"Why--What makes you think I took anything?"
"Come, come! I"m a specialist; I have some intelligence."
There was a pause, then the sick man finally admitted, "I took twenty-five grains of cocaine."
"_Twenty-five grains!_ G.o.d! It"s incredible! Eight grains is the largest dose on record. You"re dreaming, or else the drug was stale."
"I was particular to see that it was fresh."
Stormfield paced the room, shaking his head and muttering. "I wouldn"t dare report such a thing; I"d be called a faker, and yet--there are no hard-and-fast laws of medicine." He stopped and stared at his patient.
"What the devil prompted you to do it--with such a wife?"
"That"s just it," the latter cried, miserably. "Oh, you"ve done for her a great injury by saving me, Doctor. But I won"t allow it. I--won"t!"
"I see!" The doctor went to the door, where he motioned some one to enter.
A woman rose from her chair in the hall and came swiftly to the bedside.
Her face showed the signs of a long and sleepless vigil, but her eyes were aflame with a hunger that held Butler Murray spellbound and amazed.
"_You!_" he said, weakly. "When did you come?"
"I have been here for days," she answered. "Did you think I could stay away?"
"My--Muriel." He held up his shaking arms, whereupon she knelt and took his tired head to her breast.
"I thought I was doing right," he confided, after he had told her everything, "but I see now that I was all wrong."
"G.o.d will name the day," she declared, simply, "and until He does no man can say "I will.""
"Are you quite sure you have acted wisely in showing me my folly?
Remember we are poor. Even yet I might make you rich again, for there is time, and--I"m not worth this great sacrifice."
"Sacrifice? This is the day of our triumph, dear. When we had all those other riches we never knew contentment, love, or happiness. Now we can start again, with nothing but ourselves and our children. We won"t have time to be unhappy. Are you willing to try with me?"
He stroked her soft hair lovingly and smiled up into her eyes. "DeVoe was right, there _is_ a Power. I shall pray G.o.d every day to spare me, sweetheart, for now I want to live."
TOLD IN THE STORM
The front room of the roadhouse was deserted save for the slumbering bartender, back-tilted in a corner, his chin upon his chest, and one other man who sat in the glare of a swing lamp playing solitaire. It was, perhaps, three hours after midnight. The last carouser had turned in. There was no sound save the scream of the black night and the cry of the salt wind. At intervals only, when the storm lulled, there came from the back room the sound of many men asleep.
I stumbled out from the rear room, heavy-eyed, half clad, and of a vicious temper, dressing in sour silence beside the stove.
"Did they wake you up?" the card-player inquired.
"Yes."
"Me, too. I"d rather bunk in with a herd of walrus in the mating season."
He was a long, slim man, with blue-black hair and a gas-bleached face of startling pallor from which glittered two wild and roving eyes that flitted in and out of my visual line toward, to, and past me with a baffling elusive glimmer like that of jet spangles. His hands were slender and bony and colorless, but while he talked they worked, each independently. They performed queer, wizard antics with the cards--one-handed cuts, rapid, fluttering shuffles and "frame-ups,"
after each pa.s.s leaving the pile of pasteboards as square-edged and even as before. While he observed me over his shoulder one hand wandered to some scattered poker-chips which clicked together beneath his touch into a solid-ivory column as if separately magnetized. He shuffled and dealt and cut the disks and made them do odd capers like the cards.
"I slept in a menagerie tent once," said he, "but these people have got it on the animals." He nodded toward the sleeping-quarters.
"The open life seems to make a Pan"s pipe out of the human nose," said I, with disgust.
My indignation was intense and underlaid with a sullen fury at losing my rest. I seized the stranger and led him with me to the open door, saying, roughly, "Listen to that."
The room was large and low, dim-lighted and walled with tiers of canvas-bottomed "standees" three high. The floor was a litter of boots, the benches piled with garments. Every bed was full, and the place groaned with sounds of strangulation, asphyxiation, and other disagreeable demises. The bunks were peopled by tortured bodies, which seemed to cry of throttlings, garrotings, and sundry hideous punishments. My nervous system, unable to stand it, had risen a-quiver, then shrieked for mercy.
From the nearest sleeper came the most unhappy sounds. He snored at free-and-easy intervals with the voice of a whistling-buoy in a ground swell--a handsome, resonant intake that died away reluctantly, then changed to a loathsome gurgle, as if he blew his breath through a tube into a pot of thick liquid. Now and then he smacked his lips and ground his teeth until the gooseflesh arose on my neck.
"That"s the fellow that drove me out," said my new acquaintance as we went back to our seats beside the stove. "I had the berth below him. I sleep light, anyhow, since I woke up one night down on the Texas Panhandle and found a Chinaman astraddle of my brisket with a butcherknife."
"That must have been nice," said I at random. "What did you do?"
"I doubled up my legs and kicked him into the camp-fire." The stranger was dealing the cards again, this time into a fanlike, intricate solitaire much affected by gamblers. "I tried the trick again to-night, but I went wrong. I wanted to stop the swan-song of the guy over my head, so I lifted up my feet and put them where the canvas sagged lowest. Then I stretched my legs like a j.a.p juggler, but I fetched away my own bunk and came down on the man below. I broke a snore short off in him. He"ll never get it out unless he has it pulled. That was us you heard two hours ago."
