Angels' Shoes, and Other Stories

Produced by David T. Jones, Alex White & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

Angels’ Shoes And Other Stories

By M. L. C. Pickthall.

_Author of “The Bridge,” etc._

Hodder And Stoughton Limited London

Made and Printed in Great Britain by MACKAYS LTD., CHATHAM.

Contents

PAGE ANGELS’ SHOES 7 THE SLEEPING FAUN 23 LUCK 49 CHEAP 63 STORIES 75 THE STOVE 87 LA BLANCHISSEUSE DORÉE 103 THE LOST SPRING 113 THE THIRD GENERATION 123 THE GIRL ON THE OTHER SIDE 139 THE DISTANT DRUMS 151 THE PRISONER 165 TWO WAYS 179 THE DESERT ROAD 193 LA TRISTESSE 203 WHITE MAGIC 213 THE BOG-WOOD BOX 225 FRIENDS 235 SAGA OF KWEETCHEL 247 MANNERING’S MEN 261 HE THAT COMETH AFTER 271 THE CLOSED DOOR 283 THE MEN WHO CLIMBED 295 THE WORKER IN SANDAL-WOOD 311

Angels' Shoes

The Horado, huge, torpid vein of the back-country, after taking tribute of a thousand miles of jungle was suddenly released into the ocean, whose clear and fertile depths it stained with the earth’s rot and detritus. Where these two encountered there was war, of meeting and retreating waters; which only ceased when the slow pressure of the turning tide exactly balanced the slow outpouring of the vast stream. Then, for a little while, there was peace. In the midst of such a peace lay the barquentine, _Dorotea Dixon_, waiting for high-water on the bar.

She, the soiled little trader, was briefly an illusion, a dream, built of some substance of pearl-petal and rose-gold too lovely for a name. Grier said the wet deck looked so fragile, so irridescent, that he tapped it with his heel as he stood, for the assurance that he stood on something more solid than a very bubble of the foam. The crew were silent; for the most part gazing overside at the streaks of mud-brown coiling in the sapphire; for the scornful sea never entirely mingled with the current of the river. It was all glitteringly, insubstantially, clear and vivid and still you’d have thought, said Grier, that a great glass globe had been clapped down over everything. Islets of grass, logs, nameless jungle-drift the dark river brought down and left about them in that strange belt of no-man’s-water between the flood and the flood. In the very fulness of dawn it brought the dugout.

The dugout, along with the other drift, drew silently and very slowly towards them; touched at last on the port quarter with a distinct double knock. After a curious pause and hesitation, a man rose on the rail with a rope; there was a glint of faces along the rail as the others gazed at him. Grier warned: “Careful, Mac-Awe,” but less out of consideration for the dugout, he says, than for the spell of stillness they must break. His voice, or the voices of the triumphing tide, broke it; and it was amidst a commonplace clatter, on a commonplace deck, that they lifted and laid Brennan and the native girl.

The girl was all right; Brennan, the huge bull of a man, was in a bad way. He’d little on, Grier said, but a pair of burst canvas shoes much too small for him; his shirt he’d rigged as a sort of shelter for the girl. They carried them below and put them in a cabin, having first ascertained that the girl wore a brass ring on the third finger of her left hand; for the Old Man, as Grier said, was “uncommon correct.” Then, leaving them to the Old Man and his box of medicines, they went to the work of coaxing the _Dorotea_ up stream. First, Grier took off the man’s shoes—cut them off in strips—for his feet were bruised to the bone.

Two hours later, the _Dorotea_ being safely warped to a tree above the jetty, Grier went down to look at the waifs again. He met the Old Man coming out of the cabin, a blue bottle in one hand and Brennan’s shirt in the other; a gaudy garment of yellow stripes, indescribably fouled and torn. The Old Man, staring grimly over the huge steel spectacles he always assumed when he opened the medicine chest, held out the shirt to Grier; Grier gazed blankly. At last the Old Man condescended to explain, to point with the bottle.

“You don’t tell me, Mr. Grier,” he burst out, “that the fellow’s any _right_ to it.”

Grier saw that there was a celluloid collar attached to the shirt with a brass safety pin: the orthodox straight band of white a parson wears. The Old Man went on, quivering with indignation; he was, as Grier said, “uncommon correct.” Grier looked into the cabin. The girl had curled up at the end of Brennan’s bunk, sound asleep nursing his wounded feet in her arms. Something in the sight hit Grier hard; he glanced from her to Brennan’s brutal, blue-black, upturned jaw, whistled thoughtfully, and went out.

Impossible even to imagine that jowl over the parson’s collar!

But it was Brennan’s jaw—or the quality it stood for—drove him that last thirty miles between Santa Luce and the Horado.

At Santa Luce—nothing but a river-crossing—he stopped and buried his last porter. He would have delayed for nothing living. Even Buck Brennan was obliged to delay awhile for that pitiful dead. He gave Rosario a few inches of earth; rested a little; took what he could of the double load, and went on. Thinking, as he told Grier, “Well, Rosario, _hombre_, your resurrection won’t take no three days”. . . A hard brute, Buck Brennan, with a heart like a baked brick; enclosing God-knew-what of fires of powers. . . . He had no choice but to die where he stood or a little farther on. He jutted out that great coarse jaw of his and chose to die farther on—as far as possible. And—as far as possible—he came on the house.

Imagine a great forest, bare of all life but one brown ant crawling in it; imagine in the very heart of that forest a tiny ant-heap, just a spoonful of honey-colored granules in the roots of a grass-tuft. Can you imagine the ant finding the ant-hill? Yet, in the vast jungles of the Horado, the creeping atomy that was Brennan, came on the house.

There was, in one window of the house, one little bit of glass, which caught the levelling light through some aisles of the unplumbed forest, and shone like a star. It drew Brennan, though he was then past thought. It was an automaton of mere muscle that he made towards it, mounted steps that sagged like hammocks, found a door, and set his shoulders to it. The door gave, groaning. Something tangled his feet and tripped him—a rope, or a vine of the myriad that veiled the very substance of the house. He fell as it seemed to him, very slowly; and the door sank before him like a mist. He heard a bell ring outside, far overhead—it rolled like the salute of a gun, a challenge, a war-cry flung hollow of night, all ringing and booming with bells.

Out of this deep sleep he woke in a dawn full of screaming clouds of little parakeets. They flashed past the doorway and vanished, but their green and gold lingered on the rim of every motionless leaf: the forest seemed to drip glory. But the splendid moment passed. A hot wind blew, and, somewhere overhead, set a cracked bell jangling. Brennan dragged himself to his feet and went to explore.

Food he must have; he had it there, in the load he’d let fall as he fell. But before that, before anything, he had to explore the house. Hunger was urgent. But there was something around him more urgent still. What?

He found no answer for a long time in the ghost of that little native-built house fading away into grass and green and mould—a visible sort of transubstantiation, going on, to go on, for how long? Who had built it? Who had deserted it? Why? He moved cat-footed on floors wrenched apart by writhing growths, where squares of solid mildew proclaimed that matting had been. He cleared the windows with his knife—it was like cutting snakes—and watched intently as the light fell on blotched and voiceless walls. There were glasses and warped frames here and there on the walls: from all but one the ants had eaten the pictures: this one had been backed with tin, and so the Madonna of the Chair still looked out, through the veiling of the damp, with her exquisite clear benevolence. Brennan tried another room.

Here were two little iron beds side by side, bare of anything but rust; a table, and a tin box. Brennan opened it. Books and papers rewarded him—several little gray-bound Gospels, an Imitation in Latin, a “Reading Without Tears,” and Miss Braddon’s “Vixen.” He was immensely bewildered and annoyed; he guessed a clue lay here, but was not sure of it. He tumbled the books about, and a shower of little cards fluttered out and lay gaudily on the floor. There was a picture and a text on every card. Brennan stooped and read “Suffer little children,” “He that speaketh truth sendeth forth righteousness,” “Charity suffereth long and is kind.”. . . He swore in pure astonishment and went on. On to the room at the back that ran the house’s width; of which the outer wall had fallen, leaving a drunken fringing of roof, a drift of greenery, dissolution and growth going on like a battlefield over—over what? Six benches in a row, a little raised platform, some coloured rags hanging from a roller that must have been a map, and a blackboard.

The place had been a school.

A school, a mission-school, in the jungles of the Horado! A picture-palace or a morgue would have appeared equally unnatural, equally out of drawing. Over the rotting roof, in a little cupola of split cane, hung the bell. As Brennan stood knee-deep in rubbish, staring at the blackboard, the bell moved in some unnoticeable air and clanged hoarsely. The school-bell!. . . . He turned to the blind doorway. And there were the scholars.

Native children. Three or four. One naked earth-coloured boy had a broken slate under his arm. One tallish girl wore the remains of a print gown, which she had washed clean. They stood gazing at Brennan in a wild, humble way, as if they also had lost their clue. Perhaps they could help him to his, though. But with his movement they fled, vanished, melted like shadows into the leaves. He had an impression of their eyes, bewildered, faithful, like the eyes of once-beloved ghosts. In the little cupola the bell was also faithful, calling to school.

Brennan ate and drank that day from his own small supplies. Then he stretched himself on one of those little iron beds and thought.

Food he must have—to go on with. Food, and perhaps he’d make the Horado; follow it down: find a boat. . . . But his mind persistently revolted from this balanced considering of days and ways, to a mere wonder, a curiosity. This school. Who had built it, kept it? Where had they come from, and why? Where had they gone, and why? _That_, not his journey, was what mattered—here. He went through everything with an intent method, but he found no more than a name in the Imitation—“Bonnie West,” and a date. Who on earth was Bonnie West? Sitting on the edge of the bed, he frowned from the book in his hand to the mould-haloed Madonna on the wall till his weight sent the legs through the floor and he slid off. He swore, but defiantly. . . . Grier said, “He always made me understand that the house still _belonged_. He never had any sense of ownership, or any right there. He was perpetually guilty, as if his hosts might return and find him there, unwelcome. He was apologetic when he renewed some of his badly worn clothes from a few he found put away under the books in the tin box—a coat and a pair of shoes I believe; he used to wake in the night, he told me, shaping excuses for making so free. Buck Brennan! D.D.’s clothes they were—Devil Dodgers—parson’s clothes.”

Perhaps it was with some idea of a vague repayment that Brennan began to clean out the schoolroom. . . . Llianas had climbed to the roof, burst it, lapped about the little belfry. Everything he touched, he told Grier, the bell rang. And he’d a notion that the scholars still haunted the place; he felt himself continually watched, followed—weighed, perhaps, and found wanting. Once he looked up quickly from his tidying, and there they were again in the door. But again they fled and the forest swallowed them as some say a mother-snake will swallow its young. It troubled him. He thought that if he had on the parson’s coat they might have stayed, and then he would have found out everything. . . . He always wore it after that. And as the strange empty, preoccupied house worked on him, he added one of the straight white collars he also found in the box. But they would not return for all the wool this innocent wolf stuck on his rough pelt.

He had no heart those first days for venturing into the jungle again, even to find out where the children hid, and where he might get fresh supplies, and perhaps porters for his further journey; his necessities all lapsed curiously into the background. But the morning came when he took his gun and went out, moved from his uncommon lethargy by the need of the next day’s dinner. He told himself he was after pig. But he followed the trodden path he found leading from—and to—the mission school. It must lead to the village. He had followed a thousand such corkscrew trails. But this one ended in nothing. Just that. It was as if a hand had come down and wiped everything out, as you wipe something you don’t want read off a slate. Bare, burnt earth was there, and a leprosy of ashes. Rain had fallen in the night; he saw, in the ashes, prints of children’s feet. And went back without his pig.

After that, he was continually on the watch. He shot and cured meat, as much as he could carry for any journey. He still lingered, confident that somewhere in the jungle was the clue, the answer to the riddle of emptiness of ashes, and of the fluttering ghosts of the children, that he had set himself to solve. . . . Who can say what held him there? One evening, an hour from the house, he parted branches and looked on a camp.

Of himself, nothing was clearly visible in the gloom of the leaves but the white linen collar about a throat that many would have preferred in a hempen one. Of the man who sat in the daylight and the firelight, nothing was hidden as he looked up, saying, thoughtfully, “Ah! So they have sent another already. . . .”

“When Buck went back to the house,” said Grier, “Manuel Franca went along; and when he stood at the door, and looked into the emptiness, he smiled.”

“And the roof didn’t fall on him?”

“No-o-o, nothing so inadequate; it was only palm-thatch. What did happen was that he went into the inner room where the rusty beds were as if he knew the way, picked up that little Imitation, fluttered the leaves, and, when he came to the name written inside—‘Bonnie West,’ he smiled again.”

“What has that to do with—?”

“With Buck Brennan? O, a great deal. . . . You ought to have talked to Buck. You see, he’d done nothing but try and think things out, and wonder who Bonnie West was and what had happened to her, until he’d made a sort of picture of it—and her. She must have seemed quite real to him. It was in the jungle, you know, anyway. . . . .”

“Well?”

“Well, when Franca smiled, Buck took a dislike to him. So you see, it was much worse than if the roof had fallen. . . . Thank God. And _I_ never saw Bonnie’s name in a book.”

Now, she begins to come into it.

An excessively strange companionship must have ensued between those two in the empty mission-house; neither asked any questions of the other, in a situation that called for many; a betrayal in itself, if both had not so studiously avoided the veriest shadow of distrust. Certain things Buck never cleared up—for instance, if Franca took him for a bona-fide padre because of the collar! It sounds impossible; but “in there,” as Grier puts it, “the priests are just anything.” Perhaps Franca was too deep in his own affairs to notice Buck much; for it took no more than a day or two for Buck to realize that he also was waiting, watching, searching for something with an intensity that defied pretence. He believed Franca had come back—ah! come back?—to find something.

Brennan also began to look for it, though he was hampered by not knowing what it was! And by the necessity of keeping up appearances. He went on tidying the schoolroom; he told Franca that his porters had deserted on the way up with most of his goods, which was moderately true; he was expecting to get new men, only they seemed to have all run away from the vicinity.

“The scholars also, they have run away?” suggested the leisurely Franca politely.

“Yes, but—”

“But I will bring them back to you.”

Brennan said that what followed was like a nasty sort of adjectived miracle. Franca idled to the door—he was always idling about, peering in cracks, feeling walls, gazing into holes with a hunger of insatiable eyes—and called. The leaves of the forest shook, here and there, as if Fear moved them. He called again. And Fear crawled on its belly from the leaves to his feet, the boy with the slate, the girl who wore the remnants of the print wrapper. They did not even tremble; they waited, like ducks for the food to scatter.

“These are all that are left, I think.”

Franca stooped forward and took something from the girl’s neck. It was a dirty little bag on a string. He looked about, smiling; then hung it on the corner of the blackboard. “They will not run far now,” he nodded to Buck. The two crept away.

Buck Brennan was a bit taken in the wind, as he would have said. And that night he woke to a low moaning like the wind, a voice of grief so faint, so uncomprehending, it was not human. He took a light and went to the schoolroom. The girl was there, a bare thing of the night, her eyes luminous as its stars. She was squatting at the foot of the blackboard, making this sound of uncomplaining loss. Brennan knew what she wanted. She wanted her little lucky-bag, and was afraid to touch it. He took it down, looked into it; his clue was not there: unless a little bone collar stud with two or three hairs wrapped around the shank was a clue? The hairs gleamed in the light, reddish—fair. . . . He closed the little smelly thing, and gave it to the girl. Felt, the next instant, her hands, her tears, on his great bare feet! So she was a human being, not unattractive, and wildly grateful. He laid a hand like a lion’s paw on her: but she melted from him, and he did not follow. She was not his; like the house, she belonged. . . To what, to whom? To a ghost, a shadow, bringing bright hair and a halo of lilac print, that looked at Buck with the eyes of a fate he might never learn. He went back to the bedroom, looked long at Franca, asleep and smiling. And began to feel that here, perhaps, was all the clue he needed.

