II
"Oui, madame, thees is de place. One, two, t'ree island below
Stuart River. Thees is t'ree island."
As he spoke, Pierre Fontaine drove his pole against the bank and
held the stern of the boat against the current. This thrust the
bow in, till a nimble breed climbed ashore with the painter and
made fast.
"One leel tam, madame, I go look see."
A chorus of dogs marked his disappearance over the edge of the
bank, but a minute later he was back again.
"Oui, madame, thees is de cabin. I mak investigation. No can
find mans at home. But him no go vaire far, vaire long, or him no
leave dogs. Him come queek, you bet!"
"Help me out, Pierre. I'm tired all over from the boat. You
might have made it softer, you know."
From a nest of furs amidships, Karen Sayther rose to her full
height of slender fairness. But if she looked lily-frail in her
elemental environment, she was belied by the grip she put upon
Pierre's hand, by the knotting of her woman's biceps as it took
the weight of her body, by the splendid effort of her limbs as
they held her out from the perpendicular bank while she made the
ascent. Though shapely flesh clothed delicate frame, her body was
a seat of strength.
Still, for all the careless ease with which she had made the
landing, there was a warmer color than usual to her face, and a
perceptibly extra beat to her heart. But then, also, it was with
a certain reverent curiousness that she approached the cabin,
while the Hush on her cheek showed a yet riper mellowness.
"Look, see!" Pierre pointed to the scattered chips by the
woodpile. "Him fresh--two, t'ree day, no more."
Mrs. Sayther nodded. She tried to peer through the small window,
but it was made of greased parchment which admitted light while it
blocked vision. Failing this, she went round to the door, half
lifted the rude latch to enter, but changed her mind and let it
fall back into place. Then she suddenly dropped on one knee and
kissed the rough-hewn threshold. If Pierre Fontaine saw, he gave
no sign, and the memory in the time to come was never shared. But
the next instant, one of the boatmen, placidly lighting his pipe,
was startled by an unwonted harshness in his captain's voice.
"Hey! You! Le Goire! You mak'm soft more better," Pierre
commanded. "Plenty bear-skin; plenty blanket. Dam!"
But the nest was soon after disrupted, and the major portion
tossed up to the crest of the shore, where Mrs. Sayther lay down
to wait in comfort.
Reclining on her side, she looked out and over the wide-stretching
Yukon. Above the mountains which lay beyond the further shore,
the sky was murky with the smoke of unseen forest fires, and
through this the afternoon sun broke feebly, throwing a vague
radiance to earth, and unreal shadows. To the sky-line of the
four quarters--spruce-shrouded islands, dark waters, and ice-
scarred rocky ridges--stretched the immaculate wilderness. No
sign of human existence broke the solitude; no sound the
stillness. The land seemed bound under the unreality of the
unknown, wrapped in the brooding mystery of great spaces.
Perhaps it was this which made Mrs. Sayther nervous; for she
changed her position constantly, now to look up the river, now
down, or to scan the gloomy shores for the half-hidden mouths of
back channels. After an hour or so the boatmen were sent ashore
to pitch camp for the night, but Pierre remained with his mistress
to watch.
"Ah! him come thees tam," he whispered, after a long silence, his
gaze bent up the river to the head of the island.
A canoe, with a paddle flashing on either side, was slipping down
the current. In the stern a man's form, and in the bow a woman's,
swung rhythmically to the work. Mrs. Sayther had no eyes for the
woman till the canoe drove in closer and her bizarre beauty
peremptorily demanded notice. A close-fitting blouse of moose-
skin, fantastically beaded, outlined faithfully the well-rounded
lines of her body, while a silken kerchief, gay of color and
picturesquely draped, partly covered great masses of blue-black
hair. But it was the face, cast belike in copper bronze, which
caught and held Mrs. Sayther's fleeting glance. Eyes, piercing
and black and large, with a traditionary hint of obliqueness,
looked forth from under clear-stencilled, clean-arching brows.
Without suggesting cadaverousness, though high-boned and
prominent, the cheeks fell away and met in a mouth, thin-lipped
and softly strong. It was a face which advertised the dimmest
trace of ancient Mongol blood, a reversion, after long centuries
of wandering, to the parent stem. This effect was heightened by
the delicately aquiline nose with its thin trembling nostrils, and
by the general air of eagle wildness which seemed to characterize
not only the face but the creature herself. She was, in fact, the
Tartar type modified to idealization, and the tribe of Red Indian
is lucky that breeds such a unique body once in a score of
generations.
