"Oh, I haven"t got one yet," Scarlett hastened to a.s.sure her. "But I shall, please G.o.d, if I live long enough."
"Sergeant, you are talking nonsense," said Evelyn. "Pain has made you flighty."
""Way up in the seventh heaven," a.s.sented Scarlett. "Don"t be so cruel as to call me down."
"There!" Having stuck a final pin in the handkerchief she had bound about the wrist, Evelyn folded the soldier"s arm across his breast.
"Sarah, go fetch me another sash, will you? I"m going to use this one for a sling."
"Which color shall I get you, miss?" asked the maid, preparing to obey.
Evelyn shrugged her shoulders with indifference. "I don"t care--though I should think your own taste would lead you to see that blue goes best with this frock. There, Sergeant"--having made a creditable cradle of the ribbon for the soldier"s arm and knotted it behind his neck, she came in front of him and surveyed her work admiringly--"that will do, I think. Now, remember, it must not be unbound for four and twenty hours.
Promise! I wish you would stop laughing in that silly way and tell me if it feels all right, really."
"Joyous, beyond words," Scarlett affirmed. "I only wish I were that chap in the mythology with a hundred hands--and every blessed one of them in need of fomentation."
"I suppose you say these inane things to me because you think me incapable of appreciating sense," commented Miss Durant. "Just because all my poor little efforts to do good up here have seemed superfluous.
Oh, yes"--she checked the protest that rose to his lips--"you all have been kindness personified, but I do not think you quite understand me,"
she complained, with the injured quaver of one who at heart knows herself to be understood only too well. "I"m really not such an overbearing, ill-natured girl; only, I acknowledge, a wee bit spoiled.
You see, after my mother died, when I was still a very small child, in Colorado, my father sent me to a fashionable school in San Francisco, and there I began to feel that in Colorado we had been quite savage.
Then, in my early "teens I was put at another still more fashionable school in Chicago, where I was made to feel that in San Francisco I had been hopelessly Western. Next, I moved on to an ultra-fashionable school in New York, where it was tacitly impressed on me that in Chicago we had been positively vulgar. After this came a course of Dresden, Vienna, London, Paris, by which I realized that in New York I had been provincial, crude. On my return I felt myself cosmopolitan, a finished product. Yet, in this short s.p.a.ce up here you all have made me wonder if, after all, all the time, I have not been a bit of a sn.o.b. Yes, you can"t contradict me. I know. A thoroughbred would have taken things as she found them--would be at home anywhere, while I----" Having amazed herself far more even than her hearer by this unexpected burst of confidence, Miss Durant amazed herself still more by an unexpected burst of tears.
"Poor child!" Scarlett compa.s.sionated her, while liking her thoroughly for her candor. "Dear, dear little Evelyn, it"s libelling yourself you are, although it"s true, and that"s the sweetest part of it. Here, take mine!" As she was hunting, between inconsolable sniffs, for the handkerchief with which she herself had bandaged him, he tendered her his own.
"Oh, the sprain--your wrist!" cried Evelyn, in alarm.
"That"s all right," Scarlett rea.s.sured her, while drying her eyes with the hand he had removed for the purpose from the sling. "It was the other one that got the twist."
Evelyn drew back. "You mean you dared let me bind up the wrong one?"
"Ye made your own selection," Scarlett reminded her, in tones he vainly tried to render penitent.
"That you did, miss," corroborated Sarah, coming from the hotel with the blue sash and tying it about Evelyn"s slender waist.
"Give me back my ribbon, my handkerchief!" demanded Evelyn of Scarlett, furiously.
"Not for four and twenty hours," he answered. "Not even for you would I break a promise to a lady."
"Never, never, never will I speak to you again!" cried Miss Durant.
Just then the chapel bell began to ring merrily, and at the same moment Maclane hurried toward them from the mission, an open hymnal in hand.
"Come, my children, we march in, singing," he explained, pointing toward the Indians, who were forming in a procession by the chapel door. "As I am short of hymnals, you and the Sergeant will have to share one, Miss Durant. Hymn 674. "Peace, Perfect Peace.""
Evelyn stood still. "I absolutely decline to be a.s.sociated in any way whatever with Sergeant Scarlett."
"Oh, my children!" remonstrated the minister. "How can we talk of missionizing the heathen when the Gentiles so wrangle among themselves!