He spent a long time next day sitting over the little books, like a jury over so many little corpses; smoking heavily, and very uncomfortable in the mildewy coat, the stiff collar, and the parson’s shoes so much too tight for him. They were all part of position into which he had been drifted, to which he so strangely yielded himself; but he preferred to leave a certain veil of doubt and obscurity over it. Into that puddle of circumstances he would never look too closely, lest he should see reflected there a bad Buck Brennan he did not know and couldn’t have lived with—an avenger, a judge, grimly appointed by some vast mockery or vaster justice.

And there, as he sat, suddenly he had his clue in his hand.

It was the half-sheet of an unfinished letter, rolled into a little spill and thrust into the rounded back of the book. He unrolled it carefully, and the hand-writing, clear and rather childish, sprang out at him in the fading grayish ink.

“. . . . For I do think, Chubsie, Lewis is the very best man in the world. You’ll laugh; but he takes such beautiful care of me, and the work’s so interesting, and the babies are such dirty little ducks, all eyes and tummies. I don’t really feel fit to be a missionary’s wife, but I’m trying to be, and I know quite a lot of Spanish. And on Thursday, he said I was—what do you think?—an inspiration. Don’t laugh, you bad girl. Oh, Chubs, I wish I could _hear_ you! And that brings me to the one thing—I wouldn’t tell him for the world, but I can tell you because I know you never _breathe a word_ of what anyone tells you. This country frightens me. It’s not a bit like the winter I was in Ceylon. Just sometimes, you know; though I tell myself it’s only for two years, and I’m with Lewis, and I was _willing_. But it’s interesting too. Guess what he found that time he went up the Horado to the fifth tributary.—Fancy, it hasn’t even a name!—where the boys said no white man had been before. He found whole forests of rubber trees. I said, ‘Was it valuable?’ And he said, ‘Yes, _immensely_,’ but he’d never make use of it or tell anyone it was there, because he said rubber seemed to be one of the accursed products of the earth, and death and suffering always followed where it was. _Of course_ I agreed. Isn’t he splendid? Then Mr. Franca came in. I must tell you about him. He’s quite splendid in a catty sort of way; but truly, I’m a little bit afraid of him too. He’s like the country. . .”

And that was all. But Brennan had his clue. Clue? It was a revelation, a whole dark landscape shown in one flash of leven-fire. He crushed the little spill in his fingers, and across the chasm of her fate cried to Bonnie West,—“Yes, I see, I see. But what did he _do_. . .?”

“You have it. . .”

Franca, just breathing the words, stood in the doorway; he leaned, not towards the paper in Buck’s hand, but away from it, as a man leans against the pull of a rope.

“You have it. You know it. . . .”

“What do I know, I wonder?” said Buck, thoughtfully, his eyes never leaving Franca’s.

“Where he went. . . . What he found. . .”

“Yes.” Buck was more thoughtful than ever. With a single movement he took his pipe from his mouth and tilted the red-hot ash on the paper in his palm. The thin “foreign note” curled instantly in a fluff of little flame, ended in a square of fragile gray edged with dying scarlet. Buck sat watching it quietly. Franca had cried out once, no time for more. Now he stood grunting and sweating like an animal, one hand pulling and fumbling at his belt.

“No good.” Buck shook his head. “No good. You wouldn’t be such a fool. . . . _I am—now—the only living soul that knows._”

The only living soul . . . . Franca went out.

That night the native girl, with her lucky-bag and her rags of faithfully guarded print, crouching in darkness, saw a great light. A lantern was held over her head, a hand hauled her mightily from her hiding place. She was dazed as by the coming of a god: she suffered a resurrection: she shook, and was still. But the god’s voice was kind.

“I like you,” said Buck Brennan, that uncommon thoughtfulness still upon him. “You’re my kind; and you’d be right pretty for a brown one if you was washed. I like you for sticking to her; the place where she was. . . I can’t leave you here, now them poor little fools is gone. . . Them poor little _damn_ fools. You better come with me. I’ll be straight with you . . . . take care of you . . . . hand you over to the first missionary we meet, and may the Lord have mercy on my soul.” Buck was a bit confused; but neither this closing solemnity, nor the parson’s collar, nor the parson’s canvas shoes seemed quite enough . . . . Buck swallowed hard, suddenly dry of throat.

“Bonnie West,” he said, distinctly. “_Bonnie West_. . . . There, will that do you?”

Yes, it was the talisman of trust. The dark little wild thing rose and went with him, holding on to the tail of the parson’s coat.

“And after all,” said Grier, “how little Buck knew, how little he was able to tell! And yet enough—plenty. If the girl told him more, he kept it to himself; and I don’t know if he or anyone else but Franca knows the close of the story of the poor little good little Wests and their mission. The secure and comfortable organization that sent them out doesn’t know: I’ve asked it. They just went out: were swallowed up in the great dark land that was so unlike her winter in Ceylon, and frightened her sometimes. And Franca. . . . Why didn’t Buck shoot Franca and have it done with? I don’t pretend to know that either. It scarcely needs putting into words, the certainty that Franca killed, wiped out, abolished the Wests and their little mission because he didn’t want ’em to get that rubber: and then couldn’t find it himself. . . . Any good man would have shot the beast and thanked God for the chance. But Buck wasn’t good—only in spots. He had an erratic sense of humour, and he’d been in that house some time—with Bonnie West. The method he chose involved more risks to himself. But think of the devilish far-reaching completeness of it!

“The story of his escape with that girl from the jungles of the Horado would make a saga. But he can’t tell it. The rains came on, and it took them a month to find the river; Franca fighting on behind them—in case they were making for the blessed rubber! They stole a dugout somewhere and launched it for the sea; followed a long fever-dream of bars, and beasts, swimming trees, sunken islands, reversing currents, falls, impossible portages; and all the time the knowledge that Franca was dogging them behind or waiting in an agony for them in front. Afraid to let them out of his sight. . . . It probably brought Buck through; as I say, he had a peculiar sense of humour; and then he had the plucky girl. . . . I don’t know when the brass ring made its appearance, or what ingenious ceremony it celebrated. Once, I believe, she got fever and gave out; and Buck would tie her in the fork of a tree, drag the dugout overland, launch it, go back for her, and carry her to it. No wonder his feet were bad. Think of it! And all the weary way, Franca followed.

“I tell you, that villain began to pay then, as he’d never paid in his life, and it was only the beginning. He hated Buck, as, I suppose, few ever come to be hated; and he was mad with anxiety over the personal safety of the only living being who knew where to find that rubber. What a vengeance, eh? I tell you, I saw him crawling on the jetty, before I had heard anything about him, when Buck was very bad aboard the _Dorotea_, and he was the hot ghost of a man. Of a man? Of a devil. He looked like a devil dying of hunger, and that’s just what he was.

“He said to me, panting as he spoke, ‘Is it true that you have the Señor Brennan aboard there?’ ‘Yes,’ I says, ‘And is it true that the fever is heavy on him, and is he talking much in it?’ ‘No,’ I says, ‘he’s no fever, and does nothing but snore, and the fo’c’sle’s complaining. . . . And who may you be, so anxious to hear what he says in his sleep?’ But he crawled away with a sort of groan. Yes, Buck’s way was the best; Franca had begun to break then, torn as he must have been between his hate and his greed; but I doubt if my—well, my sense of humour!—would have been strong enough to let me take it! . . . All for the knowledge of the direction that unlucky little saint of a missionary had taken when he found the rubber trees, and that knowledge in Buck’s head, and nowhere else in the world.

“Yes, it was masterly. How he must have thought, ‘Some day, he must betray it. Some day, he must go back to his rubber, some day, he must show—me—where it is. . .’ But Buck hasn’t!

“Queer, isn’t it? I told you he’d a fat sense of humour. He enjoys himself immensely over it. He starts suddenly on wild expeditions with a great air of secrecy over them; Franca drops everything, beats up a party too, and trails him. When he’s been led far enough, Buck turns round and comes back. It’s ruining Franca. He’s obsessed. He can do nothing but follow, follow, follow. . . . But the worry, and the travelling, and the hate on an empty stomach! He’s taken to drinking now, Buck tells me, and he can’t last long. What worries me is that he’ll realize the game’s up, and stick that itching knife into Buck at last.

“And the cause of it all, the rubber? I never speak of it to him. Perhaps when Franca’s beyond any chance of profiting by it. . . . Perhaps then. . . . But I don’t know, I’m not sure of Buck. He’s talked to me a good deal, of the house, and Bonnie West, and her letter in his hand. He remembered every word of that letter, wrote them down for me, but gave me no confidence, for he changed the directions. . . . It was not the fifth tributary; only he knows what it was, and I’ve an idea only he will ever know. I think not through Buck Brennan will the hell of the rubber trade come to the country where Bonnie West lived and died. It wouldn’t be the first sacrifice he’d made to that erratic sense of—humour.

“He hasn’t gone on any expedition this year. I think he’s inclined to domesticity. He’s been incredibly staunch to that little brown girl of Bonnie West’s. I often think of them in the cabin, and cutting the parson’s shoes off. They were far too small, those shoes for Buck Brennan.”

The Sleeping Faun

I

“William writes that he is home from Italy, Helena; that he is married to Lucia Vasotti, and that he begs us to send the child to Great House on a visit, so that it may be less lonely for Lucia—a stranger in a strange land, as he justly observes.”

“And likely to remain so. Most unsuitable.”

“Hush, Helena, we must not be harsh. We will send the child, but only for a short time.”

Launce was that child, and that was the first word he had of Lucia Vasotti—her name, linked with “unsuitable.” It must have been blown to him on some wind of chance, because he was up in the dove-house at the time with three Ribston pippins and _The Bride of Lammermoor_. The flutter of homely wings was in his ears, the sharp fresh apple-scent on his lips, Lucia was maddening on the sunlit page before him, and “Lucia” was blown past him on the keen spring air. Until he died, that name was to him as the call of remembered music far away. Then old Pansy came and hauled him down the ladder in a hurry to be measured for two new shirts.

Launce was the only child at that time in the family, and he was used to being handed round a large circle of grown-ups for the comfort of this or that member thereof, like a foot-warmer. He remembered his Uncle William as a tall, dark man, incredibly supplied with shillings and generous of the same. Great House he did not know, but he was a child of steadfast mind. He went off very calmly, well shawled and muffled, with a small black box and two white mice in a cage. It was a day’s journey, of which he remembered little, save that the willow catkins were out and the southward-fronting gorse in bloom along the windy coast. He reached Great House just as a wild sunset was faring above the sea.

The house stood high for that level land, surrounded with a great sweep of terraces and plantations. It was built upon a fair and gracious plan, but the bitter sea and the north-east had taken their toll of it. The gardens were starved with sand, and the trees shorn off at wind-mark as with a sword. The buildings too were grey and wind-bitten, but now they swam in a strange red light. On the terrace above the beach a lady paced up and down, wrapped in a red cloak. And she moved like a moving flame in a still mist of fire.

“That is Unsuitable Lucia,” said Launce. He turned along the terrace path where the sea-shells gritted with the gravel, the mouse-cage tied up in a blue handkerchief in one hand, and his cap in the other, rehearsing the little speech that Aunt Helena had taught him last Sunday with his collect. As a result he was not very clear whether his “honoured aunt and the warm welcome that ever awaited dear William’s bride, however unexpected,” held a prominent position in the Church Service, or whether he must remind this Lucia that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves, but need to be kept both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls. However, he had no time for either, for the lady saw him, and stood, holding out her hands.

“Are you Launce?”

The child went up to her; he could see that her eyes and hair would have been very dark without the red-gold light that shone in them as fire shines through smoke. Then she moved quickly and kissed him, and the vision was blotted in the folds of her red cloak, through which he saw the world as in a flame. “Are you Launce? I am your new Aunt Lucia, but you must call me Lucy, for I am English now. I shall love you, you little brown, long-nosed boy. Will you love me?”

But how could the boy answer, drowned in his first vision of what a face might be.

She laughed a little, and sent a long, ringing call up to the house—“William, O William, here is our nephew come.” And then there was Uncle William, jumping out of the window of the gun-room and running down the terraces, and saying. By Gad, now, was that big boy little Launce, and how glad he was to see him, and Mrs. Annerley had tea ready in her room. But first he’d better give the mice to Simmons.

“I’d rather have them in my room, if Aunt Lucia does not mind. They are not very mousy.”

“Afraid you’ll be lonely in the night, eh?”

“No, Uncle Will; I’m afraid they will be lonely, they are sensitive mice.”

And Lucia laughed. “Why should I mind, William, the pretty little living things in the house? There are so few of them.” She glanced at the house with a faint shiver. The sea had suddenly taken the sun, and they moved like grey ghosts in a ghostly garden. Only on Lucia’s face the light seemed to linger.

Uncle Will patted her hand as he had patted Launce. “Well, come along, laddie. You must be hungry, and Mrs. Annerley has slain the fatted calf. But go into the gun-room first. There’s someone there you see more often than you do me.”

“Who?”

“Your godfather.”

Launce went to the gun-room with a happy face, and greeted his godfather with a nod, as one boy greets another. Mr. Geoffrey Launcelot was sitting on the table, apparently busy in admiring his own legs, very effective in new gaiters. He went straight to the point, as was his custom. “How’s the brown rabbit?”

“Well, sir, thank you, and has seven little ones. I’ve given two to Bill’s boy.”

“That’s right. Always give away what you don’t want yourself. How’s Foxy?”

“He’s well too.”

“And what do you think of your new aunt?”

Launce stood gazing at him above the mouse-cage. He opened his lips to speak, but the vision came on him again, and something beat in his heart and choked his throat like the flutter of prisoned wings. He stood stammering, and felt with amazement his own cheeks grown wet with tears.

Mr. Launcelot handed him a handkerchief with an unmoved face. “Boy,” said he, “I’m sometimes damnably afraid you’re going to be a poet.”

Launce steadied his nerves with Mrs. Annerley’s veal pie. He slept in a little gaunt room looking out over the gardens. Downstairs there was music—Lucia’s laughter, the piano. Uncle Will’s hunting songs, and then young Geoffrey’s tenor, high and wild as a bugle, ringing through the hollow corridors.

He fell asleep to the unaccustomed music, and he awoke to music—the bleak music of the wind and the sea.

He was late for breakfast, but Geoffrey was even later, strolling in imperturbably after the eggs, his curly hair still sleek from the sea.

“To-day,” Uncle Will announced, “we’re going to unpack wedding presents.”

Unpack—a happy word. Launce awoke from a dream of Lucia’s morning face behind the urn.

“Well, boy?”

“I have a new knife, sir. If I might cut the strings—?”

“Come into the hall. They are all there. And you shall cut all the strings.”

The grey old hall was littered with packages and cases and straw; the wind shook the curtains, and drove along the floor a fine dust that was not dust of the earth, but sand of the sea. Launce was sent for Lucia’s red cloak, a happy errand. And when he came back they had knocked a wooden case apart and stood above the swathed contents, waiting with a smile for the offices of the new knife.

There were many strings to be cut, but at last the packing and the sackcloth fell away. And Launce cried out suddenly and was silent. He felt again that flutter as of wings in his heart.

Yesterday he had looked his first on beauty living and mortal. Now he looked his first on beauty dead and all but immortal.

A boy was there, sleeping in the honey-coloured marble that seemed to have drunk its fill of some long-remembered sun. So soft, so warm, so golden-grey it shone in the dusk of the hall, that Launce cried out again to touch it and find it cold. The boy lay with his head thrown back on his arm. Vine-leaves, broken now, were falling from his hand, clinging to his curls, and vine-leaves lay where his little goat-hooves had crushed them ere he slept. His face was neither good nor evil, only beautiful. And his happy sleep seemed so light a thing that a laugh, a song, the touch of a bird’s wing or the shadow of a falling leaf must serve to break it, and awaken him to some unknown life apart from evil and from good, the rising and setting of whose days and nights was beauty.

“Well, my lady,” cried Uncle Will in his big voice, “you know where that comes from, hey?”

