading off a disposition for further argument, "did you see the evangelist? Pitched his tent over by Flynn's. You want to go. Beats a three-ring circus when old man Cummings hits up to his gait."

"Jimmy! Jimmy!" His wife looked up from her ironing; then daunted, perhaps, by his twinkle, she addressed Helen. "He hadn't orter talk that away, my dear. If Mr. Cummings does go on the rampage a bit when he gets het up, at least he's sincere. As for him—" She turned a severe eye on her husband. "We'll get him yet."

"Yes, I see myself. Her idea of heaven"—he shrugged at the ironing-board—"is an eternal class-meeting with everybody giving their experience—love-feast she calls it. I like something solider. Give me plenty to eat, a pipe by a warm fire, an' something to read, an' I'll sign away my harp an' crown." Ignoring his better-half's remark that he would not lack the fire, he finished: "She's going. Wouldn't miss a meeting. Kedn't keep her away with a club. So if you'd alike to see some fun—"

"If 'twas jes' out of curiosity I'd ask her to stay at home," his wife interrupted. "But she's not that kind, an' I'll be glad to take her."

"If you will?" Helen assented, and so, returning to the analogy, placed herself directly beneath the leaden belly of the lowering storm.

XXII

DENUNCIATION

A molten sun was smouldering in the ashes of day when, the following evening, Helen with Mrs. Glaves, drove up to the gospel-tent. It still lacked half an hour of meeting-time, so, while her companion joined the early arrivals who were passing time by holding a service of song inside, Helen remained in the buckboard and watched the sunset, observed herself by a group of remittance-men and a scattering of settler youths who sprawled near by on the grass.

Enthralled, she scarcely saw them; had eyes only for the ruby sun that stained the prairies with amber incandescences, the ribbed glories of the fiery cloud pillars that seemed to uphold the darkling vault above. As the orb slid into his blankets of rose and gold, shy stars peeped down at the violet shadows that crawled slowly up the slopes and knolls; over all fell the hush of evening.

It was one of the moments when the Riddle of Infinity, Puzzles of Time, Space, Eternity appear as concrete though unthinkable realities; weigh down and oppress the soul with a sense of its insignificance. Against the black-blue vault the stars loomed as worlds; she could see beyond, around them. Through vast voids planets were rushing on their courses; suns with attendant systems swung on measured arcs obedient to—what? ... A thin minor, querulous plaint stole out on the hush:

"Poor crawling Worm of Earth,

A Child of Sin am I—"

It was an honest attempt at the riddle, but its incongruity, futile insufficiency caused her to shrug with sudden annoyance. She wondered if, somewhere in planetary space, other "pinches of sentient dust" were equally afflicted with a sense of their central importance in the scheme of things. The apologetic whine spoiled the sunset; she impatiently turned to watch the arrivals—the wagons, buck-boards, horsemen—that were streaming in on every trail.

"How are you, Mrs. Carter?"

It was Danvers, Molyneux's old pupil. An honest lad and merry, she always liked him, and now made him welcome to the seat beside her, and laughed at his fire of chaff. Indicating Cummings, whose ovine expression had sustained no diminution since the day he bearded the general manager, he remarked: "He's great, Mrs. Carter; puts it all over Henry Irving. And there's the sky pilot! What a Jovelike port!"

There was, of course, little wit and less humor in his chaff, but his intentions were honorable, so, ignoring the sour looks of the arriving settlers, she gave him smiling attention up to the moment they entered the tent together, and so prepared the way for what followed. For though, going in, she left levity without, her modest and devout bearing could not mitigate her offence in allying herself with the English Ishmael. It was aggravated, moreover, by her remaining with him in close proximity to the remittance crowd on the back benches. Thereafter nothing could save her; she remained a target for sour glances throughout the service.

This was on the usual pattern—rousing hymns, prayer, testimony, and exhortation—then when groans and ejaculations testified to the spiritual temperature, the evangelist, a stout man of bull-like build, proceeded to cut off yards of the "undying worm," and to measure bushels of the "fire that quencheth not" for the portion of such as refused to view the problems of Infinity through aught but his own wildly gleaming spectacles. His discourse, indeed, bristled with those cant terms which, while entirely devoid of meaning, are still eminently conducive of religious hysteria, and his efforts were the more successful because of the absence of the Probationer, a thoughtful young fellow whose rare common-sense could be depended upon to prevent religious emotion from degenerating into epilepsy.

Lacking his wholesome presence, the evangelist paced the platform under the yellow lantern-light, stretching long, black arms, hovering over the people like some huge, dark bird as he pleaded, threatened, thundered, launching his fiery periods on a groaning wave of "amens" and "hallelujahs." As he went on, painting heaven and hell into his lurid scheme of things, sighs and exclamations grew in volume, flooding feeling pulsed through the audience, wild settler youths, who had come to scoff, exchanged uneasy glances on the back benches, sure sign of a coming stampede.

This was the psychological moment, and, skilled in his trade, the revivalist pounced upon it. Stilling the groaning chorus with upheld hand, he solemnly invited all who were not against the Lord Jesus to stand, an old revival trick and one which now, as always, turned. For, as before said, the plains were not yet infected with the leprosy of agnosticism, and, Episcopalians to a man, even the Englishmen were not willing to pose as the open enemies of God.

Once standing and pilloried in the public eye, it was but a question of minutes until the back benches began to yield up penitents. One by one the settler youths were gathered into the mourning bench, until at last Helen stood alone with the Englishmen.

"Come ye! Come ye to the Lord!" The preacher pleaded, but, haughty and coldly constrained, the remittance-men ignored the invitation; and so, for the space of a thunderous hymn of praise, gnostic civilization and the fervid frontier faced each other across the middle benches. From that dramatic setting anything might come. Moment, feeling, atmosphere, all pointed to the event that came to pass as the hymn died.

Leaping upon a bench, and so adding its height to unusual tallness, a woman pointed a warning hand at the unbelievers. Thin, family-worn, and naturally cadaverously yellow, she was now flushed with the fever of delirium. "In that day," she screeched, "the Tares shall be separated from the Wheat and cast with the grass into the oven!" Then, while her finger indicated man after man, she raised the grewsome hymn:

"'I heard the Sinners Wailing, Wailing, Wailing,

I heard the Sinners Wailing on that Great Day!'"

Travelling around the benches, her skinny finger finally fastened on Helen, and, as the lugubrious refrain came to an end, she burst forth in tremendous paraphrase: "Beware ye of the Scarlet Woman! Avoid ye, for her portals lead down to Death; her feet take hold of Hell!"

The silence of paralysis followed. So still it was that a mosquito's thin whine sounded through the tent, the tinkle of a cow-bell came in from far pastures, a dog could be heard barking a long way off. Swinging from the tent-pole, a circle of lanterns lit dark, flushed faces, and thus, for the space of a long breath, Helen faced the virago, the one glowering, malignant, the other pale with astonishment, mutely indignant. She was not confused. On the contrary, thought and vision were surprisingly clear; she noted Mrs. Glaves's shocked look, the vindictive settler faces, the Englishmen's blank expressions.

"We had better go. May I drive home, Mrs. Carter?" Danvers, the witless, the foolish, rose to the situation.

Low-pitched, his voice yet carried to every ear, as did her clear reply:

"After the service is over."

It was defiance as well as answer, and as she threw it in the lowering face of the congregation, her glance fixed on the evangelist who, till then, had stood, mouth open, hand arrested midway of a gesture, a bearded, spectacled effigy of ridiculous surprise. Starting under her pale scorn, he flushed, looked for a second through shining, bewildered glasses, then strode forward and seized the virago's arm.

"Sister, sister! Judge not that ye be not judged!" Then, himself again, he swept a pudgy hand over the benches. "Sit down, all! Brother Cummings will lead in prayer."

It mercifully happens that sudden calamity carries its own anæsthetic in that it blinds, confuses, destroys feeling, numbs the faculties that ought to register its importance. Under Helen's unnatural calmness she was dimly conscious of a sick excitement, but this was unrelated with her thought. She saw and sensed as usual; was aware of curious backward glances, the sympathy of the Englishmen at her side; heard every word of Cummings's sputtering prayer, the following hymn and benediction; only her mind refused commerce with these things. Divorced from the present, it juggled the terms of an equation in that day's lesson up to the moment that the remittance-men came crowding about Danvers' rig after the meeting.

