On a narrow strip of sand he grounded the boat and lighted the lantern which Simon had placed in the outfit. Its illumination threw up grimly the black shadows about them, and questing among these, he found huge masses of torn and twisted rocks so wildly thrown together that among them were many little caverns and grottoes thickly carpeted with white sand. One of these he chose for a camp, but not until he had gathered an armful of bleached driftwood and had started a fire did he return to the boat. It was then, in the yellow light of flaming cedar and pine, that he noted a strange and startling change had come over his father. Donald McRae no longer bore the appearance of a sick man. He stood straight and was breathing deeply. His lips were smiling as he faced Peter and quite calmly he removed the bandage from his eyes.
"At last we are home," he spoke softly. "And just beyond you—I see your mother!" Instantly he seemed to sense the shock of those words to Peter, for he said: "Don't let that frighten you, lad. Every day and night she is at my side. Only—now—she is nearer!"
He reached out his hands and almost fiercely Peter's arms closed about him.
Donald stroked his hair. It was the old caress, and he spoke to Peter as if to a little boy again.
"You're not afraid, Peter?" he asked.
"Afraid——"
Peter's heart stopped beating.
"They can't hurt you," said Donald soothingly. "I won't let them do that, Peter."
Peter drew slowly away. His face was gray in the firelight and in his eyes was a growing horror. He tried to speak but no words came from his lips. Donald's scarred face was strangely tranquil. It seemed to Peter that years had dropped away from it. In it was no fear, no sign of strain, no consciousness of the terrible hours they had passed through or of the tragic future which lay ahead. And the truth came to Peter, a suspicion at first, a whisper, growing and overwhelming him until at last it was a dizzying sickness that set him swaying on his feet. In this hour Donald McRae was not the man who had returned after years of wandering to see his boy. His mind had gone back. It had returned to the days of Peter's childhood and his voice was repeating words almost forgotten—a sacred promise of days when Peter had built mighty castles in the air and his father had helped him plan them with the understanding smile that was on his lips now.
For he was saying: "They won't hurt a boy, Peter. We'll get away. And then we'll go through the big woods to the mountains just as we've always wanted to do."
Peter raised clenched hands to his face to stifle his agony.
In the torturing slowness of the hours which followed Donald McRae lived again in the precious years when Peter was a boy, recalling forgotten incidents as if they had happened yesterday, bringing forth their old dreams, painting their pictures of the future as he had done so often with Peter at his side in the afterglow of evenings long ago. And Peter, with his soul torn and bleeding, talked with him. Together they were hunting again. They followed the old trap-lines. They heard the song of birds and planted seeds and flowers in the little garden back of their cabin home, and Peter was kneeling at his father's knees when he said his prayers at night. These things Peter had dreamed of and treasured in his years at Five Fingers, but now they were horrors—coming out of the past with a voice that trembled with the thrill and joy of a strange madness.
At last Donald slept. It was after midnight and the last embers of the fire had burned out. Peter rose to his feet and walked up the shore, staring into darkness. The rock walls that inclosed the inlet rose sheer above him, making of the place a deep and sombrous pit. He could see the stars and their distance lent an abysmal solitude to the gloom. About him was no movement and no stir of life; the water lay still; no whisper came from dark forests on the ridge tops; the black walls were dead and in the soft sand his feet alone disturbed the sepulchral quiet.
To Peter this strangeness seemed naturally a partof the change that had come into his life. Everything was changed. His world had gone into atoms and now it was reassembling itself; and with deadened emotions, almost dully, he was beginning to accept it. His yesterdays, it seemed, had existed an infinitely long time ago. Five Fingers was no longer home or a necessity and even Mona seemed a vast distance away from him in these hours when his own soul was remolding itself to fit the grimness of a new existence. His mind no longer questioned the path he was to take and no shadow of revolt rose in it.
One thought was as steadfastly fixed in him now as life itself. He belonged to his father and his father belonged utterly to him. He must go on with him, care for him, fight for him, save him from that one dread brutality of the law if his own life paid the forfeit in the end. That was settled. Even his love for Mona could not change that duty and older love which urged him. It was more than a resolution; it was as immutably a part of him as the beating of his heart and his own flesh and blood.
The stars faded and day broke swiftly above the walls of the inlet. He returned and found his father on his hands and knees groping in the sand. He was gathering sticks and placing them with the remnants of last night's fire, and when he heard Peter's footsteps he paused in his labor and raised a face out of which once more the years of grief and hopelessness seemed to have gone.
"Are you hungry, Peter?" he asked.
And Peter, as he knelt beside him, knew that he was speaking to Peter the boy and not to Peter the man.
Together they built the fire.