I was too tired and sleepy to talk, for I had come down from the hills the previous afternoon to find the equinoxial raging, and as a result the roadhouse full from floor to ridge-pole with the motley crew that had sifted out from the interior. The coastwise craft were hugging the lee of the sandy islet, waiting for the blow to abate; telephone-wires were down, and Bering"s waters had piled in from the south until they flooded the endless sloughs and tide flats behind Solomon City, destroyed the ferries, and cut us off both east and west, by land and by sea. It were better, I had thought, to wait on the coast for a day or so, watching for a chance to dodge to Nome, than to return to the mines, so I had lugged my war bag into Anderson"s place and made formal demand for shelter.
The proprietor had apologized as he a.s.signed me a bunk. "It"s the best I"ve got," said he. "I"ve put you alongside of the stove, so if the boys snore too loud you can heave coal on "em. Them big lumps is better than your boots."
I had tried both fuel and footgear fruitlessly, and when my outraged ears would not permit further slumber I had given up the attempt. Now, while the blue-haired man with insomnia dealt "Idiot"s Delight" I sat vaguely fascinated by the play of his hands, half dozing under the drone of his voice.
The wind rioted without, whipping the sea spray across the sand-dunes until it rattled upon our walls like shot. Meanwhile my companion adventured aimlessly, his strange and vagrant fancies calling for no answer, his odd and morbid journeyings matching well with the whimpering night. His stories were without beginning, and they lacked any end. They commenced without reason, led through unfrequented paths, then closed for no cause. Through them ran no thread of relevancy. They were neither cogent nor cohesive. Their incidents took shape and tumbled forth irrelated and inconsequent. Wherefore I knew them for the truth, and found myself ere long wide-eyed and still, my brain as keen as ever nature made it.
The story of the dead Frenchman has seemed strained and gruesome to me since, but that night the storm made it real, and the stranger"s unsmiling earnestness robbed it of offense. His words told me a tale of which he had no thought, and painted pictures quite apart from those he had in mind. His very frame of mind, his pagan superst.i.tion, his frank, irreverent philosophy, disclosed queer glimpses of this land where morals are of the fourth dimension, where life is a gamble and death a joke. Whether he really believed all he said or whether he made sport of me I do not know. It may be that the elfin voices of the storm roused in him an impulse to gratify his distorted sense of humor at my expense--or at his own. He began somewhat as follows:
"It"s a good night for a dead man to walk." Then, seeing the flicker in my eyes, he ran on: "You don"t think they can do it, eh? Well, I didn"t believe it neither, and I"m not sure I believe it now, but I"ve seen queer things--queer things--and I"ve only got one pair to draw to.
Either they happened as I saw them or I"m crazy." He leaped at his story boldly.
"I"m pretty tired and hungry when I hit Council City late one fall, for I"d upset my rowboat, lost my outfit, and "mushed" it one hundred fifty miles. My whole digestive paraphernalia is in a state of _innocuous desuetude_, if you know what that is, because all I save from the wreck is a flour-sack full of cigarette-papers and a package of chocolate pills about the size of a match-head. Each one of these pellets is warranted to contain sufficient nourishment to last the Germany army for one month. I read it on the label. They may have had it in them; I don"t know. I swallowed one every morning and then filled up on reindeer moss till I felt like the leaping-pad in a circus.
"Now, when I reach camp I find there ain"t any fresh grub to speak of.
But I can"t get away, so I stick on until spring. See! In time we begin to have scurvy something terrible. One man out of every five cashes in.
I"m living in a cabin with a lot of Frenchmen and we bury seven from this one shack--seven, that"s all! It gets on my nerves finally. I don"t like dead men. Now, the last two who fall sick is old man Manard and my pal, young Pete De Foe. Pete has a ten-dollar gold piece and Manard owns a dog. Inasmuch as they both knew that they can"t weather it out till the break-up, Pete bets his ten dollars against the dog that he"ll die before Manard. Well, this is something new in the sporting line, and we begin to string our bets pretty free. There ain"t much excitement going on, so the boys visit the cabin every day, look over the entries, then go outside and make book. I open up a Paris mutuel. The old man is a seven-to-one favorite at the start because he had all the best of it on form, but the youngster puts up a grand race. For three weeks they seesaw back and forth. First one looks like a winner, then the other.
It"s as pretty running as I ever see. Then Pete lets out a wonderful burst of speed, "zings" over the last quarter, noses out Manard at the wire, and brings home the money. He dies at 3 A.M. and wins by four hours. I cop eighty-four dollars, six pairs of suspenders, a keg of wire nails, and a frying-pan, which const.i.tutes all the circulating medium of the camp. I"m the stakeholder for the late deceased also, so I find myself the administrator of Manard"s dog and the ten dollars that Pete put up.
"Now, seeing that it had been a killing finish, we arrange for a double-barreled burial and a swell funeral. The ground is froze, of course, but we dig two holes through the gravel till we break a pick-point and decide to let it go at that. The "Bare-headed" Kid is clergyman because he has a square-cut coat that b.u.t.tons up the front to his chin. There ain"t any Bible in camp, so he read some recipes out of a baking-powder cook-book, after which Deaf Mike tries to play "Taps" on the cornet. But he"s held the horn in his mit during the services, and, the temperature being forty degrees below freezo, when he wets his lips to play they stick to the mouthpiece and crab the hymn. As a whole, it is an enjoyable affair, however, and the best-conducted funeral of the winter. Everybody has a good time, though nothing rough.
"Now, I"ve been friendly to young Pete De Foe--him and I bunked together--and the next night he comes to me, saying that he can"t rest.
I see him as plain as I see you.
""What"s wrong?" says I. "Are you cold?"