Aside from their looseness and general inefficiency, the lads were brave enough, and though some of them had won or lost bets on her reputation, winners were no more eager than losers to avenge the insult that had been provoked by her association with themselves.

"Just say the word, Mrs. Carter," Danvers pleaded, "and we'll lick the crowd."

"And put a head on the preacher," young Poole added, sinfully licking his chops.

From the darkness that enveloped the press of rigs and wagons rose jeering voices, sneers, laughter, the conscious cackle of scandal. Several times she heard her own name. There was provocation and to spare, but though a word would have started a racial riot, she desired only solitude, to flutter home like a wounded bird to its nest.

"No, no!" she answered them. "Take me home! Only take me home!"

Arrived there, she flew to her own room leaving Danvers to enlighten the trustee. Lying face down on her bed, she heard the rumble of their conversation, Jimmy's violent reflections upon revivals particular and general, his wife's whimpering protests when she returned. His growl extended far into the night, and when it was finally extinguished by a robust snoring, the girl was afflicted with a sense of lost companionship; thereafter she had to suffer it out by herself.

There would be more pain than profit in describing her reflections, agonizings. Sufficient to know that a knife in the breast hurts a woman less than a stab at her reputation, and her thought was none the sweeter for the knowledge that she had drawn the blow by giving way to her pique. Her resolve as expressed next morning to Jimmy Glaves is of more concern.

She had turned impatiently from Mrs. Glaves's tearful apologies, but when the old trustee laid a kindly hand on her shoulder, as she passed him in the garden on her way to school, she gave him honest eyes.

"Now, you ain't to bother. 'Twas on'y Betsy Rodd, the old harridan. Nobody minds her."

But she shook her head in accordance with her resolution to face truth. "She was expressing what was in everybody's minds. I know it, and though I didn't intend it, I'm partly to blame, for their suspicion." Her mouth drew thin and firm as she finished. "I shall live it down."

"Course you will!" he heartily agreed. "That's my brave girl!" But his face darkened after she had passed on, and he slowly wagged a grave head as he plied his hoe in the garden.

For he knew the difficulty, impossibility of the task she had marked out for herself. Of Scotch descent, dogmatic, wedded to convention, intense clannishness reinforced in the settlers bitter morality, racial hatred, the condemnation of sin. With them the offence of the fathers was visited upon the children to the fourth generation. It was remembered, for instance, against Donald Ross that his great-grandfather had died a drunkard, and the fact had limited his choice of a wife; the daughters of Hector MacCloud took inferior husbands because their grandmother had been born on the easy side of the knot. Handing such cold charity around among themselves, what mercy were they likely to extend to the suspected stranger within their gates? Jimmy was still wagging his head when, half an hour later, the Probationer reined in at the end of the garden.

Hearing of the scandal on the Lone Tree trail, the young man had turned aside to express his sorrow, and now listened patiently while the trustee drew invidious parallels between the religious movement then proceeding and his own misfit horticulture. "You see them?" Removing his pipe from between his teeth, he waved it at some half-dozen straggling apple-shoots. "Hardiest variety of Siberian crabs. Professor at the gove'nment experimental station warranted 'em to grow at the north pole. Remind me of your revival, they do."

"Why? Don't they grow?" The Probationer smiled.

"Grow? I should swan! four feet every summer, an' freeze off to the roots every winter—jes' like your converts. Get all het up at meetings, blossom with grace, then comes the backsliding, the frost, an' nips the leafage. Where's the sense of it?"

Now the Probationer had his own doubts. Having turned a prentice hand at revival work, he was painfully familiar with its characteristic phenomena—first, hot enthusiasm, slow cooling, obstinate adherence to the form after the spirit has fled, finally the reaction which would leave his people less charitable, not quite so kindly, a little poorer in the things which make for the kingdom of Christ on earth. He had tried to be a real shepherd to his flock—to upraise by precept, example, counsel, and admonition. Avoiding dogma, he had brought them together irrespective of cult and creed on the broad basis of love and a common humanity, and just when he was beginning to expect fruit from that liberal sowing, this bitter theologian, the revivalist, had been loosed upon him. And this was first fruit of his work!

Jimmy's illustration coincided exactly with his own experience, yet fealty to his Church demanded some sort of defence. "Isn't an annual growth better than none?" he asked. "The green shoots certainly improve the appearance of your garden."

Jimmy blew a derisive cloud over the few cabbages, two sickly cauliflowers, a bed of onions, salvage from worms and spring frost of half an acre's planting. "But you don't get results. One sound cabbage is worth an acre of sick saplings; a cheerful sinner discounts a hundred puckered saints. I'm scairt as the black knot has got inter that orchard o' yourn, sir?"

"I'm afraid so," the young fellow sadly agreed. "Well, I must try and prune it out."

"I'd advise the axe," Jimmy grimly commented. "An' begin with Betsy Rodd."

Sorrowing, the Probationer drove on to the school, where a very cold young lady answered his call at the door. A slant of sunshine struck in under the porch twining an aureole about her golden head, creating an auriferous nimbus for her shapely figure. Standing there, so cold and pale, she might have passed for a statue of purity, and the Probationer, being young and still impressionable albeit engaged, wondered that any should have dared to doubt her. Thawing when he mentioned Ruth, she froze again as soon as he touched, apologetically, upon the event of the night before.

"If religion strips them of common charity, they would be better without it," she answered his apology, and turned but a cold ear to his plea for his people.

"They were altogether subject to emotion, incapable of a reasoned rule of life," he said. "With the fear of God removed from their hearts, they would drop to unmentionable levels, to say nothing of the hope and consolation religion brought to sweeten their hard lives."

But he made little headway. "I don't doubt they are not quite so bad as they would like to be. But there, let us drop the subject. Won't you come in and examine the children?"

From this conversation it will be seen that her resolve to "live it down" was not exactly founded upon grounds that would appeal to a professor of ethics; yet her attitude was very natural, and not so deplorable as would at first appear. Was she so much to blame? Hardness breeds hardness, opposition its like. Fire flies from the impact of rock and iron. Always like begets like, heredity applies to mental forces. Moreover, injured pride has stiffened more weak spines and given better results than the command to turn the other cheek; the desire to "show people" lies at the root of many a bravery. Lastly, once rehabilitated socially, softness comes later to the injured member, increasing in ratio to the respect of his or her community. And so it would have been with Helen—with a different people.

XXIII

THE CHARIVARI

Straddling a log in his dooryard, the trustee whistled softly while he whittled and shaped a pair of birch crooks into the ox-collars that, with trace-chains, are preferred in the northland to the old-fashioned bows and yoke. The revival was over. After passing from house to house like measles, mumps, or other dark disease, infecting men on trail, by fireside, at the plough-tail with the prejudice he styled religion, the evangelist had reported so many head of "saved" to his superiors, and so had swooped like a plague upon other settlements, leaving the Probationer to repair, as best he might, his ravages in this. Now, two weeks later, symptoms in Silver Creek indicated a quick recovery; extra meetings had altogether ceased, bi-weekly prayer-meetings languished, remarks at the plough-tail showed signs of former vigor; the sweat and labor of haying would undoubtedly bring complete convalescence and, with it, danger for Helen. For while the religious excitement had served her by excluding all else from the settler mind, tongues would be the sharper, prejudice the keener for the rest. It was but a lull in the storm, the hush that follows the first flash and crash of thunder.

It was knowledge of this fact that inspired the trustee's thoughtful whistling. Already he smelled trouble on the wind, the impression being formed on many small significances—looks, nods, winks, and whispered asides at "bees" and "raisings." More important: his cabin, which, as post-office, had been a social focus, centre of news and gossip, a place to linger and chat, had of late been almost deserted. Calling for their mail, his neighbors departed with the shortest of salutations. So, having had a gray eye on trouble through all, he was not surprised when she presently appeared between Shinn and Hines in the latter's buck-board. Indeed, his comment while they were still a hundred yards away signified profound distrust. "Gummed if the coyotes ain't running in packs this weather." His beetling brows, moreover, drew a grizzled line across his hawk nose when the two reined in opposite; he glared suspiciously while Hines glibly discoursed on crops, weather, the ox-collars; nor hesitated to interrupt and reach for trouble's forelock.