Ninedays Peter and his father spent in their hiding-place under the walls of the lagoon. At the end of that time Donald's burns were healed and his strength had returned. He had taken on flesh and his shoulders were straighter. His eyes were clear again but their vision was strangely shadowed and at a hundred yards the wall of the lagoon was like a dark curtain. For a time it was impossible for Peter to believe that his father's mind was not keeping pace with his physical revivement. Yet with the passing of each day Donald's mental grip concentrated itself more and more on the past until he seemed not to have lived at all beyond those years when Peter was a boy. Together they picked up old threads as if they had never been broken or lost, and in those occasional dark and brooding intervals when Donald's mind dragged itself back into the haunting tragedy of the present Peter found himself praying for the return of that partial amnesia which at first had terrified him.
On the evening of the ninth day Peter once more set out to sea. Fifty miles westward he ran ashore in the illusive, gray dusk of morning and burned Simon's boat.
Now that their flight northward had actually begun there were moments when his father's attitude almost frightened him. At first Donald's mind was keenly alive to the nearness of danger and in his half blindness he became more watchful and alert than Peter. But it was the peril of years ago that haunted him—the menace of the men who had driven them from their cabin home and who had nearly killed them when Peter was a boy.
After the third day Peter began to mark the beginning of the final change in his father. Donald became less watchful and sounds no longer seemed to disturb him. Instincts which warned him of peril became ghosts and at last faded away entirely. By the end of the seventh day there remained only one consciousness of living in Donald's soul; Peter was his little boy, and he was with Peter. Physically he betrayed no sign that his mind had crumbled. His scarred eyes, in which vision had grown even dimmer, held in them a deep and abiding clearness and a strange gentleness grew in his face. And Peter, holding tight to keep his own heart from breaking, knew what it meant. His father was forgetful of all things now but his boy, and was happy.
This change more than anything else killed in Peter's breast his last hope of returning to Five Fingers. Sheer madness with its darkness and its misery might have driven him back to Simon and Father Albanel, taking Donald McRae to asylum doors instead of to the hangman. But this which he saw growing in his fatherwas to him a quietly working miracle of God instead of breaking down of body and soul and brain.
As day followed day and one cool, dark night added itself to another, a warm and thrilling reaction came to replace with new emotions the gloom and desolation in his heart. Not for an hour did he stop thinking of Mona; her face was with him, her voice, the touch of her lips and hands; she walked with him in the thick aisles of the forest, slept near his side at night, wakened with him in the morning and became in each increasing hour of their separation more completely a part of him. But with this thought of her returned also the old passion of his childhood—his love for his father. His heart stirred strangely to the gentle caress of Donald's hand as it had thrilled when he was a boy. The old chumship rose out of its ashes, smoldered for a while and then burned steadily as if the broken years had never been. Home, mother, father, all the joys and dreams of childhood and early boyhood crept upon him a little at a time, until at last he knew that to sacrifice his father was as unthinkable as to surrender that part of his heart which Mona filled.
Between these two loves, encouraged on one side by duty and on the other by desire, lay his grief. Until the end of the third week he did not give up fully his resolution to send word back to Mona. By that time the hazard of such an act had fully impressed itself upon him. He no longer feared Aleck Curry, whose stupidity he had fully measured, but almost as frequentlyas Mona filled his mind came also dread of Carter. A cold and abiding fear of this man entered into him and he was confident it would not be long before this human ferret of the forests would in some way find their trail. At times he was oppressed by the feeling that Carter was close behind them and he tried to establish in his mind the certainty of his action if his father's enemy should suddenly appear. Thought of what might happen—what probably would happen—made him shudder. For there could be no halfway measures with Carter now.
Always on the alert, with his rifle never far from reach of his hands, he swung still farther north and west. Autumn found him in the Dubaunt River country, and the beginning of winter on the Thelon. Here he traded his watch in a Dogrib camp for a score of traps, blankets and new moccasins, invested the last of his money in flour, sugar, salt and tea, and took possession of an abandoned cabin in the neighborhood of Hinde Lake. All through the winter he trapped and set deadfalls and snares.
A hundred times during the long winter he fought against his desire to send a word to Mona. Months had not dulled his caution and as soon as the spring break-up made it possible to travel he led his father into the Artillery Lake country. Through the spring and early summer they were constantly on the move, always making a little southward. By the time August came they had completed two-thirds of an immense circleand south of the Athabasca country found themselves in the unmapped region between the Cree River and the McFarland. Here, in a country of ridges and swamps and deep forests, Peter made up his mind that at last they were safely hidden from Carter and all the rest of the world.