With one of her swallow-swift movements, Lucia stooped above it. “The villa,” she murmured, “the gardens, the laughing sea, and the sun—” She laid her cheek suddenly to the smooth, cold cheek of the sleeping faun. “I kiss you, O beautiful, for the sea and the sun—for Italy—”

“You are an odd kitten, Lucia,” said Uncle Will, “and you have some dust on your cheek. Let me wipe it off for you. And don’t forget to tell Mrs. Annerley about those sweetbreads.”

To Launce—and another—it seemed the little faun should have smiled and wakened beneath that kiss of hers.

Launce wrote home that evening:

“My dear Aunt Helena, I am very Well. The mice are very Well. Uncle William is very Well, and will write when he can gain Leisure. Aunt Lucia is very well. I am glad to be here to prevent her from being Lonely. My dear Godfather is here too, to prevent her from being Lonely. He sends his Compliments, and did not tell me how to spell it. He has new Gaiters. He has a new Horse, which he calls Monseigneur. I do my Latin daily, and am, my dear Aunt, your loving and dewtiful Nephew, Launce. My dear Aunt. She is bewtiful.”

II

Launce was very happy at Great House, in a way that was a little bewildered and dream-like. The grooms and gardeners liked him, and were kindly. There were horses in the stables, great store of pups and kittens, and a boy with red hair who kept two ferrets and had been known to win sevenpence on the races. He read Latin with Uncle Will, who had forgotten his syntax, but vastly revered Horace. He had long walks and talks with Lucia on the windy terraces, and might dream of her by the hour in a newly-dug cave behind the summer-house. Mr. Launcelot, fashionably languid by day, was wont to wake up in the evening and go thundering about the country on his great bay horse. Often he took Launce on the saddle in front of him, and the boy would spend an hour of delirious delight as they swooped in great curves above the hard beaches, returning with clouded stars ahead and the foam of the in-running tide at the horse’s heels. Sometimes they would all go off together, a merry party, Uncle Will on his steady grey weight-carrier, Launce on a fat pony, Lucia on a brave old mare with a touch of the Arab. Then at the last mile Uncle Will would say, “Give her a gallop, Geoff,” and the two light-weights would flash away, the old mare running as smooth as a swallow, and Geoffrey a neck behind, bearing hard on Monseigneur’s bit—away and away, down the levels of silver sand to the far lights of Great House. Uncle Will always rode that last mile with Launce in silence. Once he said, “I wish I weren’t forty-three, boy, and didn’t ride fourteen stone.” It occured to Launce that his godfather, fighting the great bay, was a fine thing to see.

They set the sleeping faun on an old pedestal against the sea wall, among a struggling growth of rusty wallflowers and sea-lavender, under the windows of Launce’s room and the gun-room. The boy would waken in the moonlight and watch that other boy asleep in the gusts of the night. Sometimes the waves would cover the flat beach almost to the bounds of the garden; and then in the early morning Launce would go and clear the little faun of dried weed and sand, and the bitter salt crusting of the sea. He begged a hardy rose of the gardener, and planted it at the faun’s head, but the wind uprooted it.

Lucia found him as he was taking it from the sand. “What are you doing, little boy?” She nearly always called him “little boy” with a smile that was a caress.

Launce found it hard to explain, and turned very red in the effort. “I thought he would like a flower.”

“But there are little flowers here.”

“Yes, I know. They are very sweet, but the lavender looks grey, and the wallflowers are like rust. I—I thought he would like something—different. These—these are not his flowers.”

She was dressed for riding, and stood looking at the child gravely, tapping the stone with her whip. “What then?”

“A red rose, Madonna.”

“Hush,” said Lucia quickly, “hush. You must not call me that.” She laid her fingers an instant on his lips.

Launce turned redder than ever. “I’m sorry, Aunt Lucy. I heard godfather call you that, and Uncle Will laughed. I thought it was polite.” He hoped she would laugh too, and kiss him in a pleased way, as she did when he remembered to give her her English name of Lucy.

But she still looked at him strangely. “These little flowers are just as sweet,” she said with earnestness: “they are brave and poor, but they content the heart. Oh, yes they content the heart.”

“Not his,” persisted Launce; “he wants roses, Aunt Lucy, red roses with the sun on ’em.” He looked up at her shamefacedly, and saw to his relief that she was smiling at last, though her eyes were shadowed.

“How do you know?”

Launce shuffled in the sand. There was nothing she might not have of him when she used that voice. He would have told her of his fight with the red-haired boy, of the cave behind the summer-house, even of the humiliating fact that he still kept, secretly, at the bottom of his play-box, a shapeless wooden doll called Ephraim. Now she lightly asked of him a harder thing—his dreams. Well, she should have them.

“I think he is not really asleep, the little faun. Aunt Lucy, I think in the night, the quiet dark night, he wakes up.”

“He wakes up—?”

“Yes. He’s not very clever. He does not know where he is. But he can do things.”

“What things, little boy?”

“I don’t quite know. But he knows something, and they know too. I think I’ve seen, Aunt Lucy—I’m almost sure I’ve seen. I think he calls things. He wakes and calls. It is like music, but there is no sound. It is like dancing, but he does not move. Only he is awake, somehow, inside the stone. And last night, when the moon came out between the clouds, I saw the rabbits dance on the path, and other things, too—”

“What things?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Launce desperately. “I fell asleep on the window-sill. Little queer things out of the larch-plantation, but all alive and dancing.”

“Dancing—?”

“Yes,” said Launce, fired by his own fancies—“like this.” He flung two handfuls of sand in the air, and began to dance on the starved grass. He was small and slight, and he moved, in his wild fit, like an elf of the woods, a leaf in the wind. All the steps he ever knew he wove into a medley, beautiful because of the speed and grace of his little flinging body. Then, dancing fast and faster, he lost them, and there was nothing but young life leaping in the air, as the blood in the heart, the wave on the sea. “This is how the little faun dances,” he cried, shrilly. And in a moment Lucia had swept up her trailing skirts, and was dancing too.

If the child danced like a leaf in the wind, she danced like a flame in the bracken, a swallow in the air. Launce dropped on his hands and knees to watch her, breathless, and she wove a chain of lovely movements around him as he knelt. Her feet moved like music, her green habit seemed to bear her up like a bubble with fire in the heart of it. Her wild face was flushed, exquisite under her shaken hair. But when Geoffrey Launcelot came down the path she stopped in a flash, and was once more the great lady of Great House.

“Will can’t come,” said Geoffrey, pulling on his gloves; he had apparently seen nothing of the dancing. “He bade me offer my escort, Signora.”

“Shall we ride, sir?” said Lucia gravely.

Mr. Launcelot bowed. “If you will so far honour me, Signora?”

Then, catching the subdued wonder of his eyes, Lucia laughed, and Geoffrey began to laugh, and Launce echoed them for very pleasure in the sound. “But do not call me that, Cousin Geoffrey,” said Lucia. “Do not say ‘Signora.’”

“What must I say?”

“Say ‘Cousin Lucy.’ That is English, and of the English custom. I wish to forget—the other—”

“Thank you, Cousin Lucy.” Geoffrey did not lift his eyes from his gloves. “I told Simmons to bring the horses round to the foot of the steps. Shall we mount there?”

A flight of broad, shallow stone stairs led from the lower terrace to the beach. They were always scoured and swept by wind and wave, half buried in sand, with shells and bent-grass in the cracks. Simmons was holding the two horses on the beach-road beneath. Launce joined him, and was warned from Monseigneur’s heels. The others followed. Geoffrey handed Lucia down the old steps as though all London town were watching, and had for his reward the touch of her foot in his hand as she sprang to the saddle.

“Shall we take the boy?” he asked, with a look at Launce, hopping hopefully in the sand.

Lucia glanced with a little shrug at Monseigneur. “If you think it is safe.”

“I guarantee that, of the two, my neck is the only one like to be broken. And that, Cousin Lucy, is of consequence to nobody.”

Lucia was bubbling over with mischief. “I do think you take very good care of your neck, Cousin Geoffrey,” she said kindly. “I hear of you as a very reckless young man, but I see nothing of it. You do no very hard things, and you always change your boots when they are wet. And I have left my whip near the little faun—Dio mio!—”

The others echoed her startled cry. For Geoffrey, with a sudden little laugh, faced the bay horse at the broad steps and began forcing him up them, with hand and knee and spur—up, up, snorting and straining, to the terrace. He swung him round the little faun, caught up Lucia’s whip, and came down the steps again in one leaping, clattering rush that seemed as if it must end in red ruin.

“My God, sir!” cried old Simmons shrilly, snatching at Launce.

The bay came down on his knees in a shower of sand and shingle, staggered up and on, and was carried clear across the beach-road into the surf. Here the rider had the mastery in an instant. And before they could catch breath he was at Lucia’s side, splashed to the hair, on the wet and trembling horse.

“Here is your whip, Cousin Lucy,” he said, gently.

“My God, sir!” quavered old Simmons again, running to the horse’s knees.

Lucia did not take the whip. She sat looking at Geoffrey, trembling exceedingly. “How dare you!” she said at last, under her breath, “how dare you!”—and then, bending forward, she broke into wild tears.

The colour went from Geoffrey’s face as if he had been struck, and Launce, with a swift sense that the world had begun to go astray, saw that he too was shaking. “Here’s your whip, Cousin Lucy,” he said again, and even his voice shook.

But she struck it from his hand, struck it down in the sand, spurred the mare, and went off full speed down the beach. Geoffrey followed her in an instant. They saw her motion him away fiercely, saw him rein Monseigneur back two lengths in his thunderous canter. Then the silver shimmer of sun on leagues of grey beach and sea took them, and old Simmons turned with a sigh. “Lord be gentle wi’ ’em,” he said, aloud. “Come you wi’ me, Master Launce.”

The bleak gardens lay grey and quiet in the pale light. Only the crushed and trampled wallflowers and the old steps scarred with hooves served to show that a storm had passed. Launce, touching the little faun as he lay in his stone sleep, started back to find the leaf-covered breast warm, as if a heart beat there. But it was only the warmth of the sun.

That night Lucia did not go early to the drawing-room, but sat with Launce in the little room over the gardens till he fell asleep. The moon seemed to be reeling down the skies under a great press of steam-white cloud, and now the room was dark, now silver-bright. Sometimes Launce had no more of Lucia than her firm, small hand in his; sometimes he saw her face, pale and clear as the face of the little faun in the garden below. He was very sleepy, and there seemed to be music in the air; drowsing, he wondered if the little faun were calling them so, out to some unknown magic of the night. Presently there was more music in the room beneath—the gayest, brightest little laughing tunes imaginable, and a cheerful thumping noise. Uncle Will was apparently sitting on the window-sill and applauding with his feet; and the tunes went flying out of the window like little blue and golden birds.

“Sing, Geoff, sing,” cried Uncle Will in delight.

There was a silence, a changed chord on the instrument, and the high, wild voice rang out:—

Again the child was pierced with that wordless sense of the world astray, of loneliness, of loss. “Godfather Geoff is going away,” he said drowsily, “he told me so,” and felt for Lucia’s hand. The room seemed to open in the darkness, fronting a flood of silver. And he saw her face, shining with silent tears.

III

Great House by day was a mere pile of bleak grey stone, set in a wind-bitten garden. Selfish lovers, the sun and the wind took, but gave little. But at night the place seemed to come into its own. The straggling larch plantations took on mystery from the dark, the shivering birches took on grace, the sandy paths shone silver as if for the tread of unseen feet. By day everyone stayed away from the house as much as possible; only by night was it a home, with laughter and song and the light of welcoming windows. All that the day denied the night bestowed. And it was at night that Launce made his plans and discoveries.

It was one of these plans that led him, after being safely bestowed in bed by Mrs. Annerley, to rise and wrap himself in a coat and seek the garden by devious ways, with a small bottle in his pocket and the two white mice for company. The bottle contained the dregs of wine glasses, secured and preserved with some difficulty. He was going to try the effect of a ceremonial libation on the little faun.

His step from the door-sill to the gravel had the nature of a plunge from land to water, so different was the hush outside, to the ordered, companionable stillness of the house. His heart beat high. The night was one of heavy calm, the sea beneath the sandy terraces was almost silent. A few stars showed, and the hollow sky was full of the wandering cries of peewits wheeling inland above the salt marshes and the crumbling dunes. The little faun was very cold and very still in the dark. He laid the little silken, throbbing bodies of the mice in the curved stone fingers, and they cowered there without a movement.

“There’s no dancing to-night,” said Launce to himself, leaning his little dark face above the drowsing face of stone. Nothing moved in the plantations; nothing flickered on the lawn. Faunus was no more than a cunning stone carved long ago by men forgotten. “He’s not here to-night,” said Launce gravely to the mice, “he’s gone away. I must make haste.”

The mice cuddled closer. All sense of imminent life was gone from the faun. Launce glanced into the darkness. Was he free of the stone at last, let loose, a little flitting shape, stone-white yet shadowy—a swift beast-shape half-fashioned into man—snuffing at Lucia’s bed of daffodils, cutting down the irises with heedless hooves, peering into the windows with wrinkled eyelids, calling wordlessly in the night—a happy thing of darkness, knowing neither hope nor regret? Launce took out some rose-leaves from the pot-pourri jar, and the bottle of wine; he drew the cork with his teeth, and it squeaked and made him jump. He held it in readiness.

“O Faun,” whispered Launce, shakily, in a desperate hurry, “I salute you. Hail, O Faun. Drink, and remember. Vale.” And he poured out the wine.

He stood staring, waiting for the miracle, and the wine ran in a dark stain on the little faun’s breast, as if he were hurt to death. There came no wonder but the wonder of the wind.

The hush seemed to thrill, and the herald of the great gust ran rustling through the garden, stirring the leaves to the sound of innumerable little hurrying hooves. Launce felt that he was ringed round by hundreds of capering creatures suddenly imprisoned. But the force let loose was only the wind.

The great gust seemed to leap from the heart of the sky. The stars reeled and went out. Sand and surf the wind caught up as with hands and flung across the wall. For a moment all the powers of the night seemed to be let loose in storm and ruin. Then with a great voice they passed out to sea, and there was stillness again, save for the noise as of numberless little pattering feet among the restless leaves. Launce snatched the mice and ran up the larch plantation like a rabbit, toward the lighted windows of the house. The whole night and all it held seemed to be sweeping after him on threatening wings.

There were voices and footsteps on the gravel, and a beam of light from the gun-room window. His godfather and uncle Will were walking there and talking together. Launce, a mouse in each hand, was just going to fling himself upon them regardless of the result, when something in his uncle’s voice, something in the younger man’s attitude as he listened, held him back. Just what was passing he neither saw nor heard. But he saw Geoffrey swing round as quick as thought and strike the other heavily.

Launce fell on his knees in the shadow of the trees. He was too frightened to move. He longed to hide his eyes or his ears, but he had to hold the restless little mice. His world was breaking and falling.

His uncle caught the raised hand, and his own was swung back for the answering blow. Launee could see Geoffrey’s face, steady and white as he waited for it, his uncle’s flushed and dark. “Are you mad, Geoffrey?” he asked, breathlessly.

There was no answer. To the frightened boy, unwillingly listening, it seemed a silence so dead that the thudding of his own heart must be heard. The night was calm again, yet the whole of life as he knew it was in disorder.

“Are you mad, Geoffrey?” asked William again, but in a different voice.

Geoffrey’s face seemed to be a little raised, a little paler, but again there was no answer.

William’s fist dropped; he stepped back, and passed his hand over his forehead in a bewildered way. “It’s a queer thing,” he said, rather unsteadily, “but I can’t hit you back. You’re like a younger brother, you know, Geoff. I can’t hit you.”

And at that a sort of fury seemed to flash into the younger man’s face. “You must,” he cried, hoarsely.

“Gad, but I can’t, my good fellow,” said William, with a twisted sort of smile, putting his hands in his pockets. “After all, ’tis not the first time we’ve hit each other.”

“This is different, and you know it.”

“Yes. But I daresay it was my fault. I had no right to question you.”

“You have no right to shame me so.”

“Hey?”

“I say,” cried Geoffrey, passionately, “you have no right to shame me so. I was in the wrong, and you know it. You’ve no right to keep me in the wrong forever.”