"Crops is fair to middling, nothing wrong with the hay, the crooks is for Flynn—now, what is it?"

Hines blinked and looked silly, but the check worked oppositely on Shinn. Of that gaunt, raw-boned, backwoods type produced by generations of ineffable hardship and slavish labor, he stood over six feet, and combined great strength with mean ferocity and uncontrollable passion. His huge mouth twitched feverishly as he answered, "Sence you're so pressing—it's the talk through the settlement that we orter have a new teacher."

"Umph!" Grunt could not convey greater contempt. "Hain't you got a teacher?"

"Yes, but it's agreed that she ain't quite the sort to put over innercent children."

This time the trustee snorted, "Might infect them brats o' yourn with her sweet manners, eh?"

Shinn flushed dully under his yellow skin. "That or something else. Anyway, every one's agreed that she's gotter go."

"Who's everybody?"

"Meeting, held at my place." Recovering, Hines backed up his partner.

"Yes? First I heard of it. Was Flynn there? Thought not; he ain't much of a mixer. Didn't ask me, did you?"

Hines shuffled uneasily. "'Twas held after a prayer-meeting—you might ha' been there."

"Prayer-meeting, eh? Real Christian, wasn't it, to try and take the bread out of a good girl's mouth?"

"Good?"

At Hines's sneer the trustee rose, hand gripping hard on a heavy crook, eyes one gray glare under ragged brows, temple veins ridged and swollen. "I said 'good.'"

On the frontier a man must usually furnish material proof of courage, but there are exceptions from whom imminent fearlessness distils as an exhalation affecting all who come within its atmosphere. Carter was such a one; Glaves another. Though neither had found it necessary to "make good" physically during the settlement's short history, their ability to do so was never at question. Behind the reserve of one, crabbed sarcasm of the other, danger lay so close to the surface that it was always felt, could never be quite forgotten. Indeed, as regards Glaves, the feeling took form in the opinion often delivered when the qualities of men were under discussion—"If the old man ever gets started, some one will earn a quick funeral." Now Hines quailed, and even the truculent Shinn observed silence.

Glaring on the shrinking Hines, the trustee went on: "Never forgot how Carter bluffed you out on that hay business, did you? An' as you wasn't man enough to get back at him, you 'lowed to take it out of his wife? Well, you ain't going to. You kin go back an' tell them that sent you that so long as Flynn an' me sit on the board she'll teach this school."

"That," Shinn retorted, "would be till nex' election, but she won't stay that long. Sence you're so stiff about it, Glaves, let me tell you that you kain't fly in the face of this settlement. You may be big wolf, but there's others in the pack. If she's here at the end of the month—there'll be something doing." Nodding evilly, he drove on, leaving the trustee to puzzle over his meaning as he shaped and polished the crooks.

"Bluffing, I reckon," he concluded, and that, also, was the opinion of Flynn, to whom he carried his doubts that evening.

"There'll be no way for thim spalpeens to fire us av the boord?" Flynn queried. "No? Phwat about an opposhition school?"

"Agin the law to build one in this township."

"Thin 'tis all out av the big mouth av Shinn. Thalk, an' nothing more."

Both were confirmed in their opinion when the month drew to a peaceful, if hot, end. Tricked out in various green, woods and prairies slumbered or sighed restlessly under torrid heat that extracted their essential essences, weighting the heavy air with intense odors of curing grasses. There was nothing to indicate that the virulent tide of spleen was ready to burst its banks. Knowing that another week would bring on haying, with its attendant wars to provide an outlet for feeling, neither trustee anticipated the event which occurred at the full of the moon.

Though the storm broke around Glaves's cabin, Flynn received immediate notice. In pleasant weather he and his wife would sit on their doorstep after the children were in bed, to enjoy the quiet hour while the peace and cool charmed away the cares of the day; and this night was particularly beautiful. Over dewlit plains the moon emptied a flood of silver and polished the slough beyond the dooryard till it shone like burnished steel. Rolling off and away under that tender light, the huge earth waves seemed to heave, swell, sigh as a lover's bosom under the sweet eyes of his mistress, while from the corrals near by issued the heavy breathing of contented kine. Always music in the ears of a farmer, it stimulated Flynn, set him planning for the future; but he had hardly touched on next year's increase before Mrs. Flynn seized his arm.

"Phwat's that?"

At first Flynn thought that Glaves was "dogging" stray cattle away from his grain-fields, but when the iron note of beaten pans, gunshots, metallic thundering were added to the first clash of cow-bells, he sprang up. "A charivari! At Glaves's! A spite charivari!"

"Oh, my God, Flynn!" his wife exclaimed. "That poor girl!" She knew what that orgy of sound portended. A jest at weddings, the charivari was sometimes used as a sinister weapon to express communal dislike or punish suspicion of sin. The most terrible memory of her girlhood was associated with a party of fiercely moral backwoodsmen that flogged a man at her father's wagon-tail and dragged a woman, who had offended public morals, naked and screaming through a field of thistles. In Silver Creek were men who had participated in that cruelty, forced to emigrate to escape the law. Small wonder that she agonized under the thought. "Flynn! Flynn, man! Hurry, get your horse!"

Holding the light for him to saddle, she called after as he rode away: "Go round be Misther Danvers'! 'Tis on'y a mile out av your way! Going by here at noon, himself told me that he was to have a sthag-party the night! They'll jump at the chance, an' fight none the worse for a smhell av the whiskey!"

A cold, with complications in the shape of rheumatic pains, sent the trustee early to bed that evening, and Helen was sewing by the fire with Mrs. Glaves when the charivari turned loose outside. As, jumping up, they stood staring at one another, he shouted for them to bolt the door; and as, after complying, Helen returned to the fire he came limping out, bent, warped, and twisted by sciatica, half dressed, but grimly resolute.

"Danger?" he rasped, swinging round on his wife as the house trembled under sudden thunder of scurrying hoofs outside. "Listen!" And when pained bellows followed dropping shots, he added: "Peppering the cattle. Scairt? Then go an' stick your fool head under a pillow. How is it with you?"

As a matter of fact, Helen's face was as white as the fluffy shawl from which her golden head rose like a yellow crocus above soft spring snows; but, noting the thin, scarlet line of her mouth, the trustee nodded his satisfaction. "You'll do. Swing round that lounge—here, where I can train a gun on the door. Good!" He eased his length along it with a groan of relief. "Now hand me the gun—no, the other." Rehanging his own long duck-gun upon its wooden pegs, she brought him the famous double-barrelled Greener which, having disarranged the lock action in trying to clean it, Danvers had left with the trustee for repairs. "There, put out the light an' take a look out at the window."

Pulling the curtain aside, she got full benefit of the brazen clamor while learning something of its genesis, for, while easily recognizable, the din of beaten pans, cow-bells, gunshots, and yells formed only a minor accompaniment to a barbarous metallic roll, louder than a corps of beaten drums, and a discordant screech that discounted the torment of a thousand tortured fiddles. Now she saw two men rapidly vibrating long cross-cut saws back and forth against the house, while others drew a rosined plank to and fro across a log, concentrating the discords of the world into a single excruciating note. Closing her ears, she took further note of the score of dark figures that came and went in the moonlight, leaping, shouting, gesticulating strangely, as though crazed by the frenzy of noise. Weird, sinister shapes, they moved, massed, and melted to units again as in some mad carnival or distorted madman's dream.

The trustee pulled her skirt. "Come away! They might shoot at the window."

Obeying, she knelt beside him—fortunately with her back to the pane that, a few minutes later, shivered and flew in fine rain. "Drunk!" Glaves commented; and as a piercing cry, clever imitation of a cougar, rang high over a slight lull, he said, "That's sure Bill MacCloud." He grimly added—for, besides being dissolute, the man was a scoffer and leader against religion: "Gosh! but the saints are keeping queer company. Bill ain't more'n a mile 'way from his bottle."

After that one lull the tumult increased in loudness and volume, and for a long half-hour Helen listened as some soft maid of Rome may have hearkened to the din of Goth or ravaging Hun in the sacred streets of the imperial city. To her, brought up under the shadow of law, with its material manifestation—a policeman—always within call, the brutal elemental passion behind that huge, amorphous voice was very terrible. Almost equally fearful was the sudden cessation that set the silence singing in her ears, the voiceless darkness, thick night of that black room.