He breathed easier and began the building of a cabin. This was on a dark-watered, silent little stream, with a vast swamp at their back door, ridge country to right and left of them and an illimitable forest reaching out in front. The nearest point of habitation that Peter knew of was a Hudson's Bay Company post sixty miles away.
And this cabin with each log that went into it became a closer and more inseparable part of Donald McRae. Out of that forgetfulness which could scarcely be called madness began to creep memories so warm and vivid that they seemed to breathe with life itself. For Donald was building the old home again, the home of Peter's mother, where the moon had looked in through the window on the night he was born—a home, sweet and whispering with the presence of a woman one had worshiped in the flesh and the other had visioned as an angel in his dreams. After a little it was Donald and not Peter who was building the cabin, and by the time it was finished it seemed to Peter that a strange and unseen spirit of life, gentle as prayer itself, had come to dwell in it with them.
Autumn came again with its paradise of color. Thecedars, spruces and balsams took on a deeper, richer green; each sunrise bathed the ridges of poplar and birch in new splendor of red and yellow and gold; the nights grew colder, the days were filled more and more with the autumn tang that made blood run red and warm. God was with them here. Donald said that, as in the days of old. And Peter began to believe—and as faith rose in him hope and dreams returned.Mona's prayer was answered—the prayer they had said together for years asking that his father might be returned to him, and that they might all find refuge together somewhere in the wilderness world which they loved. And this was the refuge, given to them through the sweet and charitable guidance of God. All that was needed to complete it was Mona.
He began to thrill with a greater excitement as the first snows came. Would it be safe to return for Monanow? There were times when his whole soul cried out in the affirmative and he was almost ready to begin the long journey. But his caution never quite died and he always pulled himself back in time. Sixteen months had seemed an eternity to him but prudence warned him not to hurry. He would wait until spring. By that time, if Carter were on their trail, the climax would surely come. If the winter passed safely, he would go to Five Fingers and bring Mona back with him. Not for a moment did he doubt she would come, and he continued to add to the glorious castles he built in his mind, shadowed only now and then by oppressingthoughts of the many things which might have happened at Five Fingers in almost two years of absence.
Late in February he left for the trading-post with two Indian dogs and a light toboggan to sell his furs. It was not unusual now for Donald to remain alone for several days at a time, for Peter knew the home they had built had become a part of his heart and soul and that nothing short of actual force or his own wishes and plans could drag his father from it. On this trip to the post he expected to be gone five days.
It was very cold. Trees cracked and snapped with the piercing bite of the frost and the snow crackled underfoot. For a long time after Peter had disappeared Donald stood in the little clearing staring over the trail where his boy had gone.
Something unknown to Peter was finding its way into Donald's brain. Through the night it had worked, gnawing its way slowly and stealthily, and now that Peter was gone it grew bolder. Even as he turned the cabin took on a new aspect for Donald. Though the sun was shining and the sky was clear, a shadow seemed to have fallen over it and the welcoming spirit which had always clasped him closely to its heart was missing when he entered through the door. As the day passed a change came in Donald's face. He was restless and uneasy. Sounds startled him again. In the dusk of evening he did not light a candle but sat quietly in a corner, staring into darkness with his half-blind eyes, and all that night he did not go to bed.
The next day there was no sun; the sky was heavy with gloom, the air thick and difficult for Donald to breathe. Mysterious shadows crept about him and at times he tried futilely to seize these with his hands. As the hours passed his mind became more and more like a broken limb from which the last prop had been taken. A hundred times he whispered Peter's name. Then came the beginning of the storm. It broke in mid-afternoon and by night was a howling blizzard. In darkness the cabin shook and the wind screamed overhead and the snow beat like shot against the window. It would be a long time before the forest people would forget this storm because of its ferocity and the tragedy which it left in its wake, but to Donald it was more than a storm—it was a personal thing. In it was the cumulative chaos of all the evils from which he had been a fugitive through the years, and now, cornering him at last, they were fighting to break through the log walls of the cabin.
He built up the fire until it roared in the chimney and lighted candles until the cabin was aflame with light. And then, suddenly as a bolt of lightning, some thing came to him. It wasvoice—voice screaming at the window, voice howling over the roof logs, voice moaning and wailing and dying away in the sweeping of the wind. "Peter!Peter!Peter!" It was crying—nothing but Peter's name, repeating it a thousand times in its laughing, taunting, moaning efforts to make him understand.
A half-savage cry rose out of his breast. He was not afraid, not when his boy needed him—and hatless and coatless he flung up the birchwood bar to the door and faced the storm.
"Peter!" he called. "Peter!Peter!"
