"You have children?"
"At one time I wished--but now--no. And I am thankful." "And a mother?"
"Yes." "She loves you?" "Yes." Her replies were whispers.
"And a brother?--no matter, he is a man. But a sister?" Her head drooped a quavering "Yes." "Younger? Very much?" "Seven years." "And you have thought well about this matter? About them? About your mother?
And your sister? She stands on the threshold of her woman"s life, and this wildness of yours may mean much to her. Could you go before her, look upon her fresh young face, hold her hand in yours, or touch your cheek to hers?"
To his words, her brain formed vivid images, till she cried out, "Don"t! don"t!" and shrank away as do the wolf-dogs from the lash.
"But you must face all this; and better it is to do it now." In his eyes, which she could not see, there was a great compa.s.sion, but his face, tense and quivering, showed no relenting.
She raised her head from the table, forced back the tears, struggled for control.
"I shall go away. They will never see me, and come to forget me. I shall be to them as dead. And--and I will go with Clyde--today." It seemed final. Wharton stepped forward, but the priest waved him back.
"You have wished for children?" A silent "Yes." "And prayed for them?"
"Often." "And have you thought, if you should have children?" Father Roubeau"s eyes rested for a moment on the man by the window.
A quick light shot across her face. Then the full import dawned upon her. She raised her hand appealingly, but he went on.
"Can you picture an innocent babe in your arms? A boy? The world is not so hard upon a girl. Why, your very breast would turn to gall! And you could be proud and happy of your boy, as you looked on other children?--" "O, have pity! Hush!" "A scapegoat--"
"Don"t! don"t! I will go back!" She was at his feet.
"A child to grow up with no thought of evil, and one day the world to fling a tender name in his face. A child to look back and curse you from whose loins he sprang!"
"O my G.o.d! my G.o.d!" She groveled on the floor. The priest sighed and raised her to her feet.
Wharton pressed forward, but she motioned him away.
"Don"t come near me, Clyde! I am going back!" The tears were coursing pitifully down her face, but she made no effort to wipe them away.
"After all this? You cannot! I will not let you!" "Don"t touch me!" She shivered and drew back.
"I will! You are mine! Do you hear? You are mine!" Then he whirled upon the priest. "O what a fool I was to ever let you wag your silly tongue!
Thank your G.o.d you are not a common man, for I"d--but the priestly prerogative must be exercised, eh? Well, you have exercised it. Now get out of my house, or I"ll forget who and what you are!" Father Roubeau bowed, took her hand, and started for the door. But Wharton cut them off.
"Grace! You said you loved me?" "I did." "And you do now?" "I do." "Say it again."
"I do love you, Clyde; I do." "There, you priest!" he cried. "You have heard it, and with those words on her lips you would send her back to live a lie and a h.e.l.l with that man?"
But Father Roubeau whisked the woman into the inner room and closed the door. "No words!" he whispered to Wharton, as he struck a casual posture on a stool. "Remember, for her sake," he added.
The room echoed to a rough knock at the door; the latch raised and Edwin Bentham stepped in.
"Seen anything of my wife?" he asked as soon as salutations had been exchanged.
Two heads nodded negatively.
"I saw her tracks down from the cabin," he continued tentatively, "and they broke off, just opposite here, on the main trail." His listeners looked bored.
"And I--I thought--"
"She was here!" thundered Wharton.
The priest silenced him with a look. "Did you see her tracks leading up to this cabin, my son?" Wily Father Roubeau--he had taken good care to obliterate them as he came up the same path an hour before.
"I didn"t stop to look, I--" His eyes rested suspiciously on the door to the other room, then interrogated the priest. The latter shook his head; but the doubt seemed to linger.
Father Roubeau breathed a swift, silent prayer, and rose to his feet.
"If you doubt me, why--" He made as though to open the door.
A priest could not lie. Edwin Bentham had heard this often, and believed it.
"Of course not, Father," he interposed hurriedly. "I was only wondering where my wife had gone, and thought maybe--I guess she"s up at Mrs.