Dipping long strokes and strong, the girl, in concert with the
man, suddenly whirled the tiny craft about against the current and
brought it gently to the shore. Another instant and she stood at
the top of the bank, heaving up by rope, hand under hand, a
quarter of fresh-killed moose. Then the man followed her, and
together, with a swift rush, they drew up the canoe. The dogs
were in a whining mass about them, and as the girl stooped among
them caressingly, the man's gaze fell upon Mrs. Sayther, who had
arisen. He looked, brushed his eyes unconsciously as though his
sight were deceiving him, and looked again.
"Karen," he said simply, coming forward and extending his hand, "I
thought for the moment I was dreaming. I went snow-blind for a
time, this spring, and since then my eyes have been playing tricks
with me."
Mrs. Sayther, whose flush had deepened and whose heart was urging
painfully, had been prepared for almost anything save this coolly
extended hand; but she tactfully curbed herself and grasped it
heartily with her own.
"You know, Dave, I threatened often to come, and I would have,
too, only--only--"
"Only I didn't give the word." David Payne laughed and watched
the Indian girl disappearing into the cabin.
"Oh, I understand, Dave, and had I been in your place I'd most
probably have done the same. But I have come--now."
"Then come a little bit farther, into the cabin and get something
to eat," he said genially, ignoring or missing the feminine
suggestion of appeal in her voice. "And you must be tired too.
Which way are you travelling? Up? Then you wintered in Dawson,
or came in on the last ice. Your camp?" He glanced at the
voyageurs circled about the fire in the open, and held back the
door for her to enter.
"I came up on the ice from Circle City last winter," he continued,
"and settled down here for a while. Am prospecting some on
Henderson Creek, and if that fails, have been thinking of trying
my hand this fall up the Stuart River."
"You aren't changed much, are you?" she asked irrelevantly,
striving to throw the conversation upon a more personal basis.
"A little less flesh, perhaps, and a little more muscle. How did
YOU mean?"
But she shrugged her shoulders and peered I through the dim light
at the Indian girl, who had lighted the fire and was frying great
chunks of moose meat, alternated with thin ribbons of bacon.
"Did you stop in Dawson long?" The man was whittling a stave of
birchwood into a rude axe-handle, and asked the question without
raising his head.
"Oh, a few days," she answered, following the girl with her eyes,
and hardly hearing. "What were you saying? In Dawson? A month,
in fact, and glad to get away. The arctic male is elemental, you
know, and somewhat strenuous in his feelings."
"Bound to be when he gets right down to the soil. He leaves
convention with the spring bed at borne. But you were wise in
your choice of time for leaving. You'll be out of the country
before mosquito season, which is a blessing your lack of
experience will not permit you to appreciate."
"I suppose not. But tell me about yourself, about your life.
What kind of neighbors have you? Or have you any?"
While she queried she watched the girl grinding coffee in the
corner of a flower sack upon the hearthstone. With a steadiness
and skill which predicated nerves as primitive as the method, she
crushed the imprisoned berries with a heavy fragment of quartz.
David Payne noted his visitor's gaze, and the shadow of a smile
drifted over his lips.
"I did have some," he replied. "Missourian chaps, and a couple of
Cornishmen, but they went down to Eldorado to work at wages for a
grubstake."
Mrs. Sayther cast a look of speculative regard upon the girl.
"But of course there are plenty of Indians about?"
"Every mother's son of them down to Dawson long ago. Not a native
in the whole country, barring Winapie here, and she's a Koyokuk
lass,--comes from a thousand miles or so down the river."
Mrs. Sayther felt suddenly faint; and though the smile of interest
in no wise waned, the face of the man seemed to draw away to a
telescopic distance, and the tiered logs of the cabin to whirl
drunkenly about. But she was bidden draw up to the table, and
during the meal discovered time and space in which to find
herself. She talked little, and that principally about the land
and weather, while the man wandered off into a long description of
the difference between the shallow summer diggings of the Lower
Country and the deep winter diggings of the Upper Country.
"You do not ask why I came north?" she asked. "Surely you know."
They had moved back from the table, and David Payne had returned
to his axe-handle. "Did you get my letter?"
"A last one? No, I don't think so. Most probably it's trailing
around the Birch Creek Country or lying in some trader's shack on
the Lower River. The way they run the mails in here is shameful.
No order, no system, no--"
"Don't be wooden, Dave! Help me!" She spoke sharply now, with an
assumption of authority which rested upon the past. "Why don't
you ask me about myself? About those we knew in the old times?
