"The deuce you say!" cried Kent, spilling a bit of his coffee in the thrill of the moment. "Why, that"s where Staff-Sergeant O"Connor is bound for!"
"So I heard Doctor Cardigan tell her. But she didn"t reply to that. She just--went. If you don"t mind a little joke in your present condition, sir, I might say that Doctor Cardigan was considerably flayed up over her. A deuced pretty girl, sir, deuced pretty! And I think he was shot through!"
"Now you"re human, Mercer. She was pretty, wasn"t she?"
"Er--yes--stunningly so, Mr. Kent," agreed Mercer, reddening suddenly to the roots of his pasty, blond hair. "I don"t mind confessing that in this unusual place her appearance was quite upsetting."
"I agree with you, friend Mercer," nodded Kent. "She upset me. And--see here, old man!--will you do a dying man the biggest favor he ever asked in his life?"
"I should be most happy, sir, most happy."
"It"s this," said Kent. "I want to know if that girl actually leaves on the down-river scow tonight. If I"m alive tomorrow morning, will you tell me?"
"I shall do my best, sir."
"Good. It"s simply the silly whim of a dying man, Mercer. But I want to be humored in it. And I"m sensitive--like yourself. I don"t want Cardigan to know. There"s an old Indian named Mooie, who lives in a shack just beyond the sawmill. Give him ten dollars and tell him there is another ten in it if he sees the business through, and reports properly to you, and keeps his mouth shut afterward. Here--the money is under my pillow."
Kent pulled out a wallet and put fifty dollars in Mercer"s hands.
"Buy cigars with the rest of it, old man. It"s of no more use to me.
And this little trick you are going to pull off is worth it. It"s my last fling on earth, you might say."
"Thank you, sir. It is very kind of you."
Mercer belonged to a cla.s.s of wandering Englishmen typical of the Canadian West, the sort that sometimes made real Canadians wonder why a big and glorious country like their own should cling to the mother country. Ingratiating and obsequiously polite at all times, he gave one the impression of having had splendid training as a servant, yet had this intimation been made to him, he would have become highly indignant. Kent had learned their ways pretty well. He had met them in all sorts of places, for one of their inexplicable characteristics was the recklessness and apparent lack of judgment with which they located themselves. Mercer, for instance, should have held a petty clerical job of some kind in a city, and here he was acting as nurse in the heart of a wilderness!
After Mercer had gone with the breakfast things and the money, Kent recalled a number of his species. And he knew that under their veneer of apparent servility was a thing of courage and daring which needed only the right kind of incentive to rouse it. And when roused, it was peculiarly efficient in a secretive, artful-dodger sort of way. It would not stand up before a gun. But it would creep under the mouths of guns on a black night. And Kent was positive his fifty dollars would bring him results--if he lived.
Just why he wanted the information he was after, he could not have told himself. It was a pet aphorism between O"Connor and him that they had often traveled to success on the backs of their hunches. And his proposition to Mercer was made on the spur of one of those moments when the spirit of a hunch possessed him. His morning had been one of unexpected excitement, and now he leaned back in an effort to review it and to forget, if he could, the distressing thing that was bound to happen to him within the next few hours. But he could not get away from the thickening in his chest. It seemed growing on him. Now and then he was compelled to make quite an effort to get sufficient air into his lungs.
He found himself wondering if there was a possibility that the girl might return. For a long time he lay thinking about her, and it struck him as incongruous and in bad taste that fate should have left this adventure for his last. If he had met her six months ago--or even three--it was probable that she would so have changed the events of life for him that he would not have got the half-breed"s bullet in his chest. He confessed the thing unblushingly. The wilderness had taken the place of woman for him. It had claimed him, body and soul. He had desired nothing beyond its wild freedom and its never-ending games of chance. He had dreamed, as every man dreams, but realities and not the dreams had been the red pulse of his life. And yet, if this girl had come sooner--
He revisioned for himself over and over again her hair and eyes, the slimness of her as she had stood at the window, the freedom and strength of that slender body, the poise of her exquisite head, and he felt again the thrill of her hand and the still more wonderful thrill of her lips as she had pressed them warmly upon his.
_And she was of the North_! That was the thought that overwhelmed him. He did not permit himself to believe that she might have told him an untruth. He was confident, if he lived until tomorrow, that Mercer would corroborate his faith in her. He had never heard of a place called the Valley of Silent Men, but it was a big country, and Fort Simpson with its Hudson Bay Company"s post and its half-dozen shacks was a thousand miles away. He was not sure that such a place as that valley really existed. It was easier to believe that the girl"s home was at Fort Providence, Fort Simpson, Fort Good Hope, or even at Fort McPherson. It was not difficult for him to picture her as the daughter of one of the factor lords of the North. Yet this, upon closer consideration, he gave up as unreasonable. The word "Fort" did not stand for population, and there were probably not more than fifty white people at all the posts between the Great Slave and the Arctic. She was not one of these, or the fact would have been known at the Landing.
Neither could she be a riverman"s daughter, for it was inconceivable that either a riverman or a trapper would have sent this girl down into civilization, where this girl had undoubtedly been. It was that point chiefly which puzzled Kent. She was not only beautiful. She had been tutored in schools that were not taught by wilderness missioners. In her, it seemed to him, he had seen the beauty and the wild freedom of the forests as they had come to him straight out of the heart of an ancient aristocracy that was born nearly two hundred years ago in the old cities of Quebec and Montreal.