Touching the trustee, more for the comfort of his presence than to draw his attention, she whispered, "What now?"

Just then the door rattled under a heavy kick; a strident voice answered her question: "Open, Glaves, an' send out that —— baggage" (it was a viler word) "or we'll burn the house over your ears!"

"You will—" the trustee began, but was interrupted by a wail from his wife in the bedroom.

"Jimmy! Oh, Jimmy, don't let 'em have her. They'll duck her in the slough—mebbe drown her like they did Jenny Ross back in Huron."

"Will you shet up!" he roared, but the man outside had heard.

"You bet we will. She needs a little cooling."

"That's surely Mr. Shinn that's talking so fierce!" the trustee taunted. "Man, but you're gaining a heap wolfish, though it did take you some time to work up to the p'int of speech. Why didn't you take the shortcut through Bill's bottle?" His tone suddenly altered from banter to such stern command that they distinctly heard Shinn shuffle back a step from the door. "Burn this house? Get, or I'll blow the black heart out of you!"

A derisive yell rose outside, then silence fell again, a hush so complete that Helen distinctly heard the tick of the clock, her own breathing, the chirrup of a hearth cricket. Pulling the trustee's sleeve, she whispered, "I've brought such trouble upon you!"

"Rubbish!" he snapped. "Say that ag'in an' I'll spank you!" But he gently patted her hand.

A minute slid by without further speech; a second, third, fourth, then she whispered, "Surely they must have gone."

Before he could reply came a rapid beat of running feet, a splintering crash, an oblong of moonlight flashed out of the darkness at the end of the room, and quiet reigned again. Only the battering ram, a long log, poked its blunt nose over the doorsill.

"Stand clear there!" the trustee sharply warned. Then, as a dim, crouched figure appeared between the jambs, he shouted, "Fair warning!" and fired; but as the figure fell back and out, a chuckling laugh drifted through the smoke, Shinn's coarse voice yelled: "His gun's single barrel! In, afore he kin reload!" and a black, surging mass trampled over the dummy and filled the doorway. As aforeseen, the conclusion was justified—the trustee's long gun was familiar as his face in the settlement—and the click of Danvers' left trigger was drowned by a second harsh command—"Fair warning!"

The report, thunderous, ear-splitting in the confined space, certified to Shinn's mistake. His writhing mouth, Hines's wintry visage, the press of men in the door showed redly under the flash, then sulphurous darkness wiped out all. To Helen, its smothering pall seemed to pulse with thick life, to extend clutching fingers, horrors that were intensified by Mrs. Glaves's sudden burst of hysterical screaming. Crouched behind Glaves, she listened in agony to the swearing, sharp oaths, as men tripped and stumbled over the furniture and one another. There was no escape. They were feeling for her all over the room, and through a sick horror she heard Shinn's triumphant yell—

"I've got her!"

A choked gurgle, snarl of rage, as Glaves fastened onto his throat, explained his mistake. "Hell! has no one a match?" His strangled voice issued from a dark whorl, crash of splintering furniture, as they swung and staggered in that pit of gloom. The struggle could have but one ending. Healthy, Glaves would have been no match for Shinn, and, as a match scratched, came the soft thud of his body as he was thrown with brutal force against the wall.

Flaring up, the flame revealed Helen, white, trembling, sick with that paralysis of fear that a mouse must feel in the claws of a cat. From the bedroom came the hysterical whooping, terrible in its sameness. Wide-eyed, she stared, fascinated, at Shinn, but he also was staring at a body spread-eagled before the door, its face turned down in a black, viscid, spreading pool. The match went out.

"My God!" a man cried. "It's Hines!"

But Helen did not hear that or a cry from outside warning of approaching hoofs. Throughout the frenzy of noise, horror of darkness, suspense, the attack, she had carried herself bravely; but this swift death, following on all, broke her shaken nerves, deprived her of consciousness.

The trustee, however, heard and saw the house vomit its black life, the dark figures streaming under the moonlight out to the bluff where the horses were tied, panic-stricken by sudden death and uneasy memories of outraged law. Leaning in his doorway, bent and bruised, he saw also Flynn and Danvers thunder by with a score of remittance-men, a wild cavalcade hard on their heels. In the Irishman's hand a neck-yoke swung with ominous rattle of iron rings; Danvers carried a cavalry sabre he had snatched from his wall; the others brandished clubs. Looming an instant in the steam of their sweating beasts, they shot on with a glad hurrah.

"Yoicks! Tally-ho!" young Poole shrilled as he passed. "Sic 'em, Flynn!"

"A Flynn! A Flynn!" Danvers squeaked as Shinn crumpled under the neck-yoke.

Wild lads, under wilder leadership, they fought—as Mrs. Flynn had predicted—none the worse for a smell at the whiskey. Those of the enemy who made a slow mounting were ridden down, fell under the clubs, or achieved uncomfortable leaps into briers and scrub, to be afterwards caught and drubbed, while such as escaped were run down and brought to bay by twos and threes. In a running fight over miles of moonlit prairie the grudges of years were settled; jeers, gibes, many a cheating received payment in full, with arrears of interest. Thus Cummings received from Danvers the "boot" due on the mare that Carter once described as being "blind, spavined, sweenied, an' old enough to homestead," payment being slapped down upon the spot where most pain may be inflicted with least structural damage. In like manner Poole settled with Peter Rodd for a cannibalistic sow; Perceval with MacCloud, arrears not due on a quarter-section of scrub; Gray with Seebach for forty bushels of heated seed wheat. Leaving them to their rough auditing, the story returns with Flynn to the cabin after the dropping of Shinn.

After relighting the lamp, Glaves had carried his sore bones back to the lounge, and when Flynn entered he found the terrible old fellow glowering upon the dead. His wife's hysteria had slackened to a strained sobbing, and, answering Flynn's question, he tartly replied: "No, 'tain't Mrs. Carter. Had her fainting-spell an' kem to without any fuss, like a sensible girl. She's in there tending to that old fool." Then, beetling again on the dead, he forecast the verdict of the sheriff's jury. "Ye'll bear witness, Flynn, that this man kem to his death through running into a charge of buckshot after my winder 'd been shot in an' door battered down."

XXIV

WITHOUT THE PALE

"I really believe that I ought to resign!"

When, one morning a week later, Helen delivered herself of certain secret misgivings at breakfast, the trustee looked up, startled, from his eggs and mush, then proceeded to fish for motives.

"Scairt? You needn't to be. We've got this settlement by the short hairs at last."

His rude metaphor roughly set forth the truth. Without ties, the bachelors of the charivari party had scattered west through the territories, while Shinn, MacCloud, and other married men had gone into such close hiding that the sheriff had been unable to subpoena one for the inquest. But though she neither feared nor anticipated further violence, Helen now knew that she never would be able to live down the settlers' prejudice; and without the children's love, parents' confidence, her day of usefulness was past.

Glaves snorted at this altruistic reason. "Love? Confidence? What's their market value? You kedn't hope to compete with a dollar note for the first; as for the second— Danvers hit it off exactly when he stuck that sign on his stable door—'No more trading here!' Now, from my p'int of view, it isn't a question of love or confidence, but one of faith."

"Faith?" she echoed.

Nodding, he went on. "Me and Flynn backed you up—stood by you through all, didn't we?"

"Indeed you did!" She grew rosily red under warmth of feeling. "I shall never—"

"An' now you allow to throw us down? For Shinn and MacCloud will shorely tell how that they scared you an' beat us out."

It was bad argument, poor ethics—a bald statement of his grim intention of bending the stubborn settlers to his inflexible purpose. She felt, however, that it would be still poorer ethics for her to desert and disappoint these, her champions, defenders. It was one of these peculiar situations where any course seems wrong, and if she chose that which seemed most human, she did it with a mental reservation. She would resign just as soon as she could persuade him to look at things her way.

"Of course I'll stay—to please you. But—"

"No 'buts,'" he interrupted. "Haying begins Monday, an' by fall it'll all be ol' hist'ry."

But Monday brought justification of her doubt, proving that, if cowed, the settlers were by no means conquered. Only the young Flynns attended school, and the array of empty benches loomed in her troubled vision like a huge face, vacant, mulishly obstinate as a blank wall, vividly eloquent of the invincible determination that would have none of her. Her heart sank, and when the week passed without further attendance she gave up, handed her resignation to Flynn and Glaves in council at the latter's cabin.