Have you no longer any interest in the world? Do you know that my
husband is dead?"
"Indeed, I am sorry. How long--"
"David!" She was ready to cry with vexation, but the reproach she
threw into her voice eased her.
"Did you get any of my letters? You must have got some of them,
though you never answered."
"Well, I didn't get the last one, announcing, evidently, the death
of your husband, and most likely others went astray; but I did get
some. I--er--read them aloud to Winapie as a warning--that is,
you know, to impress upon her the wickedness of her white sisters.
And I--er--think she profited by it. Don't you?"
She disregarded the sting, and went on. "In the last letter,
which you did not receive, I told, as you have guessed, of Colonel
Sayther's death. That was a year ago. I also said that if you
did not come out to me, I would go in to you. And as I had often
promised, I came."
"I know of no promise."
"In the earlier letters?"
"Yes, you promised, but as I neither asked nor answered, it was
unratified. So I do not know of any such promise. But I do know
of another, which you, too, may remember. It was very long ago."
He dropped the axe-handle to the floor and raised his head. "It
was so very long ago, yet I remember it distinctly, the day, the
time, every detail. We were in a rose garden, you and I,--your
mother's rose garden. All things were budding, blossoming, and
the sap of spring was in our blood. And I drew you over--it was
the first--and kissed you full on the lips. Don't you remember?"
"Don't go over it, Dave, don't! I know every shameful line of it.
How often have I wept! If you only knew how I have suffered--"
"You promised me then--ay, and a thousand times in the sweet days
that followed. Each look of your eyes, each touch of your hand,
each syllable that fell from your lips, was a promise. And then--
how shall I say?--there came a man. He was old--old enough to
have begotten you--and not nice to look upon, but as the world
goes, clean. He had done no wrong, followed the letter of the
law, was respectable. Further, and to the point, he possessed
some several paltry mines,--a score; it does not matter: and he
owned a few miles of lands, and engineered deals, and clipped
coupons. He--"
"But there were other things," she interrupted, "I told you.
Pressure--money matters--want--my people--trouble. You understood
the whole sordid situation. I could not help it. It was not my
will. I was sacrificed, or I sacrificed, have it as you wish.
But, my God! Dave, I gave you up! You never did ME justice.
Think what I have gone through!"
"It was not your will? Pressure? Under high heaven there was no
thing to will you to this man's bed or that."
"But I cared for you all the time," she pleaded.
"I was unused to your way of measuring love. I am still unused.
I do not understand."
"But now! now!"
"We were speaking of this man you saw fit to marry. What manner
of man was he? Wherein did he charm your soul? What potent
virtues were his? True, he had a golden grip,--an almighty golden
grip. He knew the odds. He was versed in cent per cent. He had
a narrow wit and excellent judgment of the viler parts, whereby he
transferred this man's money to his pockets, and that man's money,
and the next man's. And the law smiled. In that it did not
condemn, our Christian ethics approved. By social measure he was
not a bad man. But by your measure, Karen, by mine, by ours of
the rose garden, what was he?"
"Remember, he is dead."
"The fact is not altered thereby. What was he? A great, gross,
material creature, deaf to song, blind to beauty, dead to the
spirit. He was fat with laziness, and flabby-cheeked, and the
round of his belly witnessed his gluttony--"
"But he is dead. It is we who are now--now! now! Don't you hear?
As you say, I have been inconstant. I have sinned. Good. But
should not you, too, cry peccavi? If I have broken promises, have
not you? Your love of the rose garden was of all time, or so you
said. Where is it now?"
"It is here! now!" he cried, striking his breast passionately with
clenched hand. "It has always been."
"And your love was a great love; there was none greater," she
continued; "or so you said in the rose garden. Yet it is not fine
enough, large enough, to forgive me here, crying now at your
feet?"
The man hesitated. His mouth opened; words shaped vainly on his
lips. She had forced him to bare his heart and speak truths which
he had hidden from himself. And she was good to look upon,
standing there in a glory of passion, calling back old
associations and warmer life. He turned away his head that he
might not see, but she passed around and fronted him.
"Look at me, Dave! Look at me! I am the same, after all. And so
are you, if you would but see. We are not changed."
Her hand rested on his shoulder, and his had half-passed, roughly,
about her, when the sharp crackle of a match startled him to
himself. Winapie, alien to the scene, was lighting the slow wick
of the slush lamp. She appeared to start out against a background
of utter black, and the flame, flaring suddenly up, lighted her
bronze beauty to royal gold.