It all had but one meaning for Donald now. The storm had Peter. It was playing with him, killing him, and these devils in the wind had come to tell him about it in their glee. He could feel them clawing and striking at his breast and face; the snow struck his eyes like tiny spear points and he found it difficult to get his breath in the face of the blast which tried to overwhelm him. He called again as he fought his way out into the blackness and snow. His words drifted away in shreds, whipped to pieces by the wind. Creatures seemed picking up handfuls of snow and hurling it in his face—he could hear their swift movement, the hissing of their breath, their evasion as he struck out at them, and he called Peter's name louder than before to give his boy courage and let him know he was coming.
That Peter was near the cabin, that he had turned back and was making a desperate fight to reach its shelter was as firmly a part of Donald's mind as the conviction that all the forces of the darkness and evil were trying to keep him away from his boy.
His head was bare and his woolen shirt was unbuttoned at the throat, but he did not sense the terrible cold that came with the blizzard. Among the trees hisfeet found instinctively the beginning of the trail that was blazed through the forest and he reached out his naked hands and plunged knee-deep through windrows of snow that lay in his way. The thickets whipped and beat at him and branches, ambushed in darkness, reached out from twisting trees to strike him, but he did not feel sting or pain.
At last he was sure he heard an answer to his calling but the wind came and roared in his ears and the snow beat so fiercely in his face that he could not locate the quarter from which it came. Then he tricked the wind. He stumbled in the snow behind a tree and lay there until a brief lull followed in the wake of it, when he called again as loudly as he could. But he had the direction of it now and a hundred paces brought him to the edge of a rocky ravine which ran near the trail. Down this he clambered and in the pit-like darkness at the bottom found what he was seeking. Beside a figure rumpled and twisted in the snow he fell upon his knees, moaning Peter's name.
Half an hour later Donald came back to the light in the clearing, staggering under the weight of his burden. He opened the door and together the two crashed in upon the floor. On his hands and knees Donald turned and shut the door against the storm. Then he crept to the younger man whose wide-open eyes were staring at him from a thin, white, strangely contorted face, and put his arms about him, holding his head closely against his breast.
"You're all right now, Peter," he comforted in a broken, gasping voice. "You're all right——" He tried to laugh as his frozen fingers wiped the snow from the other's hair. "We're home and it's warm and I'll get something to eat——"
He crawled to the stove, almost crooning in his joy, and opened the iron door to thrust in more wood. The flames lighted up his face, bloodless from the cold and wet with snow that had already begun to melt and trickle down his cheeks to his bare neck and chest. His hair glistened white—whiter, it seemed, than an hour ago; his breath came huskily as if driven through a sieve; he was a crumpled, frozen, wind-broken wreck, and yet as he turned from the flaming door of the stove to look at the man on the floor there was a strange miracle of triumph and happiness riding over the torture in his face and a smile was on his lips. The storm might beat and howl outside and all the evils of darkness might scream and rage to get in for all he cared now. He had saved his boy!
He rose to his feet and stood swaying for a moment, smiling, trying to speak. Then he fell upon a cot.
The man on the floor had pulled himself to his elbow. He put a mittened hand to his throat as if to free himself from fingers that were gripping him there. His face too was bloodless. It was a thin face, driven white and hard by exhaustion and pain. He was a man who had been close to death and the shadow of it was still in his eyes.
He drew off his mittens and a foot at a time dragged himself across the floor. When he reached the cot he pulled himself up to it and put his arms over the stricken form of the one who had saved him.
Donald felt the nearness and raised a hand weakly to the other's face.
"You—Peter?" he asked.
"Yes, it's me."
Donald's blue lips smiled.
"They didn't get us, did they, boy? We got away from them——"
"Yes, we got away."
"And you're warm now—good and warm?"
The head over him bowed itself slowly until almost reverently it touched Donald's breast. It was not Peter's head. It was not Peter's voice that answered. But Donald gave a deep sigh of contentment as his fingers found a hand which he thought was Peter's and for a time neither one nor the other spoke again, while near them the fire crackled merrily in the stove and the candles sputtered and flared as if laughing at the storm which was lashing itself into a wailing madness outside the cabin walls.
For three days and nights no living creature could stand against the storm which swept the Athabasca country, nor could they travel in the intense cold which followed in its wake.
It was the fifth of March, twelve days after he hadleft the cabin, before Peter crossed the Pipestone on his return into the region where he and his father had made their home.
His mind was a torment of unrest as he visioned a hundred tragic happenings, any one of which might have visited his father during his absence. The last twenty-four hours he traveled without an hour of sleep.
It was midday when he came to a high ridge from which he could look down into a cup of the forest where the cabin stood, a mile away. For the first time he breathed easily when he saw a spiral of blue smoke rising straight up into the clear sunshine of the day.