Both, as might be expected, registered strenuous objections. "'Tain't your fault if they cut off their nose to spite their face," Glaves argued. And when she replied that the children would suffer, he rasped: "What of it? 'The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children to the fourth generation.' Ye have Scripter for that."

"But not the sin of the stranger," she gently objected. "I have myself to blame for the prejudice."

Now, though neither trustee would admit her confession, both were afflicted with a sneaking consciousness of its truth. For not only had she offended by consorting with that public enemy, the remittance-man, but the cause of Carter's desertion had escaped from Elinor Leslie's indiscreet tongue. Every man, woman, and child in the country-side was informed as to the events which led up to and followed the Ravells' visit. Their denials, therefore, were negated by that profuseness of expression which accentuates the truth it seeks to conceal.

"You know it," she answered them, and opposed further argument with that soft feminine obstinacy which wears out masculine strength.

"But what else kin you do?" Glaves cried at last, in despair.

"Go to Winnipeg and take a place in an office or store."

Though she affected brightness, she could not altogether hide the dejection, homesickness that inhered in the thought. Now that she was to leave it, that rude cabin, with its log walls, legal patchwork, home-made furniture, glowed with the glamours of home. Even Mrs. Glaves's gaunt ugliness became suddenly dear in the light of an indefinite future among strangers.

Detecting her underlying sadness, Flynn exclaimed: "Phwat? Wurrk in a sthore? Sell pins, naydles, an' such truck while I've a roof over me head? Ye'd die in thim lonesome hotels. Ye 'll just come right home wid me."

"Likely, ain't it?" Glaves broke in, jealous for his prerogative. "In the first place, if she goes, she ain't agoing to stop at no hotel, but with my own sister that keeps a boarding-house on Main Street. An' if she stays, it'll be right here, with me—eh, old woman?"

His wife's warm assent brought Helen to tears without, however, affecting her resolution. For the settlement would be by the ears, she said, just as long as she stayed in it.

"Humph!" Glaves growled. "It'll have itself be the throat afore long. Yesterday Poole an' Danvers ran their mowers into Shinn's five-acre swamp, an' if that don't bring that big Injin a-kiting from the tall timber, I'm Dutch."

She was not, however, to be moved, and after an embarrassed pause Flynn said, hesitatingly: "Thim cities, now, is mighty ixpinsive. A lone girl without money—ye'll let me—"

Digging a shabby bill-book from the bottom depths of his overalls, he precipitated a second kindly quarrel. Glaring at it, Glaves snorted, "When she knows she kin draw on me for the vally of my last head of stock down to the dog!"

Having means for some months, this storm was more easily laid than that which burst when Flynn offered to drive her in to Lone Tree.

"An' her living with me?" Glaves stormed.

"'Tis meself that knowed her longest," Flynn argued.

"Humph!" Glaves sneered—"three days. Thursday she stopped at your house coming out from Lone Tree. Sunday I saw her at meeting—went a-purpose an' never tended sence. No, she goes with me."

"Anyway, I knowed her longest," Flynn persisted. "But 'tis herself shall say. Which shall it be, ma'am?"

"Both," she laughed; and so, with a grizzled champion on either hand, she rattled southward the following day.

By one of those strange coincidences of ironical fate, this, the day of her departure, occurred on the third anniversary of her first drive out with Carter, and all things, season, sight, sound, conspired to vividly recall that memorable occasion. Rank growths in uncut sloughs bowed under warm winds that freighted a distant metallic rattle of many mowers; beyond the settlements the Park Lands stretched to the Assiniboin with only the chimneys of the burned Cree village to break their spangled undulations. As before, they came suddenly upon the valley, rugged, riven, with its bald, buttressing headlands, timbered ravines; the river, writhing in giant convolutions along the level bottoms. As before, they dropped with jolts, jerks, skidding of wheels to the ford that now tuned its hoarse voice to a melancholy dirge in harmony with her mood; and from the door of the log mission Father Francis bowed his silver head in courtly farewell.

After the valley came the "Dry Lands," the tawny plains, barren of trees, cabin, or farmstead; finally Lone Tree impinged in that huge monochrome, its grain-sheds reminding her, as before, of red Noah's arks on a yellow carpet. To her the hour of departure restored the fresh, clear vision of the stranger. The town appeared as on that first occasion—its one scanty street of clapboard hotels and stores with false fronts fencing the railway tracks that came spinning out of the western horizon to flash on over the east; the wise ox-teams rolling along the street; the squaws with ragged ponies hitched in big-wheeled Red River carts; the cows pasturing amid tomato-cans that strewed vacant lots; the loafers, omni-present riffraff of the small frontier, holding down nail-kegs and cracker-boxes under store verandas.

It was a trying drive. Every turn of the trail brought its reminiscences; mud chimneys, the Indian graveyard, a lone coyote, recalled the beginnings of her love, and now that she was leaving she vividly realized how she had grown to this land of white silences, grave winds, vast, sunwashed spaces. But if she had need of the heavy veil that she pinned on that morning, that marvellous feminine restraint enabled her to turn a composed face to the doctor and Jenny, who came to the station to see her off.

As she passed up street, the riffraff exchanged nods and winks, but Lone Tree furnished still other champions. The store-keeper, he who had loaded Carter's buck-board with jams and jellies, came hurrying across the tracks with good wishes and protestations.

"Shinn, MacCloud, Cummings—the hull gang—go off my books," he swore to Glaves. "Not another cent's credit to keep 'em from starving."

"They can rot in their beds for me," the doctor added. "I strike Silver Creek from my practice." And though the train was even then whistling for the station, Hooper, the agent, stole time for friendly greetings.

If roughly expressed, their sympathy was at least genuine; it eased the parting so that she was able to lean out and give them a last smile as the train rolled by the water-tank with long, easy clickings, carrying her away beyond their tough pale. Good enough as a farewell, it was not, however, a success as a smile, and the woe behind its wanness formed the subject of an indignant caucus that convened as soon as Jenny left the platform.

"I can't figure out jes' what Carter means," the storekeeper fretfully exclaimed. "Granted that she throwed him that onct—the charivari?—that business at the revival? If it had been my wife, I'd been smelling round for—"

"Blood!" the agent interjected; and though he had intended "trouble," the store-keeper accepted the amendment.

"What's the man looking for?" the doctor roared. "She has beauty, amiability, intelligence, almost every quality that a man can desire in a wife, yet he goes off in a pout because she falls short of the angels. He's a damned fool. He ought to be—"

"Aisy, aisy wid ye." Flynn stemmed the tide of wrath. "'Tis no throuble at all to condimn whin a purty girl's at t'other ind of the argymint. She's sweet, an' I'll break the face av the man as says she isn't good. But—give the man toime. Let be till we know that he's heard av the rhuctions. Thin, if he does nothing—"

"Well," the doctor interrupted, "he'll hear, all right—from me, this very night."

"Me, too," the store-keeper added.

"An' don't forget to give him partickler h—l!" the agent called after as they strolled away.

Nor did they. Dipping his pen in scorn, the doctor opened his epistle with a timely question as to the exact number and kinds of fool that Carter considered himself, and finished with a spirit that transcended even Glaves's difficult requirements. Equally thorough in his beginnings, a rush of business prevented the store-keeper from making an end that evening; but his default had its advantages in that he was thus enabled to deliver the remainder, viva voce, to Carter himself, when he stepped off the train next morning. Served hot, with good frontier adjectives sizzling among the nouns and articles, his opinion gained the admiring attention of Hooper, the agent, who stood ready to offer advice and assistance.

For his part, Carter listened quietly until the storekeeper paused for breath. Then he turned to the agent. "If you'd like five minutes with my character and attainments, don't be bashful! I've got it coming. After that please oblige with a little information on this charivari? I only heard yesterday morning of that revival through Bender's coming into camp."

As he listened, his natural sternness deepened to dark austerity, then fluxed in sad pity as the store-keeper told of Helen's departure. Murmuring "Poor thing!—poor little thing!" he asked for her address.

