"Where are you going?"
"As far as the cottonwoods, I think."
"Then I am going with you."
"I expect to walk very fast."
"Not faster than I, Alan."
"But I want to make sure the country is clear in that direction before twilight shuts out the distances."
"I will help you." Her hand crept into his. "I am going with you, Alan,"
she repeated.
"Yes, I--think you are," he laughed joyously, and suddenly he bent his head and pressed her hand to his lips, and in that way, with her hand in his, they set out over the trail which they had not traveled together since the day he had come from Nome.
There was a warm glow in her face, and something beautifully soft and sweet in her eyes which she did not try to keep away from him. It made him forget the cottonwoods and the plains beyond, and his caution, and Sokwenna"s advice to guard carefully against the hiding-places of Ghost Kloof and the country beyond.
"I have been thinking a great deal today," she was saying, "because you have left me so much alone. I have been thinking of _you_. And--my thoughts have given me a wonderful happiness."
"And I have been--in paradise," he replied.
"You do not think that I am wicked?"
"I could sooner believe the sun would never come up again."
"Nor that I have been unwomanly?"
"You are my dream of all that is glorious in womanhood."
"Yet I have followed you--have thrust myself at you, fairly at your head, Alan."
"For which I thank G.o.d," He breathed devoutly.
"And I have told you that I love you, and you have taken me in your arms, and have kissed me--"
"Yes."
"And I am walking now with my hand in yours--"
"And will continue to do so, if I can hold it."
"And I am another man"s wife," she shuddered.
"You are mine," he declared doggedly. "You know it, and the Almighty G.o.d knows it. It is blasphemy to speak of yourself as Graham"s wife. You are legally entangled with him, and that is all. Heart and soul and body you are free."
"No, I am not free."
"But you are!"
And then, after a moment, she whispered at his shoulder: "Alan, because you are the finest gentleman in all the world, I will tell you why I am not. It is because--heart and soul--I belong to you."
He dared not look at her, and feeling the struggle within him Mary Standish looked straight ahead with a wonderful smile on her lips and repeated softly, "Yes, the very finest gentleman in all the world!"
Over the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the tundra and the hollows between they went, still hand in hand, and found themselves talking of the colorings in the sky, and the birds, and flowers, and the twilight creeping in about them, while Alan scanned the shortening horizons for a sign of human life. One mile, and then another, and after that a third, and they were looking into gray gloom far ahead, where lay the kloof.
It was strange that he should think of the letter now--the letter he had written to Ellen McCormick--but think of it he did, and said what was in his mind to Mary Standish, who was also looking with him into the wall of gloom that lay between them and the distant cottonwoods.
"It seemed to me that I was not writing it to her, but to _you_" he said. "And I think that if you hadn"t come back to me I would have gone mad."
"I have the letter. It is here"--and she placed a hand upon her breast.
"Do you remember what you wrote, Alan?"
"That you meant more to me than life."
"And that--particularly--you wanted Ellen McCormick to keep a tress of my hair for you if they found me."
He nodded. "When I sat across the table from you aboard the _Nome_, I worshiped it and didn"t know it. And since then--since I"ve had you here--every time. I"ve looked at you--" He stopped, choking the words back in his throat.
"Say it, Alan."
"I"ve wanted to see it down," he finished desperately. "Silly notion, isn"t it?"
"Why is it?" she asked, her eyes widening a little. "If you love it, why is it a silly notion to want to see it down?"
"Why, I though possibly you might think it so," he added lamely.
Never had he heard anything sweeter than her laughter as she turned suddenly from him, so that the glow of the fallen sun was at her back, and with deft, swift fingers began loosening the coils of her hair until its radiant ma.s.ses tumbled about her, streaming down her back in a silken glory that awed him with its beauty and drew from his lips a cry of gladness.
She faced him, and in her eyes was the shining softness that glowed in her hair. "Do you think it is nice, Alan?"
He went to her and filled his hands with the heavy tresses and pressed them to his lips and face.
Thus he stood when he felt the sudden shiver that ran through her. It was like a little shock. He heard the catch of her breath, and the hand which she had placed gently on his bowed head fell suddenly away. When he raised his head to look at her, she was staring past him into the deepening twilight of the tundra, and it seemed as if something had stricken her so that for a s.p.a.ce she was powerless to speak or move.
"What is it?" he cried, and whirled about, straining his eyes to see what had alarmed her; and as he looked, a deep, swift shadow sped over the earth, darkening the mellow twilight until it was somber gloom of night--and the midnight sun went out like a great, luminous lamp as a dense wall of purple cloud rolled up in an impenetrable curtain between it and the arctic world. Often he had seen this happen in the approach of summer storm on the tundras, but never had the change seemed so swift as now. Where there had been golden light, he saw his companion"s face now pale in a sea of dusk. It was this miracle of arctic night, its suddenness and unexpectedness, that had startled her, he thought, and he laughed softly.
But her hand clutched his arm. "I saw them," she cried, her voice breaking. "I saw them--out there against the sun--before the cloud came--and some of them were running, like animals--"
"Shadows!" he exclaimed. "The long shadows of foxes running against the sun, or of the big gray rabbits, or of a wolf and her half-grown sneaking away--"
"No, no, they were not that," she breathed tensely, and her fingers clung more fiercely to his arm. "They were not shadows. _They were men_!"
CHAPTER XXIV
In the moment of stillness between them, when their hearts seemed to have stopped beating that they might not lose the faintest whispering of the twilight, a sound came to Alan, and he knew it was the toe of a boot striking against stone. Not a foot in his tribe would have made that sound; none but Stampede Smith"s or his own.