He laughed in his gladness as he came to the trail which led past the spring near their home. He would stop and drink there and then give the old-time halloo for his father. He could see Donald hurrying through the sunshine to welcome him as he heard that cry.
As he came round the last turn in the trail he stopped suddenly. Someone was at the spring. The bent figure was less than a hundred yards from him and he could see it rising slowly, lifting a pail filled with water. He shifted his rifle and made a megaphone of his mittened hands at his mouth. It would be a rousing surprise for his dad!
But the cry died before it reached his lips. The man at the spring was not his father. Tall and thin and hooded, and walking with a stick as he advanced, the stranger came toward Peter. He progressed slowlyand with difficulty, limping with each step he took. His head was bowed and not until they had approached within a few paces of each other did he raise it so that his face was clearly revealed. And then Peter gave a startled cry and swift as a flash swung the muzzle of his rifle upon the other.
"Carter!" he gasped.
A wan smile played over the ferret's face as he raised a hand and thrust back his hood.
"My name is not Carter," he replied. "Since twelve days ago I have been Peter McRae—Donald McRae's son."
Something in his thin face and strangely sunken eyes sent a cold chill to Peter's heart.
Carter had stopped with the muzzle of the rifle touching the pit of his stomach. He made no effort to thrust it aside but stood looking calmly into the other's eyes.
"It happened just that long ago," he said. "I was trailing you when I slipped over a ledge and almost broke a leg among the rocks. The storm came and I was about done for, when your father wandered out into the night, calling your name, and I answered. He got me into the cabin and I've been there ever since. From the beginning he thought I was you. I understand now, McRae. I know what I've done—and I wish you would pull that trigger. I deserve it."
Peter lowered the gun.
"You have not harmed him?"
"Harmed him!" A dull look of agony filled Carter's eyes as he turned slowly toward the cabin. "No, I haven't harmed him—not since twelve days ago. It was all done before that. Only God will ever know how gentle and good he was to me, thinking I was you—and if by dying I could return what I've taken away from him I'd kill myself. And if I were in your place, Peter—standing where you are—I'd shoot!"
He gave a stifled cry as Peter hurried past him. In it was a note of appeal that choked and died in his throat. But Peter did not hear it nor did he see fully the look of dread that was in Carter's eyes. He unshouldered his pack at the cabin door, laid his rifle beside it and went in. He was no longer afraid of Carter. Something tighter and more terrible was gripping at his heart.
Carter came limping up the trail and when he reached the door he bared his head and quietly followed Peter into the cabin.
Peter was on his knees beside the bunk in which Donald was lying. His arms were spread out and his head was bowed upon Donald's breast.
White-faced, Carter knelt beside him and put both his hands about his shoulders. "Untilhebrought me into this cabin twelve days ago I never believed in God," he said huskily. "But I do now, Peter. For twelve daysyour father was my father. I loved him. And I know, if he could have understood, that from the beginning he would have forgiven me—the man who huntedhim to his death. If by any merciful chanceyoucan do that, Peter—if you can find it in your heart to let him remain my father and you my brother——" One of his hands found Peter's, clasping it tightly, and the other crept to Donald's face, where it lay cold and lifeless on its pillow. "In God's name say you forgive me!" he whispered.
In answer Peter's fingers returned the pressure of Carter's hand and a sob broke on the man-hunter's lips.
After a moment of silence he said: "It was the terrible cold and exposure of that night in which he was hunting for you. It reached his lungs. Until yesterday I was not afraid. Then the change came—swiftly. He died this morning, Peter, inyourarms, and the last word on his lips wasyourname—and Mona's."
A long time there was stillness in the cabin as the two men knelt beside their dead.
Inthe long days and weeks which followed Peter's return to the cabin and the death of his father a change which seemed to him a little short of a miracle came over the man-hunter. The pitiless Carter, the human ferret, whose years of duty had never been tempered with mercy or conscience, was gone, and in his place was a new Carter, dragging himself a little at a time out of the paths of tragedy and misery which he had followed for so long.
Through those years Peter knew that Carter had been a Nemesis and a destroyer. He had not known pity, but only the grim exultation of achievement. Women, love, the extenuation of circumstance, even motherhood in its most beautiful sacrifice, had not stayed his hand when once the law had set him like a hound upon the scent of his victim. He had broken men and women. He had opened doors of blackness and despair to a hundred human souls. Yet the law had been always at his back, urging him on and exulting in his triumphs; he had committed no crime, no sin, and the world had applauded his exploits when it heard of them, visioning him as a splendid part of that mighty mechanism of legal force which made peace and goodwill on earth possible among men. Yet Carter, in these strange days of his mental and spiritual transformation, knew differently.