His mind flashed back at that thought: he remembered the time when he had sought out every nook and cranny of that ancient town of Quebec, and had stood over graves two centuries old, and deep in his soul had envied the dead the lives they had lived. He had always thought of Quebec as a rare old bit of time-yellowed lace among cities--the heart of the New World as it had once been, still beating, still whispering of its one-time power, still living in the memory of its mellowed romance, its almost forgotten tragedies--a ghost that lived, that still beat back defiantly the destroying modernism that would desecrate its sacred things. And it pleased him to think of Marette Radisson as the spirit of it, wandering north, and still farther north--even as the spirits of the profaned dead had risen from the Landing to go farther on.
And feeling that the way had at last been made easy for him, Kent smiled out into the glorious day and whispered softly, as if she were standing there, listening to him:
"If I had lived--I would have called you--my Quebec. It"s pretty, that name. It stands for a lot. And so do you."
And out in the hall, as Kent whispered those words, stood Father Layonne, with a face that was whiter than the mere presence of death had ever made it before. At his side stood Cardigan, aged ten years since he had placed his stethoscope at Kent"s chest that morning. And behind these two were Kedsty, with a face like gray rock, and young Mercer, in whose staring eyes was the horror of a thing he could not yet quite comprehend. Cardigan made an effort to speak and failed.
Kedsty wiped his forehead, as he had wiped it the morning of Kent"s confession. And Father Layonne, as he went to Kent"s door, was breathing softly to himself a prayer.
CHAPTER VII
From the window, the glorious day outside, and the vision he had made for himself of Marette Radisson, Kent turned at the sound of a hand at his door and saw it slowly open. He was expecting it. He had read young Mercer like a book. Mercer"s nervousness and the increased tightening of the thing in his chest had given him warning. The thing was going to happen soon, and Father Layonne had come. He tried to smile, that he might greet his wilderness friend cheerfully and unafraid. But the smile froze when the door opened and he saw the missioner standing there.
More than once he had accompanied Father Layonne over the threshold of life into the presence of death, but he had never before seen in his face what he saw there now. He stared. The missioner remained in the doorway, hesitating, as if at the last moment a great fear held him back. For an interval the eyes of the two men rested upon each other in a silence that was like the grip of a living thing. Then Father Layonne came quietly into the room and closed the door behind him.
Kent drew a deep breath and tried to grin. "You woke me out of a dream," he said, "a day-dream. I"ve had a very pleasant experience this morning, _mon pere_."
"So some one was trying to tell me, Jimmy," replied the little missioner with an effort to smile back.
"Mercer?"
"Yes. He told me about it confidentially. The poor boy must have fallen in love with the young lady."
"So have I, _mon pere_. I don"t mind confessing it to you. I"m rather glad. And if Cardigan hadn"t scheduled me to die--"
"Jimmy," interrupted the missioner quickly, but a bit huskily, "has it ever occurred to you that Doctor Cardigan may be mistaken?"
He had taken one of Kent"s hands. His grip tightened. It began to hurt.
And Kent, looking into his eyes, found his brain all at once like a black room suddenly illuminated by a flash of fire. Drop by drop the blood went out of his face until it was whiter than Father Layonne"s.
"You--you don"t--mean--"
"Yes, yes, boy, I mean just that," said the missioner, in a voice so strange that it did not seem to be his own. "You are not going to die, Jimmy. You are going to live!"
"Live!" Kent dropped back against his pillows. "_Live_!" His lips gasped the one word.
He closed his eyes for an instant, and it seemed to him that the world was aflame. And he repeated the word again, but only his lips formed it, and there came no sound. His senses, strained to the breaking-point to meet the ordeal of death, gave way slowly to the mighty reaction. He felt in those moments like a reeling man. He opened his eyes, and there was a meaningless green haze through the window where the world should have been. But he heard Father Layonne"s voice. It seemed a great distance off, but it was very clear. Doctor Cardigan had made an error, it was saying. And Doctor Cardigan, because of that error, was like a man whose heart had been taken out of him. But it was an excusable error.
If there had been an X-ray--But there had been none. And Doctor Cardigan had made the diagnosis that nine out of ten good surgeons would probably have made. What he had taken to be the aneurismal blood-rush was an exaggerated heart murmur, and the increased thickening in his chest was a simple complication brought about by too much night air. It was too bad the error had happened. But he must not blame Cardigan!
_He must not blame Cardigan_! Those last words pounded like an endless series of little waves in Kent"s brain. He must not blame Cardigan! He laughed, laughed before his dazed senses readjusted themselves, before the world through the window pieced itself into shape again. At least he thought he was laughing. He must--not--blame--Cardigan! What an amazingly stupid thing for Father Layonne to say! Blame Cardigan for giving him back his life? Blame him for the glorious knowledge that he was not going to die? Blame him for--
Things were coming clearer. Like a bolt slipping into its groove his brain found itself. He saw Father Layonne again, with his white, tense face and eyes in which were still seated the fear and the horror he had seen in the doorway. It was not until then that he gripped fully at the truth.
"I--I see," he said. "You and Cardigan think it would have been better if I had died!"
The missioner was still holding his hand. "I don"t know, Jimmy, I don"t know. What has happened is terrible."
"But not so terrible as death," cried Kent, suddenly growing rigid against his pillows. "Great G.o.d, _mon pere_, I want to live! Oh--"
He s.n.a.t.c.hed his hand free and stretched forth both arms to the open window. "Look at it out there! My world again! MY WORLD! I want to go back to it. It"s ten times more precious to me now than it was. Why should I blame Cardigan? _Mon pere_--_mon pere_--listen to me. I can say it now, because I"ve got a right to say it. _I lied_. I didn"t kill John Barkley!"
A strange cry fell from Father Layonne"s lips. It was a choking cry, a cry, not of rejoicing, but of a grief-stung thing. "Jimmy!"
"I swear it! Great heaven, _mon pere_, don"t you believe me?"