“D’you want me to call you out? Geoff, Geoff, what the devil’s the matter with you to-night?”

“The devil, perhaps, as you say. I’m not drunk. And strike you must, or that blow of mine will stand between us forever. If you of your generosity forget it, shall I—? Strike me, Will, strike me—hard.”

William raised his hand slowly, and slowly lowered it. “If you’re not drunk with wine, you are with something else, I think,” he said, roughly. “I cannot hit you when I’m not in a rage, and that’s the end of it. Go and get Simmons to pump on your head.”

“It’s not the end of it. Here, then, strike with this.” He caught up a heavy hunting-crop from the window-sill of the gun-room, and thrust it into William’s hand. “Strike with this.”

“I will not—”

“It would not be the first time you had thrashed me.”

“This is different, and you know it—”

“I know it.” He slipped off his coat, and stood. “Hit with that,” he said, between his teeth.

Fired by the fierier soul, William raised the whip and struck, hastily and heedlessly, all bewildered. It was a whip used for Monseigneur in his vicious moods, and a little flick of rending linen and a thread of scarlet followed across Geoffrey’s shoulders. William flung down the whip with an oath. “There, you madman,” he cried, “I’ll do no more,” and for an instant it seemed to the trembling boy that he had Geoffrey in his arms.

They stood silent, with only the dim stars and the cries of the peewits above the garden. The wind had died down again and all the leaves were still.

“Geoff,” said William at last, almost in a whisper, “is it Lucia?”

Geoffrey raised his eyes slowly. “You shall have the truth to-night, if you never have it again. To-night, there’s no honour in a lie. Yes.”

“I should have guessed. Since—Italy?”

“I do not know. Since we came here, something that slept seemed to wake. As the tide covers that beach there—I could not help it. I fought it. If she knows, it is not from any word of mine, Will.”

“You need not tell me that, thank God.”

Geoffrey groaned. “But it was no use, so I was going. I must go to-morrow.”

“Yes, you must go at once. I’m all at sea. Don’t think I’m not sorry. I’m so damnably sorry I don’t know what to say. This marrying and giving in marriage always costs something; I’d rather it had cost my right hand than you. Gad, this is a queer way of talk. I suppose I ought to want to murder you. But I love you and trust you, Geoff, to the hilt. And you’ll go to-morrow—?”

“Yes. I shall never come back.”

“So it is as bad as that? I hope Lucia guesses nothing. She is a tender-hearted child, and it would distress her terribly. This is a queer life, Geoff, and it will be a queer house without you somewhere about half the time. There’s always a price to pay.”

“Yes, there is always a price to pay. This time I pay it,” said Geoffrey, turning away. But he came back. “Give me one thing out of all you have,” he said steadily, “I was to ride with her to-morrow morning. May I have that—still?”

For a moment William was silent. Then his face cleared. “After all, she might suspect and be distressed if you did not. Yes, yes, go, Geoff. I told you I trusted you. God help you.”

“God help us all,” said Geoffrey, looking at him strangely, and caught up his coat, and went. As he passed, the sky seemed to thrill once more, and the heralding air breathed through the garden, waking the leaves to a sound of innumerable soft voices and following feet.

IV

Launce dreamed in the early dawn that he was on board ship, and that the little faun of the garden had the wheel, and was steering the ship through a sea of dried rose-leaves. When Mrs. Annerley came in to wake him, he realized that Great House was creaking and straining like a ship in the battle of heavy seas. But the battle was of the winds.

“Is it a storm, Mrs. Annerley?” Launce sat up in bed awestruck. He could see the leaded panes of the window all blurred with driven sand, but he could not hear it. There was no lull in the wind.

“Come up this last hour, it has, my lamb.” The old lady looked very pale and troubled. “Such a tempest I never did see in so short a while. ’Twas gusty, so to say, all night, and this gale came up with the sun.”

“Which way is it blowing?”

“Straight in from the sea, oh dear, and driving the waves before it like the roaring lions seeking what they may devour in the Scriptures.”

“But there’s nothing to devour here, Mrs. Annerley.”

“There’s Great House and the lives of it, my lamb. You pick up white shells in the onion-beds, don’t you, dearie? Where the sea has been once, the sea will be again. And they two—my lovely ladyship and him I used to give jam to for love of his fair face when he shouldn’t have had it, and he two feet high—oh dear, oh dear. I hope I know my place, but tides may deal the judgments of the Almighty no less than thunderbolts.”

Launce dressed quickly and ran downstairs, wild with excitement. At the door of the breakfast-room he stopped. It was empty save for his uncle, who sat at the head of the table, staring out of the window into the grey fury of the day. He moved no more than a man of stone, and his face had the bleak colour of stone.

Launce slipped silently into his place. A pale servant attended to him, but the man’s eyes were all the time covertly on his master.

Presently Uncle Will spoke, without turning his head. “Send for Simmons again,” he said, in a dead voice.

Old Simmons was there so quickly he must have been waiting outside. He was very wet. His eyes also were on his master with that look Launce could not read, nor see without fear.

“What time did you say they started?” Was that indeed Uncle Will’s voice?

“Soon after daylight, sir, quite early. Mr. Geoffrey, he had the horses ready, and her ladyship came down the side stairs.”

“And you heard them say nothing—as to where they were going?”

“Nothing at all, sir. Mr. Geoffrey said nothing. They turned down the beach road—”

A sound of despair was in the room, yet the master had not spoken.

“—down the beach road. The weather was not near so bad then, but, such as it was, they gave no heed to it.”

“I see. They gave no heed to it. Could they shelter in the dunes?”

“Hardly, sir. Mr. Geoffrey would not risk her ladyship near the quicksands, and the dunes will be moving.”

“Could they shelter anywhere?”

“No, sir. Old Bassey, the shepherd, is downstairs, and he says the North road and the Marshcotes road are not to be passed. The walls and the dyke at Cotes will be gone by this, and the roads swept away.” He and the waiting servant exchanged a look so swift it was almost imperceptible.

“Well?” Uncle Will did not move nor turn his head. A carving-fork lay on the table, and he picked it up idly, snapping the spring-guard with the click of a trigger.

“The best thing to do will be to run back for it, sir.”

“Run back?”

“Yes. Gallop for home before the sea gets over the beach. And that’s what Master Geoff’s doing, I’ll wager.” Simmons’ face was that of the well-trained servant, but his voice betrayed it. It broke at “Master Geoff.” “You can trust Master Geoff, sir,” he went on.

“Trust him?” repeated Uncle Will, snapping the guard. “Thank you, Simmons, that will do. You had better change your wet coat.” He got up and strode out of the room; they heard him open the outer door, heard the wind leap in like a waiting enemy.

“He’s gone to the terraces,” said Simmons quickly to the other man, and followed him.

Launce ran and thrust his hand into the old man’s. “I must go too,” he said piteously.

Simmons wrapped a shawl round him and they went out into the gardens.

The wind and the sand were almost more than sight and breath could bear. Launce felt that the life must be blown out of his body. Another old man, Bassey, the shepherd, staggered up to them, caught his other arm, and the three struggled to the lower terrace where nearly all the household were gathered. Uncle Will was standing at the head of the stone steps; the others stayed apart from him. Only their eyes never left him, except to look along the lost and blinded road for Geoffrey and Lucia.

Sheltered by the other, Launce could catch breath and think. He longed to go to his uncle, but dared not. He was so sorry for Uncle Will, so fond of him. But oh, the others, the others—

“D’ye think he’ll bring her back?” shouted one of the grooms. He shouted, but it came as a whisper.

“There’ll be naught else to do—”

“Nay, I didn’t mean that. Will he get her through?”

“If Master Geoffrey had the mind, Simmons, he’d get her through hell.”

The cook broke in angrily. “Bad luck to you, and Master Launce at your very gaiters, and he but a child.”

“The surf’s at the edge of the road.”

“And the tide far from the full. Never was such a sea, Simmons. The whole garden’ll go, and the terraces. Looky. There’s the drive gone—”

The long drive that wound down by easy levels to the beach road ended now in a crumbling little cliff of gravel. Cries broke out from the group of servants.

“The shake of the waves—”

“’Tis like as if the land were falling of itself.”

“Lord ha’ mercy on them.”

Uncle Will strode over to the group. “Is it any good going out?”

“Not any use, sir. What two can’t do, twenty couldn’t do. And there’s not a horse in the stables that’s devil enough to fight with this except the old blood-mare and Monseigneur, and that’s the truth, sir.”

“Yes, sir, that’s the truth.”

William turned in silence and went back to his post

One of the maids broke into a keening cry, shrill and wild as a gull’s, but the wind whipped it from her lips.

A great wave broke in thunder on the beach. They could scarcely hear it: they felt the shock in the earth they stood on. The wind snatched the foam from the crest, tore the foam into mist, and drove the mist through the garden. When they cleared the salt from their eyes they saw a young fir-seedling, growing just outside the lower terrace, heel over in a slow arc and vanish.

The old shepherd turned a white face to Simmons. “Th’ water’s o’er the beach road.”

“Lord ha’ mercy on ’em.”

Gradually they one and all drew to the head of the stone steps where the master stood, and huddled behind him, silent now. He did not heed them. He was as still as the little faun, who lay smiling and sleeping in the storm; the pale light gleamed on the marble till it had the likeness of a body from which the life had gone like a flown bird.

Launce looked at his uncle fearfully, and his face, colourless and streaming with spray, was like the face of a drowned man. The child looked away trembling, and would not look back. And he it was at last who pointed and screamed: “I see them! They’re there—”

“Where, then?”

“The boy’s dreaming. ’Tis too late—”

“There’s naught but the scud and the driving weed.”

But William stooped his face to the child’s. “Where did you see them, laddie?” His face was torn with pain and dripping with foam, but it was no longer dead. The boy did not fear it.

“There—oh, Uncle Will, quite close—for a minute—when the spindrift cleared—”

They all surged forward. His uncle was down on the lower step with a leap, and as he stood the sea broke to his knee. There was nothing but the flying spray and the sting of the sand.

“He saw naught at all.”

“Back, I tell ye. Keep hold of the child. He’s all crazy-like—”

Launce was sobbing and screaming to follow his uncle. “I saw them, I tell you—quite close—”

The maid who had cried before tossed her arms and shrieked against the wind, her face white and wild. “Master Geoffrey—he’s there—”

“What’s got the silly wench?”

“Maybe she’s right. And her ladyship, you fool?”

“Aye, there’s two—”

And in a moment they saw them, clear and close under the wall of the lower terrace, fighting forward foot by foot. The horses huddled so near together they could not see one from the other, but Geoffrey rode on the outside, sheltering Lucia, and it seemed that his arm was round her, either to hold her in the saddle or to catch her from it if need were. Then the scud hid them.

Another great wave rose, and the wild-eyed maid shrieked terribly. The cook laid a hand over her mouth, but she suddenly slid down in a heap on the gravel and was quiet. But no one heeded her. The younger men were down on the lowest step with their master, their arms interlaced. And the great wave broke and buried them to the waist.

“Where are they to get up?”

“The drive’s gone and the road’s gone, and the surf breaks on the wall. ’Tis all sliding sand—”

“Here, here.” Suddenly as an apparition, the riders showed from the gloom but a few yards from the steps. Geoffrey had the mare by the bridle, and the waves broke on the great bay. Both horses were reeling on their legs, the surf creaming at their withers and the sand sucking under their hooves. Monseigneur’s nostrils were blood-bright, his eyes dreadful. On the steps, the men were holding their master back by main force.

“Wait an instant, sir—”

“Give Mr. Geoffrey a chance, sir. He knows what he’s doing—”

“Ah, look!” Monseigneur’s shoulder, Geoffrey’s strength were thrusting the mare at the steps. Her head was almost within their reach. She saw safety and flung forward, with the last of her strength, up and away from the water. A dozen hands were at her bridle. They had her up four steps before she crumpled forward and fell, and William leaped back with Lucia.

He gave no more than a look at the life in her beautiful dazed face, and let them take her, and turned to his friend. But it was long enough.

Heard even above the storm, there was a great cry.

The men on the steps, waiting with arms locked for Monsiegneur as they had waited for the mare, were up to the waist in surf. But a dozen strong hands were ready for the bridle as the horse rose pawing for an instant at the lowest stair. Someone screamed: “Jump for it, Master Geoff.” But Geoffrey stayed in the saddle, the backwash scoured the sand from beneath Monseigneur’s hooves, and somehow the ready hands fell short. Half the sea seemed to raise itself and hang poised above the beach and the gardens, a grey wall curbed and ramparted with running white. They saw them an instant clear—the dreadful straining head of the great horse; Geoffrey with his hand up and his face raised. It was not pale or lost, but flushed with the very fulness of life, the face of one who looks on a thing that is good. His lips moved. It seemed that something went past them on the wind, a voice and a cry—“Lucia—”

Then the great wave fell.

Launce flung face down on the gravel like the kitchen-maid. The world went out. Voices and wild words passed him.

“He reined him back, I tell you, as I’m a living man!”

“What d’ye mean?”

“There, at the foot of the steps. We’d a’ had Monseigneur as we had the mare. Sim’s hand was on the bridle. But Master Geoff reined him back.”

“For God’s sake, don’t say so to the master, then. He’s like mad down there. We had to hold him, or he’d have killed Sim that caught him out of the rush.”

“He reined Monsiegneur back, or we’d a’ had him up the steps before the wave fell. We’d a’ saved him.” The groom seemed to be sobbing.

“Not against his will, lad. He’s al’ays took his will, has our Master Geoff—”

“And her ladyship—?”

“Hush. None’ll know that—”

Someone picked Launce up, and carried him indoors and put him to bed; but the world did not come back. The house was silently astir. Mrs. Annerley, weeping, sat by the child all day, her prayer-book in her hand. The storm was full of voices—the voice of a man who walked up and down the terrace calling openly for his friend, and the voice that cried for ever in the wind, would cry for evermore—“Lucia, Lucia—”

At night the wind lulled and he could hear Mrs. Annerley reading softly—“Graciously look upon our afflictions. Pitifully behold the sorrows of our hearts. Mercifully forgive the sins of Thy people.” He fell asleep, and awoke to the world again. But it was a changed world.

The wind was still, the sky blown cold and clear. A great swell broke in silver on the beach. All the wall and the lower terrace was gone, the flowers and the young larches were gone, and the sleeping faun was gone also, swept away and buried in the ruin of the sand. All along the line of the breakers, men moved quietly, searching.

Launce took the white mice and ran to the stables. He found old Simmons sitting on a bucket in Monseigneur’s empty stall, his hands over his ears, and Launce knew that both listened to the same thing. He would have no need to explain. He spoke with a sob. “I can’t bear it any more. Take me home, Simmons, take me home.”

So the old man took him home, to the dove-house and the brown rabbit and Pansy and the kind, mild faces he knew best, which should presently heal him and set him at rest.

But he was a child no more.

Luck

I

There were four bunks in the shanty, and three of them were filled.

Ohlsen lay in one, a great bulk under the Hudson Bay Company blankets, breathing like a bull; in the next was Forbes, with eyes as quick as a mink’s, and now red rimmed from snow blindness, twinkling from time to time over his yellowish furs. Nearest the door was Lajeune, singing in his sleep. In one corner an old Indian cowered, as little regarded as the rags and skins in which he was hidden; and Desmond sat by the stove, drinking to his luck, fingering it and folding it.

It was all there in a bag—raw gold, pure gold, the food of joy. At the weight of it in his rough palm, Desmond chattered and chuckled with delight. He had sat there talking and laughing for hours, while the glow of the stove grew darker and the cold crept in. Little blots of snow from the snow-shoes, first melting, had turned again to dark ice on the floor; the red light clung to them until each little circle seemed to be one of blood. Outside the world trembled under the shafts of the bitter stars; but Desmond, with the very fuel of life in his hand, was warm.

Dreams ran in his brain like a tide and dripped off his tongue in words. They were strangely innocent dreams of innocent things; sunlight on an old wall, honey, a girl with sandy eyebrows, and yellow ducklings.

