Galen Albret, send her away."
The Factor had turned squarely in his heavy arm-chair to regard the girl, a frown on his brows.
"Virginia," he commanded, in deliberate, stern tones of authority, "leave the room. You have nothing to do with this case, and I do not desire your interference."
Virginia stepped bravely beyond the portals, and stopped. Her fingers were nervously interlocked, her lip trembled, in her cheeks the color came and went, but her eyes met her father"s, unfaltering.
"I have more to do with it than you think." she replied.
Instantly Ned Trent was at the table. "I really think this has gone far enough," he interposed. "We have had our interview and come to a decision. Miss Albret must not be permitted to exaggerate a slight sentiment of pity into an interest in my affairs. If she knew that such a demonstration only made it worse for me I am sure she would say no more." He looked at her appealingly across the Factor"s shoulder.
Me-en-gan was already holding open the door. "You come," he smiled, beseechingly.
But the Factor"s suspicions were aroused.
"There is something in this," he decided. "I think you may stay, Virginia."
"You are right," broke in the young man, desperately. "There is something in it. Miss Albret knows who gave me the rifle, and she was about to inform you of his ident.i.ty. There is no need in subjecting her to that distasteful ordeal. I am now ready to confess to you. I beg you will ask her to leave the room."
Galen Albret, in the midst of these warring intentions, had sunk into his customary impa.s.sive calm. The light had died from his eyes, the expression from his face, the energy from his body. He sat, an inert ma.s.s, void of initiative, his intelligence open to what might be brought to his notice.
"Virginia, this is true?" his heavy, dead voice rumbled through his beard. "You know who aided this man?"
Ned. Trent mutely appealed to her: her glance answered his.
"Yes, father," she replied.
"Who?"
"I did."
A dead silence fell on the room. Galen Albret"s expression and att.i.tude did not change. Through dull, lifeless eyes, from behind the heavy mask of his waxen face and white beard, he looked steadily out upon nothing. Along either arm of the chair stretched his own arms limp and heavy with inertia. In suspense the other three inmates of the place watched him, waiting for some change.
It did not come. Finally his lips moved.
"You?" he muttered, questioningly,
"I," she repeated
Another silence fell.
"Why?" he asked at last.
"Because it was an unjust thing. Because we could not think of taking a life in that way, without some reason for it."
"Why?" he persisted, taking no account of her reply.
Virginia let her gaze slowly rest on the Free Trader, and her eyes filled with a world of tenderness and trust.
"Because I love him," said she, softly.
Chapter Sixteen
After an instant Galen Albret turned slowly his ma.s.sive head and looked at her. He made no other movement, yet she staggered back as though she had received a violent blow on the chest.
"Father!" she gasped.
Still slowly, gropingly, he arose to his feet, holding tight to the edge of the table. Behind him unheeded the rough-built armchair crashed to the floor. He stood there upright and motionless, looking straight before him, his face formidable. At first his speech was disjointed. The words came in widely punctuated gasps.
Then, as the wave of his emotion rolled back from the poise into which the first shock of anger had thrown it, it escaped through his lips in a constantly increasing stream of bitter words.
"You--you love him," he cried. "You--my daughter! You have been--a traitor--to me! You have dared--dared--deny that which my whole life has affirmed! My own flesh and blood--when I thought the nearest _metis_ of them all more loyal! You love this man--this man who has insulted me, mocked me! You have taken his part against me! You have deliberately placed yourself in the cla.s.s of those I would hang for such an offence! If you were not my daughter I would hang you. Hang my own child!" Suddenly his rage flared. "You little fool! Do you dare set your judgment against mine? Do you dare interfere where I think well? Do you dare deny my will? By the eternal, I"ll show you, old as you are, that you have still a father! Get to your room! Out of my sight!" He took two steps forward, and so his eye fell on Ned Trent. He uttered a scream of rage, and reached for the pistol. Fortunately the abruptness of his movement when he arose had knocked it to the floor, so now in the blindness of a red anger he could not see it.
He shrieked out an epithet and jumped forward, his arm drawn to strike. Ned Trent leaped back into an att.i.tude of defence.