"You see, it is impossible," he groaned, thrusting the fair-haired
woman gently from him. "It is impossible," he repeated. "It is
impossible."
"I am not a girl, Dave, with a girl's illusions," she said softly,
though not daring to come back to him. "It is as a woman that I
understand. Men are men. A common custom of the country. I am
not shocked. I divined it from the first. But--ah!--it is only a
marriage of the country--not a real marriage?"
"We do not ask such questions in Alaska," he interposed feebly.
"I know, but--"
"Well, then, it is only a marriage of the country--nothing else."
"And there are no children?"
"No."
"Nor--"
"No, no; nothing--but it is impossible."
"But it is not." She was at his side again, her hand touching
lightly, caressingly, the sunburned back of his. "I know the
custom of the land too well. Men do it every day. They do not
care to remain here, shut out from the world, for all their days;
so they give an order on the P. C. C. Company for a year's
provisions, some money in hand, and the girl is content. By the
end of that time, a man--" She shrugged her shoulders. "And so
with the girl here. We will give her an order upon the company,
not for a year, but for life. What was she when you found her? A
raw, meat-eating savage; fish in summer, moose in winter, feasting
in plenty, starving in famine. But for you that is what she would
have remained. For your coming she was happier; for your going,
surely, with a life of comparative splendor assured, she will be
happier than if you had never been."
"No, no," he protested. "It is not right."
"Come, Dave, you must see. She is not your kind. There is no
race affinity. She is an aborigine, sprung from the soil, yet
close to the soil, and impossible to lift from the soil. Born
savage, savage she will die. But we--you and I--the dominant,
evolved race--the salt of the earth and the masters thereof! We
are made for each other. The supreme call is of kind, and we are
of kind. Reason and feeling dictate it. Your very instinct
demands it. That you cannot deny. You cannot escape the
generations behind you. Yours is an ancestry which has survived
for a thousand centuries, and for a hundred thousand centuries,
and your line must not stop here. It cannot. Your ancestry will
not permit it. Instinct is stronger than the will. The race is
mightier than you. Come, Dave, let us go. We are young yet, and
life is good. Come."
Winapie, passing out of the cabin to feed the dogs, caught his
attention and caused him to shake his head and weakly to
reiterate. But the woman's hand slipped about his neck, and her
cheek pressed to his. His bleak life rose up and smote him,--the
vain struggle with pitiless forces; the dreary years of frost and
famine; the harsh and jarring contact with elemental life; the
aching void which mere animal existence could not fill. And
there, seduction by his side, whispering of brighter, warmer
lands, of music, light, and joy, called the old times back again.
He visioned it unconsciously. Faces rushed in upon him; glimpses
of forgotten scenes, memories of merry hours; strains of song and
trills of laughter -
"Come, Dave, Come. I have for both. The way is soft." She
looked about her at the bare furnishings of the cabin. "I have
for both. The world is at our feet, and all joy is ours. Come!
come!"
She was in his arms, trembling, and he held her tightly. He rose
to his feet . . . But the snarling of hungry dogs, and the shrill
cries of Winapie bringing about peace between the combatants, came
muffled to his ear through the heavy logs. And another scene
flashed before him. A struggle in the forest,--a bald-face
grizzly, broken-legged, terrible; the snarling of the dogs and the
shrill cries of Winapie as she urged them to the attack; himself
in the midst of the crush, breathless, panting, striving to hold
off red death; broken-backed, entrail-ripped dogs howling in
impotent anguish and desecrating the snow; the virgin white
running scarlet with the blood of man and beast; the bear,
ferocious, irresistible, crunching, crunching down to the core of
his life; and Winapie, at the last, in the thick of the frightful
muddle, hair flying, eyes flashing, fury incarnate, passing the
long hunting knife again and again--Sweat started to his forehead.
He shook off the clinging woman and staggered back to the wall.
And she, knowing that the moment had come, but unable to divine
what was passing within him, felt all she had gained slipping
away.
"Dave! Dave!" she cried. "I will not give you up! I will not
give you up! If you do not wish to come, we will stay. I will
stay with you. The world is less to me than are you. I will be a
Northland wife to you. I will cook your food, feed your dogs,
break trail for you, lift a paddle with you. I can do it.
Believe me, I am strong."
Nor did he doubt it, looking upon her and holding her off from
him; but his face had grown stern and gray, and the warmth had
died out of his eyes.