“And maybe there’ll be a garden, with fruit you can pick off the bushes. ’Twas under a thorn-bush she used to stand, with the wind snapping her print gown. Or maybe I’ll see more of the world first in an easy fashion, never a drink scarce, and no man my better at it. I know how a gentleman should behave. Are you hearing me, boys?”

Ohlsen breathed as slowly and deeply as a bull. Forbes blinked a moment over the greasy furs and said, “I’m hearing you.” Lajeune gave a sudden little call in his sleep, like a bird.

“They’re all asleep, like so many hogs,” said Desmond, with a maudlin wonder; “they don’t care. Two years we’ve struggled and starved together in this here freezing hell, and now my luck’s come, and they don’t care. Well, well.”

He stared resentfully at the bunks. He could see nothing of Ohlsen but blanket, yet Ohlsen helped him to a new outfit when he lost everything in a snow-slide. Forbes was only an unheeding head of grimy fur, yet once he had pulled Desmond out of a log-jam. And Lejeune had nursed him laughingly when he hurt his foot with a pick. Yet now Lejeune cared nothing; he was asleep, his head flung back, showing his smooth, lean throat and a scar that ran across it, white on brown. Desmond felt hurt. He took another drink, strode over to the bunk, and shook him petulantly.

“Don’t ye hear when a friend talks t’ ye?”

Lajeune did not move, yet he was instantly awake. His eyes, so black that they showed no pupil, stared suddenly into Desmond’s muddled blue ones. His right hand gripped and grew rigid.

Desmond, leaning over him, was sobered by something in the breathless strain of that stare. He laughed uneasily.

“It’s only me, Jooney. Was you asleep? I’m sorry.”

He backed off bewildered, but young Lajeune smiled and yawned, showing his red tongue curled like a wolf’s.

“Still the gold, my friend?” he asked, drowsily.

“I—I can’t seem to get used to it, like,” explained Desmond; “I have to talk of it. I know I’m a fool, but a man’s luck takes him all ways. You go to sleep, young Jooney. I won’t talk to you no more.”

“Nor before your old savage in the corner, _hein_?”

Desmond glanced at the heap of rags in the corner.

“Hom? What’s the matter? Think he’ll steal it? Why, there’s four of us, and even an Injun can have a corner of my shack for an hour or two to-night. I reckon,” finished Desmond, with a kind of gravity, “as my luck is making me soft. It takes a man all ways.”

Lajeune yawned, grinned, flung up his left arm, and was instantly asleep again. He looked so young in his sleep, that Desmond was suddenly moved to draw the blanket over him. In the dim light he saw Forbes worn and grizzled, the wariness gone out of him, a defeated old man with horrible eyes. Ohlsen’s hand lay over the edge of the bunk, his huge fingers curved helplessly, like a child’s. Desmond felt inarticulately tender to the three who had toiled by his side and missed their luck. He piled wood on the stove, saying, “I must do something for the boys. They’re good boys.”

At the freshened roar of the stove the old Indian in the corner stirred and lifted his head, groping like an old turtle in the sunlight. He had a curious effect of meaningless blurs and shadows. Eye and memory could hold nothing of his insignificance. Only under smoked and puckered lids the flickering glitter of his eyes pricked in a meaning unreadable. Desmond looked at him with the wide good nature born of his luck.

“I ain’t going to turn ye out, Old Bones,” he said.

The eyes steadied on him an instant, and the old shadow spoke fair English in the ghost of a voice.

“Thanks. You give grub. I eat, I warm, I rest. Now I go.”

“Jest as ye like. But have a drink first.” He pushed over the dregs of the whiskey bottle.

The old man seized it; seemed to hold it to his heart. While he could get whiskey he might drink and forget; when he could get it no more, he must remember and die. He drank, Lethe and Paradise in one, and handed back the bottle.

“How,” he said. “You good man. Once I had things to give, now nothing. Nothing but dreams.”

“Dreams, is it, Old Bones?”

The eyes were like cunning sparks.

“Dreams, yes,” he said with a stealthy indrawing of breath. “You good man. I give you three dreams. See.”

With a movement so swift the eye could hardly follow it, he caught three hot wood-coals from the ash under the stove and flung them on the floor at Desmond’s feet. He bent forward, and under his breath they woke to a moment’s flame. The strangeness of his movements held Desmond, and he also bent forward, watching. He had an instant’s impression that the coals were burning him fiercely somewhere between the eyes, that the bars of personality were breaking, that he was falling into some darkness that was the darkness of death. Before his ignorance could find words for his fear, the old Indian leaned back, the fire fled, and the spent coals were no more than rounds of empty ash, which the old man took in his hands.

“Dreams,” he said, with something that might have been a laugh. He blew the ash like little grey feathers toward the sleeping men in the bunks. His eyes were alive, fixed on Desmond with a meaning unreadable. He thrust his face close. “You good man. You give me whiskey. I give you three dreams, little dreams—for luck.”

Desmond was staring at the little floating feathers of wood ash. As they slowly sank and settled, he heard the door close and felt a sharp stab of cold. The old Indian had gone; Desmond could hear his footsteps dragging over the frozen crust of the snow for a little while. He got up and shook himself. The drink had died out of him; he felt himself suddenly and greatly weary of body and mind. The fire would last till morning. “Dreams—dreams, for luck!” he muttered, as he rolled into the fourth bunk. He was ready for sleep. And as he lay down and yielded to the oncoming of sleep, as a weed yields to the tide, he knew of a swift, clear, certainty that he would dream.

II

He opened his eyes to the pale flood of day; Lajeune was cooking pork and making coffee; Ohlsen was mending snow shoes; Forbes bent over his bunk, black against the blind square of the frozen window, feeling blindly with his hands, and snuffling a little as he spoke:

“We’d ha’ let you sleep on, but we wanted to know what you’d be doing. Will ye stay here with me and rest—I’m all but blind the day—or will ye go into Fort Recompense with Jooney here and the dogs, and put the dust in safety? Or will ye try the short cut across the pass with Ohlsen?”

Desmond stretched, grunted, and hesitated. He felt curiously unwilling to decide. But Forbes was waiting, his yellow fingers twitching on the end of the bunk.

“Oh, I dunno,” he said. “What’s the hurry? Well—I guess I’ll try the pass with Ohlsen.”

“Right.” Ohlsen nodded his heavy head, for he seldom spoke. He had the physique men always associate with a kind and stupid fidelity. Desmond said of him, “Them that talks most ain’t the best at heart.” Desmond said it to himself as he rolled out of the bunk for breakfast.

Forbes stayed in his bunk, and made little moaning animal noises while he fed. Lajeune bubbled over with quick laughter. Desmond beamed on everyone and talked of his luck. Ohlsen sat immovable, working his jaws like an ox, watching Desmond with his small, pale eyes.

He did not speak as they drew on their furs and packed the gold; nor as they turned out of the shack, shutting the door swiftly behind them, and faced the stinging splendour of the windy winter day. The cold had lessened with the sunrise, but what cold there was the wind took and drove to the bone. The air was filled with a glittering mist of blown snow, and all the lower slopes of the hills and the climbing spruce forests were hidden. Above the _poudre_ the mountains lifted like iron in the unpitying day, and every snowfield and glacier was crowned with a streaming feather of white against a hard turquoise sky.

“You think we’ll get through?” asked Desmond, doubtfully.

“Ay t’ank so.” Ohlsen was striding heavily, tirelessly, just behind his shoulder. His grey eyes, still fixed on Desmond, were like little bits of glacier ice inset above his high cheek bones.

“We may.”

“We may. It ain’t far.” Desmond was talkative. “This gold weighs heavy. I like the colour o’gold. Ohlsen, you got any children?”

“Ay, got two kids.”

“Wisht I had. Maybe I will, though—little boy ’n’ gal, with kind o’ gold hair. See here, you ever had a garden?”

“No.”

“I’ve me garden on me back here, hey? With them blue things that smell, and hens. You come and see me, Ohlsen, and you’ll have the best there is.”

“T’anks. Ay like fresh eggs.”

“So do I. And apples. Say, Ohlsen, I’m sorry this luck ain’t for you.”

Ohlsen did not answer or slacken his heavy, stooping stride against the wind. The curved hills opened slowly, swung aside. The spruce stood up, came nearer, and closed in around them like the outposts of a waiting army. The wind roared through the trees like a flood of which the surf was snow.

“Do you think we’ll do it?” shouted Desmond again and Ohlsen answered:

“Ay t’ank so.”

In a little while the trees were a dark mass beneath them, and they were out on the bare heights, fighting with the wind for every foothold. Desmond staggered under it, but Ohlsen seemed untiring, climbing very close at his shoulder. The glare of the sun seared their eyes, but they had no heat of it. In all the vast upheaval of the hills, in all the stark space of the sky, there was no warmth, no life.

Something took Desmond by the throat.

“We’ll not do it,” he cried, to Ohlsen. “Let’s turn back.”

For answer Ohlsen unstrapped the heavy pack of gold, fastened it on his shoulders, and went on. This time he was ahead, and his huge body sheltered Desmond from the wind.

“I been drinking too much,” thought Desmond; “and here’s Ohlsen having to do my work for me. It ain’t right.”

They were on a high ridge, and the wind was at its worst. On the left lay a precipice, and the dark masses of the spruce. On the right the depths were veiled with glittering silver, now and then shot through with the blue-green gleam of a glacier. It was fair going for a steady head, but the wind was dangerous. It took Desmond, as with hands, and thrust him to his knees at the narrowing of the ledge. He slipped a little. The dark-grey ice, white veined, gave him no hold. He lost his head, slipped a little farther, and the white driven foam of snow and cloud above the glacier was suddenly visible. He called to Ohlsen.

Ohlsen could not have heard, yet he turned and came slowly back. Desmond could have raged at him for his slowness if his lips had not been so stiff and dry. Inside his fur mitts his hands were suddenly wet. Gently he slid a little farther, and the wind-driven white below was plainer, cut through with turquoise as with a sword. He shut his eyes. And when he opened them Ohlsen had stopped and was standing quietly watching him.

Desmond shrieked hoarsely, for he understood. Between the two drove the torrent of the wind, shutting slayer and all but slain into a separate prison of silence. But even the wind did not stir Ohlsen; he stood like a gray rock, watching Desmond. Presently he leaned forward, hands on knees, his back humped grotesquely under the pack, as the cruel or the curious might watch the struggles of a drowning kitten. Desmond was shaken to his fingers by the terrible thudding of his heart. He could not make a sound. Earth and sky flashed away. There remained only the gray inhuman shape beyond the barrier of the wind.

Presently that also flashed away. Yet, as Desmond fell, he was aware of light, a great swift relief, for he knew that he dreamed.

Then came darkness.

III

It was a darkness glittering with stars. Such stars as the men of the South, the men of the cities, never see. Each was a blazing world hung in nothingness, rayed with sapphire and rose. Now and then the white ice-blink ran over and died beyond them in the spaces where even stars were not. Desmond was lying on his back, staring at them through a cranny in his sleeping-bag. He knew where he was, yet in his brain was a sort of cold confusion. He seemed to hear Forbes speaking.

“Will ye stay here with me and rest—I’m all but blind the day—or will ye go into Fort Recompense with Jooney here and the dogs, and put the dust in safety? Or will ye try the short cut across the pass with Ohlsen?”

“And here I am, half-way to the fort, and sleeping out with Jooney and the dogs,” Desmond muttered; “but I can’t remember coming.”

Yet, as he turned in his sleeping-bag, his knowledge of his whereabouts was exact. He was in a stony little gully beyond Fachette, where high banks cut off the wind and ground willows gave firing. The huskies were asleep and warm in deep drift under the bank, after a full meal of dried salmon.

“I’ll say this for young Jooney,” said Desmond, drowsily, “he’s got some sense with dogs.”

Lajeune was beside him, asleep in another bag. Between them was the pack of gold and the sledge harness. And the great plain, he knew, ran north and south of the very lip of the gully, silver under the stars, ridged and rippled by the wind, like white sand of the sea. The wind was now still. The earth was again a star, bright, silent, and alone, akin to her sisters of the infinite heavens.

“There ain’t so much gold in a place like this here,” Desmond whispered, resentfully, to the night, “but jest you wait till I get south-east again.” He was filled with blind longing for red brick, asphalt, and crowded streets; even the hens and ducklings were not enough. He hungered in this splendour of desolation for the little tumults of mankind. It seemed as if the stars laughed.

“There ain’t nothing my gold won’t get me,” said Desmond more loudly. His breath hung in little icicles on the edges of his spy-hole. It was cruelly cold. He drew his hood closer round his head, and thrust it out of the bag.

Lajeune was gone.

He did not feel afraid; only deadly cold and sick as he struggled to his feet. Under their shelter of canvas and snow he was alone; everything else was gone. He fell on his hands and knees, digging furiously in the trodden snow, like a dog.

The gold was gone also.

“My luck,” whispered Desmond, stupidly, “My luck.”

He was still on his knees, shaping a little rounded column of snow; suppose it might be Lajeune’s throat, and he with his hands on each side of it—so. Lajeune’s dark face seemed to lie beneath him, but it was not touched with fear, but with laughter. He was laughing, as the stars had laughed, at Desmond and his luck. Desmond dashed the snow away with a cry.

He scrambled out of the gully. The dog-trail was easy to read, running straight across the silvery plain. He began to run along it.

As he ran he admired Lajeune very much. With what deadly quietness and precision he must have worked! The gully and the deserted camp were a gray streak behind him, were gone. He was running in Lajeune’s very footprints, and he was sure he ran at an immense speed. The glittering levels reeled away behind him. A star flared and fell, staining the world with gold. Desmond had forgotten his gold. He had forgotten food and shelter, life and death. He could think of nothing but Lajeune’s brown throat with the scar across it. That throat, his own hands on each side of it, and an end for ever to the singing and the laughter.

He thought Lajeune was near at hand, laughing at him. He felt the trail, and searched. The dark face was everywhere, and the quick laughter; but silence was waiting.

Again he knelt and groped in the snow; but he could feel nothing firm and living. He tore off his mitts, and groped again, but there was only the snow, drifting in his fingers like dust. Lajeune was near at hand, yet he could not find him. He got up and began to run in circles. His feet and hands were heavy and as cold as ice, and his breath hurt; but Lajeune was alive and warm and lucky and laughing.

He fell, got up, and fell again. The third time he did not get up, for he had caught young Lajeune at last. The brown throat was under his hands, and the stricken face. He, Desmond, was doing all the laughing, for Lajeune was dead.

“My luck, Jooney, my luck,” chuckled Desmond.

His head fell forward, and the dry snow was like dust in his mouth. Darkness covered the stars.

IV

In the darkness and the shadow something moved. Desmond was in his own bunk at the shack. There seemed to be an echo of words in the air, yet he knew that he had slept for some time. He was not asleep now, yet sleep lay on him like a weight, and he could not move.

Forbes was silent, too. He was quite clear that he was alone with Forbes, and that the other two had gone prospecting beyond Fachette. Forbes had asked him, “Will ye stay here with me and rest,—I’m all but blind the day,—or will ye go in to Fort Recompense with Jooney here and the dogs, and put the dust in safety? Or will ye try the short cut across the pass with Ohlsen?” And he knew he had chosen to stay in the shack with Forbes.

It was night. The shack was dark, save for the red glow of the stove, and something moved very softly in the dusk and the shadow.

Desmond, weighted with sleep, could not move; but he listened. Someone was shuffling very softly and slowly round the wall of the shack, pausing at the bunks. It was Forbes. He was snuffling to himself, as some little soft-nosed animal might snuffle, and feeling in his blind way with one yellowed hand.

Desmond was amused. “If I was to yell out, old Scotty’d have a fit,” he thought. He decided to wait until Forbes was quite near, and then yell, and hear the old man curse. Old Forbes’ cursing was the admiration of the camps. Desmond lay very still and listened.

Forbes was coming nearer, feeling his way as if over unseen ground, and whimpering to himself very softly. Desmond could hear the scratch, scratch of his long-clawed fingers as he slipped his hand over the empty bunk near the door. He was silent and still for a minute, then the shuffling came again.