Ready, please! Fall into line!" Striking up the tune, he led the way.
And, somehow, in despite of her protest, Miss Durant found herself following, side by side with the hated young soldier, sharing the same hymnal, moreover, and joining her sweet voice with his manly one in praise of "Peace, Perfect Peace."
VIII.
AT THE SIGN OF THE TEMPERANCE SALOON.
"One sandwich, pie an" corfee, three-fifty! One ham an" eggs, pie, corfee, five! One whiskey on a doctor"s prescription, two bits!" Thus Gumboot Annie scored off their reckonings to a party of prospectors who had patronized her lunch-tent, whereupon the prospectors meekly handed their pokes across the counter for her to weigh out the dust, according to her own liberal interpretation.
"Halt!" Barney"s rich brogue rang out upon the trail. "Twinty minutes for refrishmints by request, for man and baste!"
"What"s up now?" Gumboot Annie put her head out to reconnoitre. "Why, who"s thet blamed cop runnin" in?"
"Why, it"s pop!" in dismay, cried Gelly, who was a.s.sisting the mother of Klondike Delmonicos in the capacity of bean-slinger. "My pop!" She began to cry.
"Aye, it"s Bully Nick, all right," corroborated a prospector, selecting a wooden toothpick with nicety. "They"re fixin" ter extrydite him.
Charge of murder. Oh, he"ll be hanged this time fer sure!" he added, with relish.
"Now, wouldn"t thet jostle yer!" exclaimed Gumboot Annie, generally.
"But didn"t the stiff he peppered get well some?"
"Yep, and they let off th" Bully on parole. But ef th" all-fired fool didn"t celebrate his freedom by gittin" crazy drunk and shootin" at a United States Deputy Marshal fer targit! The marshal was a mean man an"
deserved ter die--but Nick should "a" left it to a meaner man to shoot him."
"A United States Marshal!" exclaimed Gumboot Annie, scornfully. "Shucks!
Drunk or sober, I thought Nick had more sense."
"Nick shoots blind when"--her informant considerately lowered his voice--"when he"s on the rampage for Dandy Raish. Nick has sworn ter kill Raish on sight along of Gelly."
"Gumboot Annie! Gumboot Annie!" Bill"s eager voice rang out on the clear air, as he came running toward the tent.
"We"re planning for to give Bully Nick a handsome send-off. Rustle, won"t you? and get us up an A1, gilt-edged blow-out!"
"Betcherboots I will," promised Gumboot Annie, cordially, adding that the Bully would be a great loss, socially, if hanged.
""Twas the drink done it--and I cud ha" kept him from it," moaned Gelly, rocking and wringing her hands.
"Here, stop whining and make the sandwiches. Better git down behind the stove whar yer pop can"t see yer!" Gumboot Annie gave the girl an ungentle but not unkindly push, and thrusting a carving-knife into her hand, bade her, as it might be the old man"s last square feed upon this planet, not to spare the b.u.t.ter.
"Gents, I thankee hearty for these here evidences of popularity," cried the Bully, as they placed him at the head of the well-filled board inside the lunch-tent. "Gents, go thou an" do likewise, but don"t git pinched! Ah, well, ef I"d got my deserts I guess I"d"a" bin strung up twenty years ago."
"Better late than nivver," politely remarked Barney, who, as an honored guest, by his gift of repartee was contributing greatly to the meal"s hilarity.
"Mush, get up, there! G.o.dam you, Teleglaph and Langel. Mush!" Thus Chilkat Jo might have been heard profanely to encourage to increase of speed on a pious errand the parson"s dogs that now were drawing a sled beside which the parson and the trader were running on their snow-shoes toward Gumboot Annie"s tent. For all this took place many miles from Perdu and Lost Shoe Creek, on the heights where the snow still lingered in heavy, frozen ma.s.ses, though the valleys below were abloom with summer flowers. "Him velly d.a.m.n sick," he pityingly added, indicating the bundle wrapped in furs, strapped to the sled.
"Very sick, indeed, I fear, my son; but not d.a.m.n sick," the minister corrected. "Perhaps we can get succor here. Whoa, Telegraph, Wrangle, lads, whoa!" Halting opposite the tent, he read its legend with surprise, "TEMPERANCE SALOON. GUMBOOT ANNIE, PROPRIETOR."