"I will pay off Pierre and the boatmen, and let them go. And I
will stay with you, priest or no priest, minister or no minister;
go with you, now, anywhere! Dave! Dave! Listen to me! You say
I did you wrong in the past--and I did--let me make up for it, let
me atone. If I did not rightly measure love before, let me show
that I can now."
She sank to the floor and threw her arms about his knees, sobbing.
"And you DO care for me. You DO care for me. Think! The long
years I have waited, suffered! You can never know!" He stooped
and raised her to her feet.
"Listen," he commanded, opening the door and lifting her bodily
outside. "It cannot be. We are not alone to be considered. You
must go. I wish you a safe journey. You will find it tougher
work when you get up by the Sixty Mile, but you have the best
boatmen in the world, and will get through all right. Will you
say good-by?"
Though she already had herself in hand, she looked at him
hopelessly. "If--if--if Winapie should--" She quavered and
stopped.
But he grasped the unspoken thought, and answered, "Yes." Then
struck with the enormity of it, "It cannot be conceived. There is
no likelihood. It must not be entertained."
"Kiss me," she whispered, her face lighting. Then she turned and
went away.
"Break camp, Pierre," she said to the boatman, who alone had
remained awake against her return. "We must be going."
By the firelight his sharp eyes scanned the woe in her face, but
he received the extraordinary command as though it were the most
usual thing in the world. "Oui, madame," he assented. "Which
way? Dawson?"
"No," she answered, lightly enough; "up; out; Dyea."
Whereat he fell upon the sleeping voyageurs, kicking them,
grunting, from their blankets, and buckling them down to the work,
the while his voice, vibrant with action, shrilling through all
the camp. In a trice Mrs. Sayther's tiny tent had been struck,
pots and pans were being gathered up, blankets rolled, and the men
staggering under the loads to the boat. Here, on the banks, Mrs.
Sayther waited till the luggage was made ship-shape and her nest
prepared.
"We line up to de head of de island," Pierre explained to her
while running out the long tow rope. "Den we tak to das back
channel, where de water not queek, and I t'ink we mak good tam."
A scuffling and pattering of feet in the last year's dry grass
caught his quick ear, and he turned his head. The Indian girl,
circled by a bristling ring of wolf dogs, was coming toward them.
Mrs. Sayther noted that the girl's face, which had been apathetic
throughout the scene in the cabin, had now quickened into blazing
and wrathful life.
"What you do my man?" she demanded abruptly of Mrs. Sayther. "Him
lay on bunk, and him look bad all the time. I say, 'What the
matter, Dave? You sick?' But him no say nothing. After that him
say, 'Good girl Winapie, go way. I be all right bimeby.' What
you do my man, eh? I think you bad woman."
Mrs. Sayther looked curiously at the barbarian woman who shared
the life of this man, while she departed alone in the darkness of
night.
"I think you bad woman," Winapie repeated in the slow, methodical
way of one who gropes for strange words in an alien tongue. "I
think better you go way, no come no more. Eh? What you think? I
have one man. I Indian girl. You 'Merican woman. You good to
see. You find plenty men. Your eyes blue like the sky. Your
skin so white, so soft."
Coolly she thrust out a brown forefinger and pressed the soft
cheek of the other woman. And to the eternal credit of Karen
Sayther, she never flinched. Pierre hesitated and half stepped
forward; but she motioned him away, though her heart welled to him
with secret gratitude. "It's all right, Pierre," she said.
"Please go away."
He stepped back respectfully out of earshot, where he stood
grumbling to himself and measuring the distance in springs.
"Um white, um soft, like baby." Winapie touched the other cheek
and withdrew her hand. "Bimeby mosquito come. Skin get sore in
spot; um swell, oh, so big; um hurt, oh, so much. Plenty
mosquito; plenty spot. I think better you go now before mosquito
come. This way," pointing down the stream, "you go St. Michael's;
that way," pointing up, "you go Dyea. Better you go Dyea. Good-
by."
And that which Mrs. Sayther then did, caused Pierre to marvel
greatly. For she threw her arms around the Indian girl, kissed
her, and burst into tears.
"Be good to him," she cried. "Be good to him."
Then she slipped half down the face of the bank, called back
"Good-by," and dropped into the boat amidships. Pierre followed
her and cast off. He shoved the steering oar into place and gave
the signal. Le Goire lifted an old French chanson; the men, like
a row of ghosts in the dim starlight, bent their backs to the tow
line; the steering oar cut the black current sharply, and the boat
swept out into the night.