“I’ll wait till he’s at the foot o’ my bunk,” thought Desmond, grinning foolishly, “and then I’ll bark like a dog. Used to do it in school when I was a kid and scare the teacher. Lord! how a bit of luck does raise a man’s spirits!” He lay very quiet, grinning to himself in the dark.

Forbes’ blind, bent head showed, swaying slightly, against the dull, red glow of the farther wall. A tremulous touch, as light as a falling leaf, fell on Desmond’s foot, and suddenly he was stricken with the black, dumb terror of dreams; for he knew there was death in the touch of that hand.

The walls reeled about him, shot with streaks of red. He could feel the hand hovering lightly at his knee. The blind man’s soft, whimpering breathing sounded close above him. But he could not move. His whole life was centred in the quivering nerves which recorded the touch of the blind man’s hand.

It travelled very slowly and lightly up his body, and lingered above his heart. His life gathered there also like a cold flame. And he could not move.

Visions rose before him. The gold was under his head; and he heard again the sound of wind in a garden among tall flowers, and thud of ripe apples falling, soft croons, and cluckings of hens, a whirring of the wings of doves. He saw a straight girl in a stiff print dress, with very blue eyes under brows and lashes the colour of sea-sand. He saw two children with hair the colour of gold.

The blind man moaned and bent waveringly near, his right hand gathered to his breast.

The flowers of the hollyhocks were gold, and the little ducks were gold, and gold sunlight lay on the gold hair of the children. “Gold,” said Desmond, faintly—“gold; my luck.” The blind hand crept upward. Like a blown flame, the golden visions flickered and went out.

Desmond awoke, fighting upward out of darkness and the dreams of the night. He felt reality coming back to him as a tide comes back to a beach, and opened his eyes on a glad world. His terrors fell away from him. He came near to thanking God. Dark words he had dreamed, dark deeds, but they were not true. Thank God! they were only dreams. He stirred in the bunk, sat up, and brushed a white feather of wood-ash from his sleeve. Only dreams!

Lajeune was cooking pork and making coffee; Ohlsen was mending snow shoes; Forbes bent over his bunk, black against the frozen window, feeling blindly with his hands and snuffling a little as he spoke:

“We’d ha’ let you sleep on, but we wanted to know what you’d be doing. Will ye stay with me and rest—I’m all but blind the day—or will ye go into Fort Recompense with Jooney here and the dogs, and put the dust in safety? Or will ye try the short cut across the pass with Ohlsen?”

He stopped suddenly. Desmond shrank back slowly against the wall of the bunk, his eyes staring on them as a man stares on death, a fleck of froth on his lips. There was no sound in the shack but the quick breathing of four men.

Cheap

Ransome said that you might pick up specimens of all the unprettiest afflictions of body and soul in Herares ten years ago. He also said that when he saw any particularly miserable bit of human wreckage, white or brown, adrift on the languid tides of life about the jetty, he always said without further inquiry, “It’s Henkel’s house you’re looking for. Turn to the left, and keep on turning to the left. And if God knew what went on under these trees, He’d have mercy on you. . . . .”

The house was the last house on the last road of the town. You won’t find it now, for no one would live in it after Henkel, and in a season or two the forest swamped it as the sea swamps a child’s boat on the beach. It was a white house in a garden, and after rain the scent of vanilla and stephanotis rose round it like a fog. The fever rose round it like a fog, too, and that’s why Henkel got it so cheap. No fever touched him. He lived there alone with a lot of servants—Indians. And they were all wrecks, Ransome said, broken down from accident or disease—wrecks that no one else would employ. He got them very cheap. When they died he got more.

Henkel was a large, soft, yellowish man. Ransome said, “I don’t mind a man being large and yellowish, or even soft, in reason, but when he shines too, I draw the line.” Henkel had thick hands with bent fingers, and large brown eyes. He was a Hollander Jew, and in that place he stood apart. For he didn’t drink, or gamble, or fight, or even buy rubber. He was just a large, peaceful person who bought things cheap.

He was very clever. He always knew the precise moment, the outmost low-water mark, of a bargain. His house was full of things he’d bought cheap from wrecked companies or dying men, from the mahogany logs in the patio to the coils of telegraph wire in the loft. His clothes never fitted for they belonged to men whom the fever had met on the way up the Mazzaron, and who had, therefore, no further use for clothes. The only things Henkel ever paid a fair price for were butterflies.

“I went to his house once,” said Ransome. “Had to. A lame Indian in a suit of gaudy red-and-white stripes opened the door. I knew that striped canvas. It was the awnings of the old ‘Lily Grant,’ and I saw along the seams the smokemarks of the fire that had burnt her inwards out . . . . . Then the Indian opened the jalousies with a hand like a bundle of brown twigs, and the light shone through green leaves on the walls of the room. From ceiling to floor they flashed as if they were jewelled, only there are no jewels with just that soft bloom of colour. They were cases full of Henkel’s butterflies.

“The Indian limped out, and Henkel came in. He was limping, too. I looked at his feet, and I saw that they were in a pair of someone else’s tan shoes.

“That, and the whiff of the servants’ quarter, made me feel a bit sick. I wanted to say what I had to say, and get out as quick as I could. But Henkel would show me his butterflies. Most of us in that place were a little mad on some point. I was myself. Henkel, he was mad on his butterflies. He told me the troubles he’d had, getting them from Indians and negroes, and how his men cheated him. He took it very much to heart, and snuffled as he spoke. ‘And there’s one I haven’t got,’ he said, ‘one I’ve heard of, but can’t find, and my lazy hounds of hombres can’t find it either, it seems. It’s one of the clear-wings—transparent. Here’s a transparent silver one. But this new one is gold, transparent gold, and the spots are opaque gold.’ His mouth fairly watered. ‘I tell you, I will spend anything, anything, to get that gold butterfly. And if the natives can’t or won’t find it for me, my friend, I’ll send for someone who can and will.’

“I quite believed him, though I was no friend of his. I didn’t know much about butterflies, but I guessed that in Paris or London his collection would be beyond price. But I wasn’t prepared, two months later, for Scott and his friend. . . . .

“Derek Scott. Ever meet him? A very ordinary kind of young Northerner. He was only remarkable in having everything a little in excess of his type—a little squarer in jaw and shoulder, a little longer in nose and leg, a little keener of eye and slower of tongue. I’d never have looked at him twice as he landed from the dirty steamer with a lot of tin boxes, if it hadn’t been that he was hale and sound, with hope in his eyes. Health and hope, at Herares . . . .

“Then little Daurillac ran up the gangway, laughing. I looked at him—everyone did—and wondered. And then, to cap the wonder, they two came up to me with their friendly, confident young faces, and asked for Henkel’s house.

“‘Turn to the left,’ I said. And then I said, ‘You’ll excuse me, but what does Henkel want of you?’

“Scott didn’t answer at first, but looked me over with his considering eyes, and I remembered a collarless shirt and a four days’ beard. But Daurillac said, ‘He wants butterflies of us, Monsieur. I am an entomologist, and my friend, he assists me.’ He drew up very straight, but his eyes were laughing at himself. Then we exchanged names and shook hands, and I watched them going along the path to Henkel’s . . . . .

“Next day, Scott came down to the jetty. He sat on a stump and stared at everything. He was ready enough to talk, in his guarded way. Yes, he was new to the tropics; in some ways they were not what he had expected, but he was not disappointed. He was here for the novelty, the experience. But his friend, Louis Daurillac, had been in the Indies, and with some of Meyer’s men in Burma, after orchids. Louis’ father was a great naturalist, and Louis was very clever. Yes, Henkel had got hold of him through Meyer. He wanted someone to find this butterfly for him, this golden butterfly at the headwaters of the Mazzaron—someone whose name was yet in the making, someone he could get cheap . . . . . So Louis had come. He was very keen on it. Henkel was to bear all costs, to supply food, ammunition, trade-goods, etc., and pay them according to the number of the new specimens that they found. ‘So you see,’ said Scott, with his clean smile, ‘Louis and I can’t lose by it.’ . . . .

“We talked a bit more, and then young Scott said to me, suddenly, ‘Henkel has everything ready, and we start in the morning. You seem to be the only white man about here. Come and see us off, will you?’ I said yes; afterwards it struck me as curious that he should not have counted Henkel as a white man. He laughed, and apologised for the touch of sentiment. ‘It’s like plunging head first into a very deep sea,’ he explained, ‘and one likes to have someone on the shore. You’ll be here when we come back?’ And I said, ‘Yes, either unloading on the jetty or in the new cemetery by the canal.’ But he didn’t smile. His light northern eyes were gravely considering this land, where life was held on a short lease, and he looked at me as if he were sorry for me.

“I saw them off the next day. There were six or eight men of Henkel’s, loaded with food and trade-goods, and I saw that two of them were sickening where they stood. I looked in Daurillac’s brilliant young face, and I hadn’t the courage to say anything but ‘Have you plenty of quinine?’ He tapped a big tin case, and I nodded. ‘And what are you taking the Indianos?’ I asked.

“He fairly bubbled over with laughter. ‘You would never guess, Monsieur, but we take clocks, little American clocks. The Indianos of the Mazzaron desire nothing but little clocks, they like the tick.’

“Their men had turned down one of the jungle paths. They shook hands with me, and Scott met my eyes with his grave smile. ‘Just drawing breath for the plunge,’ he said, with a glance at the forest beyond the last white roof. Daurillac slipped his arm through Scott’s, and drew him after their slow-going hombres. At the bend of the path they turned and waved to me; Scott with a quick lift of the hand. But little Daurillac swept off his hat and stood half-turned for a minute; the sun splashed on his dark head, on his Frenchified belt and puttees, on his white breeches, and on an outrageous pink shirt Henkel seemed to have supplied him with. He looked suddenly brilliant and insubstantial, a light figure poised on the edge of the dark. One gets curious notions in Herares. The next moment they were gone. The jungle had shut down on them, swallowed them up. They were instantly lost in it, as a bubble is lost in the sea.

“Two days before I hadn’t known of their existence. But I was there to see them off, and I was there when Scott came back.

“It was well on into the rainy season, and I was down with fever. I was in my house, in my hammock, and the wind was swinging it. It was probably the hammock that did all the swinging, but I thought it was the house, and I had one foot on the floor to try and steady it. But it was no use. The walls lifted and sank all in one rush, like the side of a ship at sea. Outside I could see a pink roof, a white roof, a tin roof, and then the forest, with the opening of a path like the black mouth of a tunnel. I wanted to watch this tunnel, because I had an idea I’d seen something crawl along it a good while before. But I couldn’t manage it; I had to shut my eyes. And then I felt the scratching on my boot . . .

“I caught hold of the sides of the hammock, but it was some time before I could manage to pull myself up. Then I looked down.

“A man was lying along on his face on the floor, just as he had crawled into my hut and fallen. The yellowed fingers of one hand clawed on my boot, and that was the only sign that he was alive. He lay quite quiet, except for the slow working of his fingers. And I sat quite quiet, staring down on him with the infinite leisure that follows a temperature of one hundred and five. It was only by slow degrees I realized that this was Derek Scott come back, and that he was probably dying.

“I got to my feet, and bent over him, but I couldn’t raise him, of course. I was afraid he’d die before anyone came. So I took my revolver and aimed as well as I could at that tin roof beneath which my man Pedro was eating his dinner. The barrel went up and down with the walls of the hut, but I must have hit the roof, for the next thing I knew was a lot of smoke and noise, and Pedro’s face, eyes and mouth open, rushing out of it. There seemed no interval before I found myself sitting in the hammock, and saying over and over again, ‘But where’s the little chap? Where’s the little French chap?’

“Scott was still on the floor, but his head was on my man’s shoulder, and Pedro was gently feeding him with sips of brandy and condensed milk. He turned and looked at me, and his eyes were clear and considering as ever, though his answer didn’t sound quite sane. He said, ‘The clocks wouldn’t tick.’

“He said it as if it explained everything. Then he unstrapped a tin case from his belt, laid his head on it, and was instantly asleep.

“I cried out, ‘Is it the fever, Pedro?’ But my man said, ‘No, Senor, it is the hunger.’ He rolled Scott up very cleverly in a blanket. ‘This Senor has had the fever, but it is not upon him now. Without doubt he is a little mad from being in the forest so long. But when he wakes he will be stronger. So much I heard, and no more. Unconsciousness came down on me like a wave. But into the dark heart of that wave I carried the certainty that Pedro knew all about the matter and that he hated Henkel. How or why I was certain of this I don’t know. But I was.

“I woke in the cool of the evening. The fresh breeze off the river was like the breath of life, and Pedro’s face, thrust close to mine, no longer grew large and small by fits. I noticed that it was quite grey, and that his lips twitched as he muttered, ‘Senor, Senor . . .’

“I said, ‘Where is the Senor Scott?’

“‘He woke a little while ago and called for water to wash in and a clean coat, and he used the hair-brush. Then he went out—went out—’

“I got to my feet, threw an arm over Pedro’s shoulder, and he ran with me out into the moonlit street. The track to the fountain lay like a ribbon of silver, the houses were like blocks of silver; and every house was shuttered and silent—breathless. Not a man lounged under the shade of the walls, not a girl went late to draw water, not a dog barked. The little place was deserted in the hold of the forest. It lay like a lonely raft of silver in the midst of a black sea. Only ahead of me a man stumbled slowly in the middle of the road, and his shadow staggered beside him. I have said there was no other living thing visible. Yet as this man stumbled past the shuttered houses, the very blades of grass, the very leaves on the wall, seemed to have conscious life and to be aware of him. When the wind moved the trees, every branch seemed straining to follow him as Pedro and I followed.

“We followed, but we could not gain on him. It was like the dreams of fever. Pedro and I seemed to be struggling through the silence of Herares as if it were something heavy and resistant, and Scott reeled from side to side, but always kept the same distance ahead. We were still behind when we turned into Henkel’s garden, and the scent of the flowers beat in our faces like heat. At the foot of the verandah steps we met the man who had admitted Scott.

“The man was running away. He was a cripple. He came down the steps doubled up, bundled past us, and was gone. Somewhere a door clashed open. There was no other sound. But in a moment the garden seemed full of stampeding servants, all maimed, or ill, or aged. They melted silently into the bushes as rats melt into brushwood, and they took no notice of us. I heard Pedro catch his breath quickly. But when a light flared up in one of the rooms, it showed no more than Scott talking with Henkel.

“They showed like moving pictures in a frame, and the frame was dark leaves about the window, which was open. I leaned against the side of it, and Pedro squatted at my feet, his head thrust forward as if he were at a cockfight. I did not know just why I was there. Henkel sat at a table, wagging his head backwards and forwards. Scott was sitting opposite him; and he looked as Lazarus might have looked when first he heard the Voice, and stirred . . . .

“Henkel was saying, ‘Dear me, dear me, but why should this have happened?’ And Scott answered him as he had answered me, in that strange, patient voice,

“‘The clocks wouldn’t tick.’

“‘But they were good clocks,’ cried Henkel.

“Scott shook his head. ‘No, they were not good clocks, he explained gently, ‘they were too cheap. They would not go at all in the jungle. An Indian of the Mazzaron does not care what time his clock tells, but he likes it to tick. These were no good. And the food was not good. The things in the tins were bad when we opened them.’

“‘Mismanagement, mismanagement,’ said Henkel, but Scott went on as if he had not heard.

“‘We followed the river for two days and then turned east. In a week after that, two of your men were dead. They died of fever. No, the quinine was no good. There was a lot of flour in it. Two days more, and another man died, but he would have died anyhow. It was very hard to see them die and to be able to do nothing.

“‘The men who were left went so slowly that nearly all our food was gone when we reached the country of the Indios. We made our camp, and I shot a pig. That made us stronger, but Louis was very bad then with the fever.

“‘The Indios came down, and we spoke with their head-men. They thought we were mad, but the clocks pleased them. They sat round our tents and shook them to make them tick louder, until Louis cried out in his fever that all the world was a great clock that ticked. They gave us leave to hunt in their country for butterflies, and the head-men told off six to help us. One was very clever. He used to wear his net on his head with the stick hanging down behind, and he snared the butterflies with a loop of grass, as if they had been birds.