His face fell when the store-keeper answered: "You'll have to go to Glaves for that. The doc' might have it, but him an' Miss Jenny went north this morning to settle up her father's affairs." Noting Carter's disappointment, he kindly added: "You kin drive my sorrels. They're a third faster than the livery teams. On'y, remember they're fresh off the grass."

"I'll try not to misuse them," Carter answered, brightening, a remark that plentifully illustrates his impatient feeling.

Agent and store-keeper helped him hitch; and as he headed the sorrels out on the Silver Creek trail—the trail that for him, as for Helen, was one long heartache—the agent drew a deduction from his sombre sternness.

"I heard that MacCloud an' Cummings were back. Je-hosh-a-phat! There'll be something doing if they cross his track."

Stepping out of his stable, after feeding the noon oats next day, Glaves "lifted up his eyes," in biblical phrase, and saw Carter "a long way off." A hot morning at the hay, and the loss of two sections of his mower-sickle by impact with a willow snag, did not tend to alleviate his natural crustiness. As he recognized the tall figure behind the sorrels, the hoar of his fifty winters seemed to settle in the lines of his weathered visage; his eye took the steely sparkle of river ice; his nod, when Carter reined in opposite, was curt as his answer.

"Your wife's address? Yes, I know it."

Forewarned by the store-keeper of the old man's bitterness, Carter was not surprised. "Meaning that you won't give it to me?"

"Not till I know as she wants you to have it."

Tone and manner were superlatively irritating, but the man had taken blood on his soul in Helen's defence, and Carter spoke quietly. "Don't you allow that she's a right to decide for herself?"

"Now, ain't that exac'ly what I said?"

It was not, but contradiction would merely inflame his obstinacy. At a loss how to proceed, Carter switched the heads, one by one, from a patch of tall brown pig-weeds, using his left hand, for the right was roughly tied up in his handkerchief. On his part Glaves looked steadily past him.

It was a beautiful day—sensuous, soft, one of the golden days when warm winds flirt among rustling grasses breathing the incense of smiling flowers. Heat hung in quivering waves along the horizon like an emanation from the hot, prolific earth over whose bosom birds, bumblebees, the little beasts of the prairies, came and went on errands of love and business with songs and twitterings. And there, in the midst of this joy of life, the grim old man bent frowning brows on Carter, who was lost in bitter meditation.

He was laboring under an unhappy sense of error, for his contumacy, determined absence, was not altogether a product of hurt pride. As he himself had dissolved their relations, it was Helen's privilege to renew them, and he had waited, yearning for her word. But now that he was dragged under the harrows of remorse, in an agony of pity for her, he stood before Glaves as in the presence of Nemesis, convicted of a huge mistake.

The initiative, after all, had lain with him. If he had owned to his fault, had apologized for his summary desertion, she could have been trusted to do the rest. Now he doubted that he was too late, for it was but reasonable to suppose that the trustee's determined opposition had origin with her. He squared his big shoulders to this burden of his own packing.

"Will you forward a letter?"

Frowning, Glaves answered without looking at him, "You kin leave your address."'

"But you will forward it?"

"If she wants it."

Carter flushed, but checked a sharp answer. "You ain't extending too much grace to a sinner."

"Any less than you extended her? What d' you expect of me that saw her name dragged in the mud, herself insulted—that took a life to save her body from violence? G—d d— you!" His pent-up feelings exploded, and for three minutes thereafter hot speech bubbled like vitriol through his clinched teeth in scathing denunciation of Carter's remissness.

"Part of what you say being true, we'll pass the rest," the latter said, when the trustee had drained his phials of wrath. "Now—without conceding your right to withhold her address—will you forward some money?"

Glaves stared. He had expected a blow, a violent quarrel, at least; nay, had lusted for it. But he was too much of a man himself to mistake a just imperturbability for fear, while the mention of money checked his anger by switching his ideas. Jealous for her honor, he looked his suspicion. "Whose money?" But if accent and tone declared against the acceptance of favors, he took the proffered greenbacks after Carter explained that they covered her share of the cattle he and Morrill had owned in common—took them, that is, with a proviso.

"Let me see," he mused, counting five of ten bills of one-hundred-dollar denomination. "You'd forty head of stock when Morrill died. Five hundred covers her share. Take these back." And to further argument he sternly answered, "I don't allow that she's looking for any presents from you."

"No, I don't allow that she is."

Sadness of look and tone caused Glaves to glance up quickly, but he did not relax in his grimness up to the moment that, having left his address, Carter drove away. Then a shade of doubt crept into his steel eyes. "If it had been myself—" he muttered; then as Helen's parting smile recurred in memory, he added: "No, damn him! Let him suffer!" But this was not the end. Pausing in his doorway as he went in to dinner, he saw the buckboard, small as a fly, crawl over a distant knoll, and by some association of ideas remembered Carter's hand and wondered why it was bandaged. And when he learned from Poole and Danvers, who called round for their mail that evening, his first small doubt was raised almost to the dimension of regret.

Since the charivari, Glaves's opinion of the remittance-man—as a fighting animal, at least—had risen above zero, and he lent first an indulgent, then a rapt ear to the boys' story. As he himself had prophesied, the piracy of the five-acre swamp brought Shinn out from his hiding, but the latter's evil fate arranged matters so that as he descended upon the remittance buccaneers from one end of the swamp, Carter appeared on the Lone Tree trail which cat-a-cornered the other. The result bubbled forth from the mouth of first one boy, then the other, in eager interruptions.

"Shade of my granny!" Danvers swore. "You never saw such a fight!"

"No preliminaries," Poole declared. "Carter just leaped from his buggy and went for him like a cat after a mouse."

"And little good it did him. He might have been a gopher in the paws of a grizzly."

"Lay like a dead man for a long half-hour—"

"And looked like a snake that had mixed with a streak of lightning."

"Blind, battered, bruised, we carried him home on his shield—that is, on our hay-rake—"

"And that poor squalid wife of his looked rather disgusted when she found that he wasn't dead."

While they thus poured the tale of Shinn's discomfiture into Glaves's thirsty ears, Carter rattled steadily on towards Lone Tree. Passing Flynn's, he had been tempted to put in, but remembered that the Irishman would be out at the hay, and so ran on and by the one person who could have furnished an approximation of Helen's address. For she had merely promised to write Jenny as soon as she was settled, as he had learned when he met the doctor, back-trailing alone, early that morning.

"But you'll surely find her at one of the hotels!" the agent called to him, on the platform of the freight-train that carried him away at midnight.

But Helen had gone straight to the trustee's sister. And having wasted two days scanning hotel registers, wandering the streets, he concluded that perhaps she had changed her mind and gone straight through to her friends back East. Charging his friends and financial backers to keep on with the search, however, he returned to his labors in that unenviable condition of mind which romanticist writers describe as "broken-hearted."

In a city of twenty thousand it ought not to be so very difficult to locate a young lady whose style and beauty drew the eyes of the street. But if the search failed, the cause inhered in other reasons than lack of diligence—in a reason that largely accounted for Glaves's reluctance to give her address. Sick at heart, hopeless for the future, she had sunk her surname with the bitter past; resumed her maiden name while keeping the married title. Even with Glaves's sister, a big, good-natured woman, she passed as a widow.

XXV

THE SUNKEN GRADE

The "Ragged Lands!" Seamed, rugged, broken, gloomy with dark spruce, sterile as a barren woman, they cumber the earth from Lake Nipissing a thousand miles westward to the edge of the prairies, and in all their weary length no stretch of meadow-land occurs. Pock-marked with sloughs, muskegs, black morasses, peppered with sand-hills that rise suddenly like eruptive boils in the sparse beard of its dwarf-growths, it is a wicked country, and was held accursed by trappers and Jesuit fathers who, of old, portaged or paddled upon its borders. Yet in construction days men poured into its dark environs; one may still see Carter's camps, moss-grown, roofless, rotting by the right of way, for his line split a fifty-mile breadth from the western verge of that mighty forest.