All three of those present had many times seen Galen Albret possessed by his noted fits of anger, so striking in contrast to his ordinary contained pa.s.sivity. But always, though evidently in a white heat of rage and given to violent action and decision, he had retained the clearest command of his faculties, issuing coherent and dreaded orders to those about him. Now he bad become a raging wild beast. And for the spectators the sight had all the horror of the unprecedented.
But the younger man, too, had gradually heated to the point where his ordinary careless indifference could give off sparks. The interview had been baffling, the threats real and unjust, the turn of affairs when Virginia Albret entered the room most exasperating on the side of the undesirable and unforeseen. In foiled escape, in thwarted expedient, his emotions had been many times excited, and then eddied back on themselves. The potentialities of as blind an anger as that of Galen Albret were in him. It only needed a touch to loose the flood. The physical threat of a blow supplied that touch. As the two men faced each other both were ripe for the extreme of recklessness.
But while Galen Albret looked to nothing less than murder, the Free-Trader"s individual genius turned to dead defiance and resistance of will. While Galen Albret"s countenance reflected the height of pa.s.sion, Trent was as smiling and cool and debonair as though he had at that moment received from the older man an extraordinary and particular favor. Only his eyes shot a baleful blue flame, and his words, calmly enough delivered, showed the extent to which his pa.s.sion had cast policy to the winds.
"Don"t go too far! I warn you!" said he. As though the words had projected him bodily forward, Galen Albret sprang to deliver his blow. The Free Trader ducked rapidly, threw his shoulder across the middle of the older man"s body, and by the very superiority of his position forced his antagonist to give ground. That the struggle would have then continued body to body there can be no doubt, had it not been for the fact that the Factor"s retrogressive movement brought his knees sharply against the edge of a chair standing near the side of the table. Albret lost his balance, wavered, and finally sat down violently. Ned Trent promptly pinned him by the shoulder into powerless immobility. Me-en-gan had possessed himself of the fallen pistol, but beyond keeping a generally wary eye out for dangerous developments, did not offer to interfere. Your Indian is in such a crisis a disciplinarian, and he had received no orders.
"Now," said Ned Trent, acidly, "I think this will stop right here.
You do not cut a very good figure, my dear sir," he laughed a little. "You haven"t cut a very good figure from the beginning, you know. You forbade me to do various things, and I have done them all. I traded with your Indians. I came and went in your country. Do you think I have not been here often before I was caught? And you forbade me to see your daughter again. I saw her that very evening, and the next morning and the next evening."
He stood, still holding Galen Albret immovably in the chair, looking steadily and angrily into the leader"s eyes, driving each word home with the weight of his contained pa.s.sion. The girl touched his arm.
"Hush! oh, hush!" she cried in a panic. "Do not anger him further!"
"When you forbade me to make love to her," he continued, unheeding, "I laughed at you." With a sudden, swift motion of his left arm he drew her to him and touched her forehead with his lips. "Look!
Your commands have been rather ridiculous, sir. I seem to have had the upper hand of you from first to last. Incidentally you have my life. Oh, welcome! That is small pay and little satisfaction."
He threw himself from the Factor and stepped back.
Galen Albret sat still without attempting to renew the struggle.
The enforced few moments of inaction had restored to him his self-control. He was still deeply angered, but the insanity of rage had left him. Outwardly he was himself again. Only a rapid heaving of his chest answered Ned Trent"s quick breathing, as the two men glared defiantly at each other in the pause that followed.
"Very well, sir," said the Factor, curtly, at last. "Your time is over. I find it unnecessary to hang you. You will start, on your _Longue Traverse_ to-day."
"Oh!" cried Virginia, in a low voice of agony, and fluttered to her lover"s side.
"Hush! hush!" he soothed her. "There is a chance."
"You think so?" broke in Galen Albret, harshly. And looking at his set face and blazing eyes, they saw that there was no chance. The Free Trader shrugged his shoulders.
"You are going to do this thing, father," appealed Virginia, "after what I have told you?"
"My mind is made up."