“‘Our tents were of cheap cotton stuff that would not keep the rain out, and the wet came in on Louis and made him worse. But he was young, and I saw to it that he had food, and your men loved him. I do not think he would have died if the clocks had ticked properly.’

“‘I do not understand,’ said Henkel, blinking his heavy brown eyes.

“‘No? They were so cheap that they broke at the first winding. The Indios brought them back, and asked for better ones. I had no better ones.’

“‘Still, I do not understand,’ said Henkel, smoothly, and blinked in the lamplight.

“Scott’s tired voice went on. ‘The Indios were very angry. They brought us no more butterflies and no more food. And presently, as we went about the camp, or the paths of the forest, the little arrows began to fall in front of us and behind, though we never saw who shot at us.’

“‘The little arrows?’ asked Henkel, heavily. ‘I do not understand. Go on.’

“‘There is very little to tell. Only a nightmare of hunger, of wet, of fever, of silence, and the little poisoned arrows quivering everywhere . . . . And one day a little dart flickered through a rent in the rotten cotton tenting and struck Louis. He died in five minutes. Then I and the men who were left broke through and came down to the Mazzaron. The Indios followed us, and I am the only one left. It is a pity the clocks wouldn’t tick, Mister Henkel.’

“‘Ya, ya,’ said Henkel, leaning over the table, ‘but the butterfly? The golden butterfly? You have found it?’

“Scott opened the tin case slowly and clumsily, drew out the perfect insect, and laid it on the table. But it is wrong to speak of that wide-winged loveliness as an insect. Henkel sat staring at its glittering and transparent gold, one big yellowish hand curved on either side of it, too happy to speak. His lips moved, and I fancied he was saying to himself, ‘Cheap, cheap . . . .’

“‘It is very good,’ he said at last, cunningly, ‘but I am sorry there is only one. I do not know that it is worth very much. But now I will pay you as I promised. There was no agreement that you should receive the other young man’s share, and there is only one specimen. But I will pay you.’

“Scott was fumbling in his belt. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you will pay me,’ and he leaned forward with something in his hand. We saw Henkel’s face turn to yellow wax, and he tried to stand up, but he was too stout to lift himself quickly. He had no time to turn before Scott shot him through the heart.

“When I broke through the vines, Scott was moving the butterfly out of the way . . . . . He looked up at me with his old considering look, his old clean smile. ‘It was cheap at the price,’ he said, touching one golden wing with his finger.”

Stories

Joyce was at his tenth story, the pipes were drawing well, and the birch logs singing softly, while Father John gazed at his entertainers with fascinated eyes.

“. . . . And so he fell into the car, and the grain poured in on him, and there he was, buried. That car wasn’t unloaded until spring, and then out he came like a board, and they buried him again, and no one knew he was heir to a million.”

Father John made a stunned, murmuring noise, and his hosts looked upon him fondly. Only Morris was discontented.

“I thought he’d have come out alive.”

“Alive?”

“Yes. Fed on the grain . . . .”

Royce turned his back on Morris, and Falconer began, hastily.

“But that’s not so queer as the man at Fort Duchesne. He was a scientific fellow, and he went mad, and ran after the shooting stars with a butterfly net. It was in the Fall, when the sky is generally fizzling with meteors. This fellow would run after them till he fell, exhausted, and they had to tell off a Siwash to retrieve him, which must have been very annoying. He’s in a private asylum in ’Frisco now, keeping copper-filings in a cage; thinks they’re larvæ and feeds them on lettuce leaves.”

“Poor soul, poor soul,” murmured Father John, helplessly, and for a few minutes there was silence.

“But that’s nothing to what happened to Ignatius O’Higgins up north.” Connor’s voice rolled as richly into the flat silence as a plum pudding on a table. “Out snaring rabbuts, he was, and put his foot in a bear trap. A while after, another trapper came by, and he wondering why the snow was all trod up with rabbut tracks, and they marching in squads like Ulstermen, bad luck to ’em. And then he went on a bit, and he knew; and the knowledge he had of the black, bitter heart of a rabbut gave him a turn, and he was a better Christian all his days, Father. All the buck-rabbuts east of the Rockies, fighting and kicking and straggling round that bear trap . . . .”

“Have another drink, Con,” said someone loudly, passing up the decanter. Connor helped himself, and drank, beaming, to the guest of the evening. “Here’s good luck and a fat living to you, Father Jack, and may you never want a bottle of the best to share with a friend.”

“A memorable night,” said Father John, looking very young and pink in the depths of his leather chair. “That’s what it’s been—a memorable night. It was very kind of you to ask me again, to take me in once more among you, to give me a share in this way of all the things you’ve seen and done and heard in all these years. And such things . . . . It’s a terrible world,” and he shuddered, slightly.

“Bless your heart,” said Royce, “but lots of queer things must have come your way since you took to—this,” and he leaned forward, and gently touched the shabby, black sleeve.

Father John looked at his cassock with some discontent. “Old women’s quarrels, and young folks’ love affairs, a mother to be comforted, or an old man ushered into Paradise. It’s God’s work,” finished Father John, wistfully, “but there’s no good denying it’s a bit dull.”

“The confessional?” suggested Royce, delicately.

Father John leaned forward, with a twinkle. “Shall I tell you? Well, it’s my belief all the bad, wild deeds are done by the Protestants, I hear so few of them.”

“But life and death—you must come closer to these than any of us. They’re not dull.”

“In the aggregate I find them so.”

“But surely, sometimes . . . .?”

“Well, I don’t know.” Father John brightened up a little. “There is something under my notice now. Not through the confessional, of course; it’s open, quite open. And it’s—well, curious. Yes,” he went on, judicially, “I should certainly call it curious.”

“Is it war, passion or revenge?” asked Royce, with a smile.

“Well,”—Father John did not smile,—“it is probably murder.”

“Probably murder? Don’t you know, then?”

“No. That’s the curious part of it. I don’t know, and the man who most likely did it, he doesn’t know.”

“O, come now, Father Jack . . . .”

“It’s a fact. He’d tell me if he knew, but he doesn’t.”

“Do you mean to tell us that a fellow could murder, not kill, murder—another fellow, and not know it?”

“Yes, I do,” said Father John, mildly, “that is just M’Cabe’s case.”

“Go on with his case,” said Connor, admiringly.

“Well, I only know it in bits, you understand—in flashes as he tells it to me—a flash of light so clear and vivid it’s painful, and then fog and darkness. I’m afraid it’s a pretty bad case, though I’ve grown fond of M’Cabe. It’s curious, too,” mused Father John, “how fond you do get of anyone or anything that looks to you for help. I ought to detest M’Cabe, he’s always sending one of his brats to call me up at night—thinking he’s going to remember . . . .”

“What was M’Cabe in his off hours?” asked Morris, with envy.

“M’Cabe? O, I’m afraid he was a seal-poacher. He tells me of fights with Japanese ships in the fog—bloody decks, and half-seen yellow faces. It’s all in a fog as he tells it—the ships and the men, the seals in the sea and the bull-walrus bellowing from the floes. I wish he could make it clearer to me, but he’s always down on the floor, groaning—afraid he’s going to remember.

“He must have seen some queer things, if you like, where Asia and America are still in the making, and no man can read the tides, and on the islands in the summer you walk waist-deep in flowers. M’Cabe says he’s gone ashore on one of these islands and picked harebells and fern till his arms could hold no more. And the next year the island’s gone, swallowed in the sea, and a new volcano spouting east-by-north in the offing. They’re very troublesome, those islands. And the natives are as strange as their own coasts; you see them, M’Cabe says, in their high-prowed boats, driving down the steel-grey channels, past the long promontories, out of the fog and into the fog again. They used to massacre the fur traders, and no one seems to know what they do now. They just go past, flying low, like birds, and the crews throw things at them . . . .

“Well, from what M’Cabe says, it wasn’t natives, but islands, that gave him his trouble. They seem to have been sailing very slowly up some coast in a fog, which lay thick on the sea like a layer of wool, but cleared so suddenly that the topsails were in golden day. On deck they could see nothing. They had a man at the top of the foremast, I think he said, and that man was absolutely cut off from them by the fog. They heard his voice as a voice from another world.

“They were just creeping along, only the topsails drawing. M’Cabe and another man were up in the bows, looking over the side. He says the sea came sliding out of the fog and curling alongside, pretty little gentle waves, as white as lambs. M’Cabe watched them for some time, he says, and then was going aft, when he heard the other man say, ‘Come back and look at this.’ He went and looked, and there were all the waves breaking black.

“Quite black, he says, like soot instead of foam. And then, as they stared, the fog grew pit-black ahead of them, as if a great mouth had opened. And it was all perfectly sudden and perfectly silent. They could see nothing, they could hear nothing, except that once the look-out man screamed. Then they looked up, out of their pit of fog . . .

“It was like a signal breaking out, M’Cabe says. I do not quite know what he means, but over the golden sky something deadly—smoke, ash, gas—was rushing and spreading. I can’t make out from him whether it looked red or black; but it was dark, and hot.

“Then they felt the sea tremble, and that blind ship fouled in fog was struck. Not tossed or struck by a wave, but by something that hit at her out of the fog. They’d all run aft like sheep, away from the blackness. And the next thing that M’Cabe knows is that he was in a small boat which had been trailing astern, alone with another man, drifting in the fog. The ship was gone as if that blow had smacked her out of existence—gone for ever. It is very curious how Time seemed to go wrong. The destruction or disappearance of the ship, in M’Cabe’s mind, happened instantaneously; as a matter of fact, it must have taken some moments, for the other man had had time to run and fetch a fur coat of which he was very proud. I know nothing of this man, except that he was, and that he had a fur coat; he was the first thing M’Cabe noticed with a clear mind, brushing his coat with black hands. They were as black as sweep’s, the boat was black, a black sea lopped after them oilily, and the fog rained black on them. ‘Is it snowing black?’ asked M’Cabe. And the other man, never looking up from the coat, grunted, ‘Nah, it’s ashes. There’s been an island blowed up, or something, and it’ll ruin my coat.’

“M’Cabe says he took a dislike to him and his coat, though he’d liked him well enough before; he was that unfriendly over it. Those are M’Cabe’s words—‘that unfriendly.’

“M’Cabe took the oars that were in the boat and paddled about in the fog to see if he could find the ship. He seems to have been a good deal shaken. He says he doesn’t remember anything else until the boat grated softly on a gravel beach and a great rush and screaming went past his head in the fog, and things black as bats which he took at first for devils, but they were only sooty gulls.

“They pulled the boat up and sat down on the beach waiting for the fog to lift, but it didn’t. It didn’t lift for days; the blackness went out of it and it grew lighter, but as thick, M’Cabe says, as milk. And all the time they had to stay on this little bit of an island, a few flat rocks and a little gravel huddled together in the sea. It was spring, the rocks were all glassy with ice every morning; but the gulls were laying about the beach tamer than poultry, and they gathered the rank eggs and ate them, and drank of the half-frozen sleet pools. Fire? They had nothing to burn but the seats of the boat; they tried to kindle these with their few matches, but the sea-soaked wood refused to catch, however fine they shaved it. They turned the boat over and dug little burrows in the sand to sleep in, lining them with dried weed. But it must have been cold beyond bearing. M’Cabe says he used to crawl out of his burrow in the morning, almost crying with cold. And the other man snoozing comfortably in the fur coat. I asked him why they didn’t sleep in one burrow and share the coat; he said he didn’t like to, the other man being ‘that unfriendly.’

“M’Cabe doesn’t know how long they were on the island. He says it was all fog, and sea-beasts bellowing, and great birds buffeting them, and cold; there was the other man, too, very careful not to tear his fur coat on the rocks. At last, M’Cabe says, what with the fog and the cold and the birds, he became so that he could not take his mind off that fur coat.

“He’d lie shaking in his burrow at night, thinking how warm he’d be with it on. He’d limp about the island by day, thinking what it would feel like if he could put his hands in the pockets. He’d cry, that great bull-headed raw-boned scamp, because the other man wouldn’t lend it to him. He would have blanks, gaps of thought or consciousness, when he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. And he’d come out of them to find himself following the other man about and staring at the coat.

“I think the other man was frightened. M’Cabe has shown him to me—just a glimpse—stout, bearded, with pale eyes, running round and round the island. M’Cabe thinks he must have chased him; he’d come out of his blank fits to fear the man would fall in and get the coat wet. ‘And how to dry it then,’ said M’Cabe, ‘I didn’t see.’ The other man never left off the coat; he clung to those mangy old fox-skins literally as you’d cling to life. You see him always, furred to his pale eyes, running clumsily among a white flutter of birds, and M’Cabe pursuing him, a man in a dream—a dream of warmth. . . . .

“He came out of this dream one day to find himself knee-deep in surf, the day blown clear as grey glass, and a whaler’s boat putting in to the island. He splashed to meet it, and a man hauled him aboard by the collar. M’Cabe’s very confused about this. He says they were very kind to him and fed him with rum with biscuit crumbs in it. They said, ‘Are there any more on ye?’ And he said ‘Yes;’ so they hunted every creek on the island, and thought he was dreaming till they found the two burrows under the boat. It wasn’t any use looking any longer; there was the island, bare as a child’s slate lung on the sea, and nothing near it but the gulls. So they tied the boat on astern and went. ‘This pore feller’s the only one saved,’ says someone, and someone else says, ‘Yes, and he wouldn’t have lasted long without he was kept warm. He’s pretty far gone as it is.’ With that, M’Cabe says, in a wild way, ‘It’s the other man who’s saved, and pore Bill M’Cabe, he’s a-lying froze on the island,’ and falls forward in a faint. Because, you see, looking down at himself, he’d seen he was all wrapped up in that old fox-fur coat.

“For some days after he’d come to aboard the whaler, he doesn’t seem to have done much or thought of much; he just lay in his bunk and shivered. They were very good to him; gave him blankets and the best food they had, and let him lie, for his mind was all in a fog. They spread the fur coat atop of the blankets, and whenever he’d lift his head or stretch his hand, there it would be. It didn’t worry him much at first, but as his strength came back, the fog in his brain lifted, all but a few patches. And he’d lie fingering the greasy fur, and wonder—and wonder—how it came there . . . .

“I’ve known men, bolder or weaker than M’Cabe, who’d have let those patches rest. But he couldn’t. He kept trying to blow the fog clear. He’d lie there, shaking under the fur coat, and fighting for memory till he was as weak as a rag, and the cook, who was especially good to him, would bring him a tin of bitter brown coffee and a hot stove-lid for his feet. . . . Those blank patches in his mind were like lead, like iron; he might wreck himself against them like a prisoner against a stone wall; his own brain, his own memory, would yield him nothing.

“How did he get the fur coat? What he struggled for was the complete picture; and in the centre, it was smeared with a great black brush. He could not remember.

“He saw himself and the other man in the boat, landing on the island, digging their burrows in the icy sand; saw again all the monotony of that suffering; saw them gathering eggs, whirling arms like windmills in the fog as they fought the great gulls. He could taste again the salty frost on his lips. He could see the other man running round the icy rocks, and a shadow of himself following anxiously. He could see the rime on the fur coat, the pockets bulging with eggs, a button that was loose and worried him for fear it would be lost. And he could see himself being hauled into the boat by the collar of that coat. But between these two—blackness.

“How did he get it? What did he do?

“Did the other man die? They didn’t find him. Did he take off the coat, leave it behind him, and fall from the rocks while scrambling for eggs? Did M’Cabe push him off? Did he kill him first and then take off the coat and throw the body into the sea? ‘He didn’t feel his end near and will the coat to me,’ says M’Cabe, ‘he’d have wished to be buried with it on, he was that jealous of it.’ Many and many a time I’ve sat there with him and gone over every inch of that dirty old coat, hunting for a cut, a tear, a stain that might help him to remember, and he in a sweat of fear. ‘Father, it’ll come in another minute,’ he’d say, ‘in a minute I’ll know.’ But he never knew, he doesn’t know. The fog never lifted. The man in the fur coat running round the rocks in the mist—himself being hauled into the boat by the collar of that coat: whatever lay between of accident, of murder, of death—whatever lay between, is locked in the mysterious archives of the brain, like a book, the covers of which he may never be permitted to open. He goes about his world, as it were, looking at his hands; and he does not know if they are clean, or if there is on them—blood.”