He knew that he had served too well, and for that reason he hated himself, and called himself a fiend. It was now, after he had hunted Peter's father to his death, that his successes began to dig themselves out of their graves and reappear to him as haunting ghosts. And he prayed God to keep Peter, of all men, from hating him.
"I killed your father," he said to him frankly. "I hunted him until his mind and his body broke down and he died. And in the end he accepted me as a son, and I loved him. If I had only known! But I didn't, and my life belongs to you. I give it willingly as the price of a great mistake."
And as the sullen winter's end passed Peter found it impossible to hate Carter. Instead, there grew in him a slow and irresistible feeling of brotherhood for the man who had trailed them to their hiding-place at last, and who, in the hour of his deepest grief, had knelt with him in prayer over the frozen grave of his father. In those moments he had learned that it was not Carter who was accountable. It was the system—the law and its inalienable right to strike and kill.
Now, late in April, they were going home.
Six hundred miles behind them lay the wilderness of the Pipestone and the McFarland, where the hunt had ended and the final tragedy had been enacted.
Ahead of them, beyond four hundred miles of still deeper forests was Five Fingers.
On this night, as they sat in the yellow glow of a birchwood fire which they had built in the chill of sunset, Carter had drawn a rough map in the edge of the ash. The somber depths of a moonless night lay like a curtain of heavy velvet behind him, and against this his thin and hawk-like face was set so vividly that Peter saw the odd twitch of his lips as he said:
"One week for Jackson's Knee, another for the country of Lac St. Joe, two more for the Height of Land, and then you'll be looking down on Five Fingers! They'll all be glad to see you, Peter. And Mona——" He shrugged his shoulders and a little throb came in the pit of his throat when he spoke of Peter's sweetheart. "God knows a man should be happy with a girl like her waiting for him at the end of the trail."
"I've been away two years," replied Peter, for it was always that thought which kept pounding at his heart. "At times I am afraid of what may have happened since that night you and Aleck Curry almost got dad and me in the edge of the burned lands."
Carter made no sign that he had heard. He was staring into the deep, red embers of the fire.
"Your mother was an angel," he said, so quietly and unexpectedly that his words fell upon Peter almost with the effect of a shock. "In the last of those days when your father and I were shut up together by storm and cold in the cabin, and he was accepting me as his son inhis madness, he talked of her almost as if she were alive and we were going home to her."
"She has been dead twenty years," said Peter.
"I know. Dead, and yet living. I can scarcely believe that I hunted Donald McRae until I drove him mad—for doing a thing which I would have done had I stood in his shoes that day when he killed a man! It was justice, Peter. My mother I cannot remember. Butyourmother he made very near and real for me in those last days of—I can't call it his madness!—it was——"
"Forgetfulness," said Peter.
Carter bowed his head. "Yes, forgetfulness. Yet some things lived so vividly—things of the past. He made them live and breathe for me—and one picture makes me want to kill!—that picture of the little cabin in the clearing more than twenty years ago—your mother—you in her arms—Donald McRae's homecoming and the vengeance he dealt out to the snake who had come to take advantage of his absence. When I see that vision I want to choke the life out of a human beast I know—Aleck Curry!"
Peter made no answer.
"I can't undo what I've done," Carter went on. "I tracked your father until his mind broke under the strain, but I can't help that now. It is over. All I can do in the way of reparation is to help you—you and Mona Guyon. And between you two—between your happiness and hers—is one man, a slimy, consciencelessserpent, waiting and watching for your return."
"You mean—Aleck Curry?"
"Yes, Aleck Curry."
Carter stood up, his tall, catlike form bathed in the fire glow, and his hard lips were tightly closed as he stared off into the darkness of the forest.
"Sounds queer—that word 'conscienceless' coming from me," he mocked bitterly. "I've never had a conscience or a heart in obeying the word of the law—but I've never thought bad of a woman in the way Aleck Curry thinks of Mona Guyon. He would sell his soul, if he had one, to possess her—even if she came to him for only an hour as the price of your safety and freedom. And you're going home—an outlaw!"
"By that you mean Curry will hold me in his power when I reach Five Fingers?"
"Yes."
"And will attempt to force from me a price——"
Peter stood looking straight into Carter's eyes.
"Yes, partly from you, but mostly from Mona. That is why I've been holding you back, a drag from the beginning. Curry's uncle has become a power politically, and Aleck was given a corporalship a year ago. I would stake my life that he is keeping his secret about you and the part you played in your father's escape two years ago. The knowledge is too precious for him to divulge. You assaulted him, almost killed him, and freed your father; you kept him—an officer of the law—a prisoner on an island; later you fired uponCurry and me with the rifle which Simon McQuarrie gave you—and all this means from five to fifteen years in prison for you, and Curry knows it. The fact that your father was almost blind, and that his mind had broken down, won't help you. Law is law, especially in Canada. Our judges and juries go by the code and not by emotions. And this law, its inviolability, is why Aleck Curry is a greater menace to you now than all the dangers you have encountered since you led your father into the north.