On the day after Carter's return from Winnipeg the westering sun gilded a long scar, brown with the sere of felled trees, that shore thirty miles of forest. Ten more miles and this, his right of way, would debouch on the Park Lands, a day's drive southward from Silver Creek; at its other end fifty miles of prairie grading would carry it down to the American border. Northerly, the cut was masked in rolling smoke of burning brush; but where, farther south, the spruce mantle had been torn from the bosom of mother earth, it gaped yellow as a gangrened wound. Over this earth-sore men and teams swarmed with the buzz and movement of flies, coming and going about a steam-digger that bit hungry mouthfuls from the bowels of a sand-hill and spat them, with hoarse coughing, upon a train of flat-cars. Beyond them a pile-driver sputtered nervously upon a lean trestle; and still farther south a track gang laid and spiked rails with furious energy, adding their quota of noise to the roar that combined with heat and dust to produce a miniature inferno.

Dipping still lower, the sun poked a golden finger down a thin survey-line that slit the forest at the head of the right of way, and touched into flame the yellow head of a young man who sat on a log near Carter. There slim poplar-brake enclosed a mossy dell, into which the frenzy of work and noise came faintly as the hum of a passing bee. It was, indeed, so cool and pleasant that the surveyor shrugged unwillingly when the advancing shadows emphasized Carter's remark that it was "time to be moving."

"What a demon of unrest!" he laughed. "Can't keep still for five minutes."

His mock disgust drew Carter's smile. "That's all very well—for you. When your transit is cased, you're done. I have a few hundred men to look after."

"Oh, confound them!" the other said. "I'll never make a philosopher of you." And as, shouldering his transit, he followed, he commented humorously on Carter's tiresome energy, affirming that he was reminded of a steam-engine that had slipped its governors. "Couldn't be more grovellingly industrious if you were qualifying for a headline on a child's copy-book. Early to bed, early to rise, makes your boss healthy, wealthy, and wise," he misquoted. And as, a few minutes later, they came out upon wood-choppers who were driving the right of way into the forest, he grimaced, "More misguided zeal."

For all his sarcasm, his eyes betrayed his appreciation, and as, pausing, they looked on, his face lit up with professional pride. Following the choppers, sawyers were cutting sizable timber into logs, piling small trees with the brush; behind them a stumping outfit practised rough dentistry upon the road-bed. All were putting in the last "licks" of a good day's work; the air whistled of falling trees, hummed to the ringing saws; the woods echoed laughter, shouts, cheery curses.

"Good boys," Carter murmured. "Regular whales. Jest eat it up, don't they?"

"Peculiar idiosyncrasy." The surveyor resumed his chaffing. "They ought to have eased up while you were away. Can't account for it, unless—yes, it's beans! Beans, sir! You feed them beans and they work or—die. Query: What effect would a bean diet have on a philosopher? Ugh! I must avoid them."

"No"—Carter indicated a figure, gigantic in the loom of the smoke, "it's not beans; it's Bender. Without him we'd have plenty converts to your theory."

"And now tired nature pities them."

In their coincidence, the last red ray might have signalled Bender's shrill whistle, or vice versa. Anyway, sudden silence fell like a mantle over the clearing. While choppers and sawyers cached tools under brush away from rusting dews, teamsters dropped bows and yokes, and all followed the patient ox-teams down the right of way.

"Joking aside," the surveyor said, as they fell in behind, "what has life for these fellows? Ill-fed, worse clothed, only an occasional spree breaks the monotony of grinding toil."

Carter's nod was non-committal. "They work hard—yes, but then work is only terrible to the young and shiftless; your grown man loves it."

"If congenial."

"Generally is. You see, there's always something that a fellow thinks he can do a bit better than any one else—Bill, there, planes his stumps; Ole, that big Swede, is chain lightning on a cant-hook; Michigan Red rides a log down a rapid like a ballet-dancer, and has Jehu beat out on the reins; Big Hans lifts more'n any other man in camp. Summing it, from whip-cracking to stable-cleaning every job has its professor, who gets a heap of fun out of proving his title. Looking a bit closer, these chaps get more sunshine, fresh air, and sleep than your city workers, and if the grub is rough they ain't bothered none with indigestion. Hans finds a flavor in his beans that your big financial gun doesn't get out of his canvas-back. As for amusement, the regular lumber-jack does blow a year's salary on a week's bust, as you say; but most of these are farmers, some of 'em neighbors of mine. If they're rushed in summer they have time to burn in winter, and what of socials, dances, picnics, they strike a fair balance with pleasure."

"But what is ahead of them?"

Carter shrugged. "Death, of course; in the mean time, hard work, harder living, a family, and a mortgage to keep 'em from oversleep. But they'll breathe clean and live clean, work in the sun and outlive two generations of city people. Barring accidents, they'll average fourscore years, and so, when the last word is said, I don't know but that happiness lies down instead of up the ladder."

The surveyor curiously studied his thoughtful face. "You are climbing?"

But Carter was equal to the contradiction. "We was talking of averages—"

"Were," the other interrupted.

Grimacing, Carter repeated: "Were talking of averages. The exception gets his fun climbing, and don't find out how much of a fool he is till he looks down from the top."

"Doesn't," the other put in, and Carter resaid the word.

The corrections sprang from a compact that was now as old as their acquaintance. A graduate in engineering, the young fellow was widely read and cultured far beyond the needs of his profession, and as they talked, smoking, in their office-tent of evenings, his allusions to and illustrations from the realms of science, literature, art had given Carter glimpses of Helen's world, a universe in which touch, taste, smell, sight, and other things gave place to feeling, memory, perception. And so he had been stimulated to conscious attempts at improvement.

"I feel like a two-year-old!" he had exclaimed one evening early in their acquaintance. "I 'd like to know more of that. D' you suppose I could get that book in town? An' say, if you catch me straddling the traces—manners, speech, an' so forth—I wish you'd lam me one. Of course I'm pretty set, but if I could just tone down a bit on a few of the big things, the little ones might slip by unnoticed."

In the nature of things a construction-camp is bound to suffer a chronic drouth of news, and in default of other subjects Carter's marital troubles had received exhaustive and analytical treatment at the hands of the Silver Creek men and others. Filtering through many strata, enough of the gossip had reached the surveyor to inform him of the motive under this rough appeal, and he readily consented. So, in their talks thereafter, he had trimmed out the wilder growths of Carter's speech, giving rule and reason, for, as he laughingly assured him, his big pupil had an uncanny appetite for underlying law.

"Now 'tain't reasonable to suppose that you have to learn all the individual cases," he would say, when the surveyor tripped him on some expression; "what's the law of it?" And he would offer humorous opinions on the eccentricities of the tongue. "The darn language seems to have grown from wild seed, an' though Lindley Murray—ain't that his name?—lopped a bit here an' pruned a bit there, he couldn't straighten the knarls and twists in the trunks. An' I don't know but that it's as well that way Leave them grammarians alone, an' they'd clip an' trim the language till it was tame as the cypress hedges that my old aunt uster shape into crowing roosters, gillypots, an' pilaster pillars at home back East." In saying which he touched a profound etymological truth that is altogether ignored by the scientific inventors of universal languages.

One who had not seen him for some months—Helen, for instance—could not have failed, this evening, to notice how his faithful delving in that wild orchard had begun to bring forth fruit in his speech. Evincing fewer "aint's," it had more "ings," and even attained, on occasion, to correct usage in "number" of verbs. Equally forcible, as full of curt figures, its epigrammatic quality had gained rather than lost by better expression.

The silence which had fallen between them endured till they came in sight of the camp, a string of tents and log-cabins under the eaves of the forest. Then the surveyor pointed out a girl who was watching the tired stream from the door of the nearest tent.

"Why, there's Dorothy! She threatened to make the chief bring her down, but I didn't think she'd make it. Come along and I'll introduce you."

As, however, he mended his pace, Carter fell behind, and the sadness which had become habitual to his face deepened. He had heard the young fellow speak of this girl, his fiancée; and though in color and appearance she was the opposite of Helen, the swish of her skirts as she came to meet them, suggestion of perfume, the hundred elusive delicacies that make up a well-bred girl's personality, recalled his wife and oppressed him with a vivid sense of loss.

Her voice, rich and low in its tones as Helen's, strengthened the impression. "Dad said 'No,'" she laughed, after the introduction. "But—"

"Wilful woman will have her way," a voice declared from the interior of the tent; then the chief engineer, a hale man of fifty, appeared in the doorway. "Mosquitoes, alkali water, nothing would scare her." He was going on with inquiries of the health of a bridge that had developed rheumatic tendencies in its feet, when she laughingly interrupted:

"Come, dad, no business till after supper. I have already scraped acquaintance with the cook, and he says we are to come at once. So run along, little boys, and get ready."