Father John sat silent, staring at the fire, and his hosts were silent also; until at last Royce rose leisurely, opened a drawer, and took therefrom a bundle of cheroots. “I think you are all agreed,” he said, “as to whom these belong?”

A chorus of assent and admiration rose on the words, and Royce leaned over and clapped Father John on the shoulder. “I didn’t know you had it in you, Padre,” he said.

“But your mechanism was a little too apparent,” said Morris jealously, “and I know where you got your setting from. It’s in here—” He turned and groped in the bookcase.

“When I went fishing with you a few score years ago,” put in Connor, “we’d limit the righteous increase to fifty per cent. I’d like to know how much ye tacked on to that fur coat. How many perch do ye reckon to a salmon now? Far as we go, boys,” he said, looking sadly at the cheroots, “ye can trust Holy Church to go one further. And I thought Jack that innocent, I tried me rabbuts on him.”

Royce grinned into Father John’s entirely bewildered face. “I don’t want to know the percentage. I’ve enjoyed a good yarn so well told that it took me in at first until you made it a little bit too effective. A bundle of these,” he went on, flourishing the cheroots, “always goes to the most successful liar of the evening. And I don’t think,” he finished gracefully, “that we’ve any of us a doubt as to who that is to-night . . .”

A noise at the door made him turn—made Father John pause with his mouth open and his hand outstretched in denial or acceptance. They heard the servant’s voice raised indignantly, and a short scuffle in the hall. Then the door opened and a girl ran into the room; a rough girl from the river front, with a shawl over her shoulders and the rain lying like a net of pearls on her solid flaxen hair. She ran to the priest like a dog, and caught his cassock with her square tanned hands, and began to wail, strangely, softly.

“Father, Father,” she besought him, “come to M’Cabe. O, come quick to poor M’Cabe. He’s remembered. . . . .”

The Stove

“I’ll be back the third day at latest with the doctor. I’ve left you wood enough for three days and more and you’ve grub for a month.” Garth looked at her anxiously; his strong mouth twitched. Suddenly he leaned forward and brushed her cheek lightly with his yellow beard. “I—hate to leave you, little girl,” he said, with a gentleness not common with him, “but I guess it’s Derek’s only chance.”

“Of course you must go. It’s Derek’s only chance.” Dorette faced him steadily. She was pale, slight, sleepy-eyed, but wilderness born and bred, for all that; one guessed a spirit of steel in that fragile sheath. She finished wistfully: “There’ll be nothing for me to do—nothing, but—wait.”

“Only look after yourself and keep the stove up.”

“I’ll do it. And you—if you meet Maxime . . . .”

Rage blazed suddenly in her brother’s eyes. The barrel of his rifle gleamed blue as he gripped it. “If I meet Maxime,” he said, through his teeth, “it’s a finish for him or for me!”

He turned about without another word, and swung down the forest trail on his long run to Mandore.

Dorette watched him until he was no more than a dark shadow among the heavy blue shades that hung from spruce to spruce like tangible banners. All life, all sound, all motion seemed to go with him. Mile after mile, she knew, on each side of her was nothing but the same silence, the same stillness, league after league of the desolate fir forest of the North. She went into the cabin and bolted and barred the door behind her, as if the solitude were an enemy which she must keep out.

The cabin was a pleasant place. The walls were sheathed in red cedar, and there were fur rugs on the floor, red curtains at the windows. In the centre of the larger of the two rooms into which the cabin was divided stood the great iron stove, in winter the source of their very life.

Its voice filled the cabin with a roar like the forever unsatisfied roaring of the wind and sea—a hungry voice. Dorette swung open the heavy door, wincing from the furnace-glory within, as she flung on more wood. That was her one occupation until Garth came back—feeding the stove.

She went to one of the bunks—like the bunks of a ship—that were built on the wall behind the stove, and looked in.

Derek, her younger brother, lay there without sense or motion, as he had lain ever since the sergeant of police and Garth had carried him in and laid him there. He drowsed between life and death, shot through the body. Now and then he swallowed a little broth, but with no knowledge of the hand that fed him. She dared not touch him. There was nothing she could do for him but keep the cabin warm enough to sustain that flickering lamp of life till the doctor came, for the cold of that country kills like a sword.

Suddenly, clinging to the side of the bunk, she trembled. “If only you could speak to me, Derek,” she whispered. “If only I could hear your voice!”

But the only voice was the voice of the great stove.

Her mind painted for her the scene she had not witnessed—the hard men of the mines and the lumber camps, still men with formidable eyes, following Cain’s trail from Fort Dismay to Anisette; the end of the trail at a little lonely shack blinded in snow, ringed with watchful men; Derek pleading that Maxime might have “one more chance, boys;” the parley at the door, the shot coming from nowhere; men storming into the shack over Derek’s fallen body, and finding it empty; Maxime Dufour escaped again! She saw it all. Heard again Garth’s voice in hard-breathed sentences between shut teeth: “But he’s not goin’ to get away again. He’ll have to get food and shelter somewhere; and if it’s a thousand miles away, we’ll follow and shoot him down like the wolf he is!”

She glanced round, pale and shaken, thinking that still she heard that deep voice of bitter rage. But it was only the undertone of the roaring stove humming its angry song.

She busied herself about such duties as she could find. Twice she fed the stove from the pile of wood on the floor beside it. The fierce heat licked out at her each time, just as a savage beast will strike through the bars of his cage, and each time she shut the door with the sense of prisoning some lion-voiced living thing.

Her work was soon done. Everything in the cabin was tidied and tidied again. She glanced at the clock. Only an hour of the slow time had gone. Garth had only been gone an hour. She turned the clock with its face to the wall, took out a shirt she was making for Garth—red-and-black checked flannel, thick as felt—and stitched resolutely.

Her hearing, accustomed to the sound of the stove, as the ear adjusts itself to the thunder of a waterfall, was acute to catch the faintest noises. She heard the tiny sound of the thread passing through the flannel, the soft thud of snow slipping from the boughs of the forest, the least check and stumble in Derek’s shallow breathing. Each time she heard this last, her own heart checked and stumbled in tune with it. She held her own breath till her brother’s renewed its weak rhythm.

So the morning passed. In the afternoon, she found a snowshoe that needed re-stringing. Deftly as Montagnais she twisted the gut and wove the net.

It was dark sooner than she could have hoped. She needed no lamp. The stove filled the cabin with its glow. In the dark it became a beautiful and formidable thing, a shape of dull red, with a heart of lambent rose. She glanced at the little windows, sheathed thick with frost-ferns. It would be a cold night. Her thoughts went to Garth, then, with dread, to Maxime Dufour. She dragged her cot from the inner room, set it across the front of the stove, and lay down. The warmth was like a hand pressing on her eyelids.

With the subconscious watchfulness of those who care for the beloved, she was awake five times in the long night to feed the stove. Each time she looked at Derek, and thought, with a pang, that he was deeper sunken among the pillows. His eyes were not quite closed; the silvery line of eyeball reflected the red glow. She would have liked to close them, but her hand shrank from so prophetic an action.

The last time she woke the sun had risen. The gathered crystals on the windows were lit with a glow that paled the stove. Dorette went into the inner room and braided her hair.

That day passed as the first had done. Her brother was weaker. She pleaded with him, passionately tender. “Just a mouthful of soup, Derry. Wake up, Derry dear. Take it for my sake, Derry!” but her voice, which had dimly roused him the day before, could not reach him now. She looked round for something she might do for him.

The diminished heap of logs on the floor showed her work enough. She must bring in a fresh supply from the pile behind the cabin. She ate a hasty breakfast and made herself some coffee. Then, hooded and wrapped against the cold, she opened the door.

She stepped into a world of white, blue, and black; solid, translucent, and motionless as though built from gems. Where the blue sky touched the black trees there seemed to run a setting of gold; where the black trees trailed branches to the snow, was a stain of sapphire shadow. It was fiercely cold. She shut the door behind her, hastily, ran to the snow-buried wood pile behind the cabin, burdened herself with an armful of small logs, returned, set her load on the threshold, opened the door, and tumbled the wood on the floor. All the morning she worked thus. Her spirits rose; she began to believe that Derek would not die, and soon she might think of Garth’s return. The noise of the logs as she flung them on the floor pleased her. It was a change from the one unceasing voice that filled the cabin day and night—the voice of the stove.

The second night she was restless. She dared not sleep at first, for fear she should sleep too well. Wind came up with the electric stars; the great stove sang to a higher, more tremendous note; she could scarcely keep pace with its consuming hunger. The pine knots and bright birch logs fell to ash in a moment. If she slept, she dreamed that the stove was out, and the cold creeping into the cabin in long feathers of frost, that twisted under the door like snakes, until one touched her on the throat and she woke, choking.

Dawn found the sky fleeced with cloud, the cabin warm, and the hurt man yet alive.

Again with the day her heart lightened. Four—five hours from that time, and she might expect Garth with the doctor from the mines at Mandore. She wound the clock, and turned it with its chipped white face to the room, no longer dreading to tell the passage of the hours.

Yet five hours went, and Garth had not come.

She went to the door. Closing it behind her that the cold might not get into the cabin even for a moment, she stared down the trail. It ran in the straight no more than a half-mile; farther than that, she could not see. Yet it was less her eyes than her soul that she thus strained to see beyond the forest.

“Garth! Garth! Garth!”

Who had given that wild cry that rang among the trees? For a moment she wondered, then knew it had come from her own troubled heart.

She must see beyond the first bend of the trail; she must see if, farther than that, the blue-white ribbon between the trees was still empty of her hope.

She built up the fire again, put on coat and hood and snowshoes, took one glance at Derek, and left the cabin. She sped down the trail. She was panting when she reached the first curve. Almost afraid to look, she saw the long track before her—empty. There was something conscious and deliberate in that emptiness, as if the forest knowingly withheld from her a secret. She dared go no farther. She turned back and fled home.

The clock ticked off another hour—two, three, four. Garth had not come.

Darkness, and he had not come.

Loneliness and suspense were shaking her strong, young nerves. The worst of all was the silence. The voice of the stove became first an annoyance, then a weariness, then an intolerable burden. The voice of its devouring hunger was the very voice of silence, of desolation. She flung the wood in angrily. “If there was only someone to _speak_ to,” she said, a little wildly—“just someone to give me a word!”

There was no one—then, nor through the endless night, when she feared to sleep, lest, in her dreams, or in reality, that insatiable thing in the stove that kept them alive might escape her, nor with the stormy dawn. Garth did not come.

There was no wood left in the house. Before she did anything else, she wrapped herself and went to the wood-pile.

The wood-pile was heaped against the back of the cabin: it was roofed and sheeted with snow. She pulled at the butt of a log, and the wood came down with a run, mixed with much snow—such dry snow that the wood was not moistened until she held it in her warm hand. The bitter work was a relief to her. She thrust the soft, dark hair out of her eyes and piled herself such a load that she swayed under it. “But it’s something to do for Derek,” she said, wistfully. “It’s all I can do.”

She took in enough for the day. But there was the night.

“Garth will be back by then,” she muttered, with cold lips, staring at the stove.

“Garth _must_ be back by then.” The stove sent a screaming rush of flame up the pipe, as if in mockery. She felt an unreasoning hatred for it, as she went wearily out again to gather enough wood for the night too.

Kneeling beside the wood-pile, she groped with numbed hands. She felt nothing but snow.

She thrust in her arm to the shoulder. She met no resistance but that of the snow.

Her heart beat in shuddering throbs. She brought a long pole and prodded the pile, then swung the pole and levelled it. She found nothing but snow.

“How did it happen?” She heard herself asking this over and over. Easily enough. She or Garth or Derek had been drawing supplies from the other side of the pile, and the snow had slipped from the roof and filled the spaces; hardening, it had stretched a roof over emptiness. The pile, which had been taken for good, hardwood logs, fodder for that roaring hungry heat within, was no more than a heap of snow.

Dorette turned slowly, and went into the cabin.

She stood by Derek’s bunk, staring at the wood on the floor. It was enough for the day, but what of the night?

Would Garth return before the night?

She looked about the cabin. There were things there, things that would burn. Her sleepy brown eyes widened. There was war in them as she leaned and kissed Derek’s cheek. He did not stir from that deepening sleep of his.

“Sleep on, Derry,” she whispered, scarcely knowing what she said, “sleep well, Derry. I’ll take care of you, I’ll fight for you!”

She took Garth’s heavy axe, and began on the chairs.

They were heavy and clumsy things, Garth’s pride, since he had made them himself. They would feed the stove well; but they were hard for a girl’s arm to chop, even though she struck true as a woodman, and Dorette’s hands were scorched from the door of the stove. As she toiled, her eyes ranged the cabin, calculating on this box, that shelf, the table. Her heart beat to every sound. As the wind rose higher, the bitter day was full of sounds. A dozen times she ran to the door, crying, “Garth!” A dozen times she saw nothing but the forest and a driven mist of snow, as fine and dry as dust.

By the earliest dusk she had chopped up everything in the cabin. Each stroke sent a jar of pain to her shoulder from her burned and bruised hands, but she did not feel it. And still the stove roared, insatiable. The dried wood of their furnishings, pine for the most part, burned like straw. The great iron horror must be fed, and she had nothing to feed it.

She took the axe and went out.

The grey forest fronted her in a rustling drive of snow and shadow. There must be a hundred fallen boughs within range of the cabin. She found one, dragged it from the snow, and toiled with it into the house. She twisted it apart, desperately, and there was blood on the rough, broken stuff she thrust into the stove.

She went out again. She was growing more desperate as her strength failed. There was a great branch trailing from a spruce, and she tore and wrenched at it, but it would not yield—it was frozen. She swung her weight upon it, sobbing. She struck with all the force remaining in her, but the axe-blade turned in her weary hands. She felt as though the will in her, passionately strong, should sever the bough as by steel. She did not know she was beaten, until she slipped weakly and fell in the snow and lay there, wailing helplessly and softly as a child.

The bitter snow stung her face like heat—like the heat of the stove. If she stayed there, the stove would be out. She lifted herself to her knees, and saw in the growing dark a man, who stood with a rifle on his arm, looking down at her.

“_Garth!_ Oh, Garth!”

But even as the cry left her lips, she knew it was not Garth.

A figure, lithe even under the heavy furs, a face hidden in the cowl he had drawn forward above his fur cap, a certain strange immobility that vaguely chilled her, but surely—help? So swift is thought, that in the transitory seconds before she spoke again her brain had shown her a picture, a memory of a wild-cat which she and Garth had vainly tried to corner in the yard—of the creature’s utter immobility until it launched itself and struck.

“The stove! Oh, the stove!”

She thought, as her hands went out to that motionless figure in the shadows, that she had spoken all the desperate appeal that was in her heart. But she only repeated: “Oh, the stove, the stove!”

“What stove?”

“The stove. The stove in our cabin. There’s—no more wood for it!”

She waited. Surely he understood. But he remained as he was, motionless, staring down at her.

She looked up at him with a burning appeal. She had forgotten to rise from her knees. She kneeled at his feet in the snow. Her breath came in gasps. “There,” she repeated, helplessly, “there—in the cabin—the stove! It’s going out!”

Still he waited.

“There’s a sick man there—my brother! Oh!” she finished, as he did not stir, “help me, if you’re a man!”

“Oh, b’gosh, yes, I’m a man!” She fancied that he was laughing in the shadow of the cowl. “But why should I help you?”

She had no more words. Silently she lifted and held out to him her bleeding hands.

After a long minute he stirred slowly. Without a word he laid his gun crosswise on two fir branches that grew above her reach, easily within his own. He lifted the axe from the snow. She watched him. Four sharp cross-cuts, and the trailing branch fell. He set his foot on it, chopped it quickly into f