Stanton"s on French Gulch. Nice weather, isn"t it? Heard the news?
Flour"s gone down to forty dollars a hundred, and they say the che-cha-quas are flocking down the river in droves.
"But I must be going; so good-by." The door slammed, and from the window they watched him take his guest up French Gulch. A few weeks later, just after the June high-water, two men shot a canoe into mid-stream and made fast to a derelict pine. This tightened the painter and jerked the frail craft along as would a tow-boat. Father Roubeau had been directed to leave the Upper Country and return to his swarthy children at Minook. The white men had come among them, and they were devoting too little time to fishing, and too much to a certain deity whose transient habitat was in countless black bottles.
Malemute Kid also had business in the Lower Country, so they journeyed together.
But one, in all the Northland, knew the man Paul Roubeau, and that man was Malemute Kid. Before him alone did the priest cast off the sacerdotal garb and stand naked. And why not? These two men knew each other. Had they not shared the last morsel of fish, the last pinch of tobacco, the last and inmost thought, on the barren stretches of Bering Sea, in the heartbreaking mazes of the Great Delta, on the terrible winter journey from Point Barrow to the Porcupine? Father Roubeau puffed heavily at his trail-worn pipe, and gazed on the reddisked sun, poised somberly on the edge of the northern horizon.
Malemute Kid wound up his watch. It was midnight.
"Cheer up, old man!" The Kid was evidently gathering up a broken thread.
"G.o.d surely will forgive such a lie. Let me give you the word of a man who strikes a true note: If She have spoken a word, remember thy lips are sealed, And the brand of the Dog is upon him by whom is the secret revealed.
If there be trouble to Herward, and a lie of the blackest can clear, Lie, while thy lips can move or a man is alive to hear."
Father Roubeau removed his pipe and reflected. "The man speaks true, but my soul is not vexed with that. The lie and the penance stand with G.o.d; but--but--"
"What then? Your hands are clean." "Not so. Kid, I have thought much, and yet the thing remains. I knew, and made her go back." The clear note of a robin rang out from the wooden bank, a partridge drummed the call in the distance, a moose lunged noisily in the eddy; but the twain smoked on in silence.
The Wisdom of the Trail
Sitka Charley had achieved the impossible. Other Indians might have known as much of the wisdom of the trail as he did; but he alone knew the white man"s wisdom, the honor of the trail, and the law. But these things had not come to him in a day. The aboriginal mind is slow to generalize, and many facts, repeated often, are required to compa.s.s an understanding. Sitka Charley, from boyhood, had been thrown continually with white men, and as a man he had elected to cast his fortunes with them, expatriating himself, once and for all, from his own people. Even then, respecting, almost venerating their power, and pondering over it, he had yet to divine its secret essence--the honor and the law. And it was only by the c.u.mulative evidence of years that he had finally come to understand. Being an alien, when he did know, he knew it better than the white man himself; being an Indian, he had achieved the impossible.
And of these things had been bred a certain contempt for his own people--a contempt which he had made it a custom to conceal, but which now burst forth in a polyglot whirlwind of curses upon the heads of Kah-Chucte and Gowhee. They cringed before him like a brace of snarling wolf dogs, too cowardly to spring, too wolfish to cover their fangs.
They were not handsome creatures. Neither was Sitka Charley. All three were frightful-looking. There was no flesh to their faces; their cheekbones were ma.s.sed with hideous scabs which had cracked and frozen alternately under the intense frost; while their eyes burned luridly with the light which is born of desperation and hunger. Men so situated, beyond the pale of the honor and the law, are not to be trusted. Sitka Charley knew this; and this was why he had forced them to abandon their rifles with the rest of the camp outfit ten days before. His rifle and Captain Eppingwell"s were the only ones that remained.
"Come, get a fire started," he commanded, drawing out the precious matchbox with its attendant strips of dry birchbark.
The two Indians fell sullenly to the task of gathering dead branches and underwood. They were weak and paused often, catching themselves, in the act of stooping, with giddy motions, or staggering to the center of operations with their knees shaking like castanets.