"Wash our dirty faces, to put it plainly," the surveyor echoed her happy laugh. "Be it known unto you, fair lady, that ablutions are held to be effeminate, unnecessary, if not immoral, in construction work. However, in view of your hypersensitiveness, we will do violence to our inclinations. Come on, Carter—we for the tub."

But from a dozen yards she called him back. "This is the man you wrote me of? I knew him at once. What a splendid fellow!"

"Gorgeous!" he returned her whisper. "His wife must be a queer sort."

"Not necessarily." She added, with thoughtful intuition: "The possibilities are so many. Your friend is handsome and has a good face, but we girls are more complex than our mothers. While they were satisfied with good temper and good provision, we demand sympathy of taste and habit; that we touch without friction at a hundred points of contact. Tall as Mr. Carter is, he may fall short of such a standard."

Bending, her lover gazed admiringly into her earnest eyes. "Such a little wisehead! And did I pass in this difficult examination?"

Carter's back was turned, the cook-house door had just closed on the last teamster, her father had gone back to his calculations, so her answer was sweet as satisfactory.

When, half an hour later, the four entered the cook-house, two cookees were laying the table under one eagle eye of the cook, the other being on a roast that he was liberally basting. "Hain't you got no nose?" he answered Carter's question; but he smiled as, sniffing its rich odor, Dorothy said: "It's venison! And I'm so hungry!"

"Sure!" he corroborated. "Cree hunter brought in a quarter of moose this afternoon."

Pleased with her discernment, he seated her at the head of a table which he himself had scoured with sand to a snowy whiteness while the cookees were grinding a summer's tarnish from iron knives and spoons. Her tin plate reflected a smile that he would willingly have paid for in turkey and truffles, but lacking these, he served baked potatoes with the venison, hot biscuit, cake a hand's-breadth thick, and with a flourish set the crowning delicacy of camp life, a can of condensed cream, beside her tin coffee-cup. Then he packed the cookees outside to peel the morrow's potatoes that her appetite might not suffer from their admiring glances, an act which they classified as tyranny and ascribed to evil motives.

"She's a right smart gal," he added, after imparting a few privacies anent their birth and breeding from the door-step. "None a' your picking sort. Knows good cooking when she sees it, she does." Then he left them to digest a last piece of information that the evolution of their ancestors had been arrested in a low and bestial stage.

That supper figured as an epoch in Carter's life, because it marked a definite conscious change in his feeling towards his wife. With all men thought is more or less chaotic. Filtering slowly from feeling under pressure of experience, it remains fluid, turgid, until some specific act—it may be of a very ordinary nature—clears and precipitates it into the moulds of fixed opinion. So, though material of a sounder, more reasonable judgment of Helen had been gathering in his mind these months, injured pride had held it in abeyance—in suspension, as it were—until now that recent disappointment had left him peculiarly susceptible to impression, a resolvent was added; that occurred which precipitated his thought.

It took form in Michigan Red, who entered with another teamster and sat down at the opposite table. The task that delayed them had sharpened appetite, and their attack on the food the cook set before them was positively wolfish. Using fingers as much or more than forks, they shovelled greasy beans into their mouths with knives, as stokers feed a furnace; and as they bolted masses of pork, washed whole biscuits down with gulps of coffee, Carter's glance wandered between them and the delicate girl at his side. Here, indeed, was one of the "points of contact" of her intuitive wisdom. Once before he had seen, realized it. But whereas he had thrust the thought away the night that he watched Michigan Red eat in the lumber-camp, he now gave it free admittance, mentally writhed as he realized how this and other gaucheries must have ground on Helen's sensitive mental surfaces. Fascinated by their gluttony, he watched until dulled eyes and heavy, stertorous breathing signalled repletion and the close of their meal.

On her part, Dorothy was quietly observing him. Given such knowledge as the Silver Creek teamsters had sown through the camp, it would have been easy for her to guess the rest—if his conduct had borne out her surmise. But he had learned so much and so quickly under the stings of injured pride that observation failed to reveal any wide departures from the conventional. She had to give it up—for the present.

"What a strange man!"

Her whisper dissipated his painful reflections, and, looking up, he saw that, after lighting his pipe with a coal from the stove, Michigan Red was surveying them with cool effrontery through the tobacco smoke. His fiery beard split in a sneer as Carter asked if he had finished supper. But he did not take the hint nor move when ordered to call Bender.

"Mister Bender"—he spat at the title—"is down at the grading-camp."

"I said for you to call him." Carter's tone, in its very gentleness, caused the girl to look quickly so she caught his queer expression. Compounded of curiosity, interest, expectation, his glance seemed to flicker above, below, around the red teamster, to enfold, wrap him with its subtle questioning. Impressed more than she could have been by threat or command, she waited—she knew not for what—oppressed by the loom of imminent danger.

But it was not in the teamster's book to disobey—just then. Lingering to pick another coal, he sauntered down the room under flow of that curious, flickering glance, and closed the door behind him with a bang. Sharp as the crack of a gun, Dorothy half expected to see smoke curling up to the massive roof-logs. But though her father and lover looked their surprise, Carter resumed his eating, and there was no comment until he excused himself a few minutes later.

Tugging his gray beard, the chief engineer then turned to the surveyor. "Why doesn't he fire that fellow?"

Shrugging, the young fellow passed the question up to the cook. "You've known them longest."

Thus tapped, the cook turned on a flow of information, appending his own theory of Carter's patience to a short and unflattering history of Michigan Red. "You see, Red thought he was the better man from the beginning, an' it was just up to the boss to give him fair chance to prove it. As for him, he likes the excitement. You've seen a cat play with a mouse? Well—an' when the cat does jump—"

"Good-bye mouse," the surveyor finished.

The cook's significant nod filled Dorothy with astonishment. From the social heights upon which the accident of birth had placed her, she had looked down upon the laboring-classes, deeming them rude, simple, unsophisticated. Yet here she found complex moods, a vendetta conducted with Machiavellian subtlety, a drastic code that compelled a man to cherish his enemy till he had had opportunity to strike.

The knowledge helped her to a conclusion which she stated as they walked back to her father's tent. "Such pride! I understand now why he left her. Just fancy his keeping on that man?"

"Damned nonsense, I call it," her father growled. "That fellow will make trouble for him yet."

The prediction amounted to prophecy in view of a conversation then proceeding in the bunk-house. As Michigan's table-mate had fully reported the scene at supper, the teamsters were ready with a fire of chaff when he stumbled over the dark threshold after delivering Carter's message.

"Been dinin' in fash'n'ble sassiety, Red?" a man questioned.

"Nope!" another laughed. "Voylent colors ain't considered tasty any more, so the boss fired him out 'cause his hair turned the chief's gal sick."

Hoarse chuckling accompanied the teamster's answering profanity, but when, after roundly cursing themselves, Carter, the surveyor, chief engineer, he began on Dorothy, laughter ceased and Big Hans called a stop.

"That's right." A voice seconded Hans's objection. "We ain't stuck on the boss any more'n you are, Red; but this gal isn't no kin of his'n. Leave her alone."

"Sure!" the first man chimed in. "An' if he's feeling his oats jes' now, he'll be hit the harder when we spring our deadfall. Did you sound the graders to-day? Will they—"

"Shet up!" Michigan hissed. "That big mouth o' yourn spits clean across the camp to the office." And thereafter the conversation continued in sinister whispers that soon merged in heavy snoring. Silence and darkness wrapped the camp.

Awaking while it was still dark, the camp rubbed sleepy eyes and looked out, shivering, on smouldering smudges. Outside, the air whined of mosquitoes. At the long hay-racks horses snorted and pawed frantically under the winged torture; patient oxen uttered mained lowings. Growling and grumbling, the camp distributed itself—teamsters to feed and rebuild smudges, choppers and sawyers to the grindstone and filing-benches. It was a cold, dank world. Pessimism prevailed to the extent that a man needed to walk straitly, minding his own business, if he would avoid quarrel. But optimism came with dawn—teamsters hissed cheerfully over their currying, saw-filers and grinders indulged in snatches of song—reaching a climax with the breakfast-call. When, half an hour later, Dorothy appeared in the cook-house doorway, the camp had spilled its freight of men and teams into the forest.