"He is moved entirely by two passions, one his desire for Mona Guyon and the other his hatred for you. On the night when we almost caught you both in your escape from Five Fingers he offered me a thousand dollars and his uncle's influence in getting me a sergeancy if I would keep the secret of your capture, and turn our prisoners over to him. It was my humor to let him think he had bought me. And then, in the dawn of that morning, you filled our boat full of bullets—and got way. That's the story, Peter. There is no escaping the trap if you return to Five Fingers. Curry will descend upon you, demand marriage of Mona, or probably worse—and if she refuses——"
"She can visit me occasionally in prison," said Peter.
His face reflected no trace of the white heat that had mounted into Carter's; he spoke quietly and his hands had lost their clenched tenseness. For a moment Carter gazed at him in silence.
"You mean that?"
"I do. Aleck Curry holds no power over me that can in any way endanger Mona. If I owe a debt, I am willing to pay it. Neither Mona nor I have anything that we want to sell, and Aleck Curry has nothing that we want to buy."
Carter drew in a deep breath.
"If you look at it in that way——"
"There is no other way."
"But Curry and I are the only two men on earth who can swear that you have done these things. The smallest restitution I can make to you for all the wrong I have done your father is to keep my knowledge secret. Torture could not tear it from me. Now—if we can silence Curry, tie his tongue, break him——"
"None of which we can do," interrupted Peter. "He has hated me since the day we first fought over Mona when we were boys. Only one thing could stop his vengeance. I would have to kill him, and that is inconceivable. For my father I would have done that. I had even prepared myself to kill you, Carter, if such an act became necessary to save him. But for myself—no!"
Carter thrust out his hand, but as it gripped Peter's he turned his face away. "You're a lot like your dad," he said. "I see it more every day. I'm going to bed. Good night!"
Caution and habit had made the ferret spread his blankets in the pit of gloom outside the glow of firelight. He disappeared in the darkness and a momentlater Peter heard him as he stretched himself out for the night.
But Carter had no idea of sleeping. For days past a thought had been building itself up slowly in his brain, and tonight he had almost revealed that thought to Peter. He watched him now, and in the firelight the drooped figure and pale, sensitive face of the man he had hunted and whose happiness he had helped to destroy tightened something at his heart until he found it hard to breathe. He had never loved a woman, and had never felt the bond of a great friendship for a man, but for Peter something more than the friendship he had known—a thing that was very close to a man's love for a man—had begun to possess him body and soul. In this one warm emotion of his cold and merciless life Carter felt a deeper thrill than in the hour of his greatest man-hunting triumph, and as he lay in stillness, strengthening that thought which was becoming a larger and more definite thing between Peter and Mona and the tragedy which threatened them, his lips parted in the grim and humorless smile which in all the years of his service had made men fear and avoid him.
And with that smile, deadly and uncompromising, Carter whispered to himself: "I guess maybe you needn't worry, Peter. I don't think Aleck Curry and the law are going to get you—not if I can help it."
With this settled, it was easier for Carter to give himself up to sleep.
For a long time Peter sat near the fire. The birchlogs burned down into a mass of coals, and as deeper shadows closed in about the camp he felt himself alone except for the visions which came and went in the dying embers. With a clearness that brought almost physical pain the years passed before his eyes, and when they had gone they had taken with them his boyhood, the father he had worshiped, his dreams and happiness, leaving behind in the ash of the fire only memories shadowed with the gloom of tragedy. But calmly and with a courage inspired by his own grief he was ready to accept what lay ahead of him. The fight, as a physical thing, was over—and he was going home. On that point his mind was fixed and no sense of self-preservation could move it. What was to happen to him when he reached Five Fingers was a matter which Fate should decide.
Even in these moments of his decision he felt Mona's nearness and her protest. If in defense of his father he had become an outlaw, there was still a wide world in which he could hide, and Mona would come to him. So the persistent voice of caution whispered to him, and at times that voice was Mona's.
Haggard-faced, Peter went to bed, and in the morning it was Carter, cold and mechanically efficient, who pointed out the same way to him.
But even as he pressed his reasoning home, Peter observed there was a still deeper and more mysterious change in his companion. It lay more in Carter's eyes than in his voice or the unemotional lines of his face.
"You've learned how big the woods are," he said. "Go north, into the Yukon or Alaska. I will see that Mona comes to you—safely."
Peter shook his head.
"I've also learned what it means to run from thicket to thicket, guarding a hunted thing you love. That would be Mona's share—years of it, until the end. And the end would come sometime. I'd rather pay the debt—and have free years left to me afterward."
It was Carter's last effort. From that hour he traveled steadily homeward with Peter, making no protest against this new code which had come into his life of giving, instead of taking, a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye.
The middle of May found them halfway between Lac St. Joe and the Height of Land, with Five Fingers still a hundred and eighty miles ahead of them.
"We'll make it in seven days," said Peter.
"Unless the melting snows flood the streams," said Carter.
Spring was breaking gloriously. Scents filled the air. Crushed balsam and cedar gave out a redolence that was tonic. The poplar buds were bursting. Birds were returning. On the sides of slopes where the sun struck warmly the snow was gone, grass sprang up lush green, and flowers that budded while the earth was still white began to bloom. Sap dripped from broken limbs, and the whispered breath of a wakening life, of growing things, and of matehood, hope and happiness,seemed to rise between the earth and the sky, night and day.
Both Peter and Carter sensed the thrill of these things, yet neither felt their joy. The floods held them back, so that at first their loss was in hours, and then in days. Carter was glad, but he gave no betrayal of that fact. His face in these last weeks had grown quietly and splendidly different from the old Carter's. It was cold, deeply lined, austere, but its sharpness was mellowed and there was no longer the ferret-like gleam in his eyes or the grim hardness in his lips and chin. Not a day passed that his hand did not rest on Peter's shoulder or arm, and in his touch was a gentleness that at times was reflected in the look of his eyes. But in the secrecy of his own thoughts was a dread of the day they would arrive at Five Fingers. Dread—and yet not fear.
Peter did not reveal his own fears except as they became a part of his face and eyes in certain moments which a man like Carter could not fail to observe. These fears were not inspired by visions of personal danger, for in adjusting his mind to the necessity of paying his debt to the law he had eliminated the menace of Aleck Curry in so far as it could possibly affect the future of Mona or himself.
What he dreaded were the changes which nearly two years might have brought to Five Fingers, and the evil which Aleck Curry could have accomplished in that time. Just what outrage his enemy could have successfullyconsummated he had no definite idea. Yet the thought seized upon him at times and held him under a dark and oppressive apprehension.
On the last day before crossing the Height of Land Carter spoke of what he knew to be in Peter's mind.
"You will find Mona safe and well, and as true as the day you left her," he said. "And lovelier, too, Peter, for she needed these two years to round out her glorious womanhood. I'm not worrying about her. I'm putting all my faith in another gamble."
"And that?"
Carter gave his thin shoulders a suggestive shrug.
"Has it occurred to you how nice it will be if—in these two years of change you have anticipated—something has happened to Curry? Death, for instance?"
Peter looked at his companion to see if he was joking. Carter's face was set and unsmiling.
"Why not?" he argued. "Aleck, although a brother of the Devil, isn't calamity-proof. With him under six feet of good, honest dirt, or mysteriously missing, or kicked out of the force by an authority greater than his uncle—you would be a free man, and Father Albanel could ring the wedding bell the day you reach Five Fingers. Maybe it's only a dream I've had—but I seem to see Aleck Curry safely out of your way, now or very soon. If he has tried to take advantage of Mona Guyon during your absence——"
"Simon McQuarrie or Pierre Gourdon would kill him!"
"Exactly!" And Carter lighted his pipe and said no more, nor did he raise his eyes to see the strained look which he knew was in Peter's face.
That night they slept on the northward slope of the ridge that separated the waterways of a continent.
Two days later, on the first of June, they crossed the southern line of rail and camped in the deep wilderness between it and Lake Superior.
Carter made his bed with more than usual care.
"Our last night," he said. "Tomorrow we should pass the high ridge country before dark and reach Five Fingers in the early light of the moon. Are you a little excited?"
"I should like to go on," said Peter.
Carter smiled a bit wistfully. Now and then this flash of gentleness had crept into his face of late. "I'd be willing to give up the rest of my life if for a few hours I could have someone waiting for me as Mona Guyon is waiting for you," he answered in a low voice. "Strange that I've let all the years go by without thinking of that, isn't it? But I'm thinking now. And I'm sorry—for a lot of things."
"You say you are going to resign from the police as soon as you can," said Peter, looking into the darkness that lay between him and home. "When you do that—come to Five Fingers. Simon McQuarrie and Pierre Gourdon and Joe and Father Albanel and all the others will make it home for you. And Mona and Marie Antoinette and Josette will love you because you werefour-square and helpedus. And after that—somewhere—maybe at Five Fingers—there will be a girl——"
A cough came from the gloom behind Peter, a thick and husky cough as if Carter were choking something back that was in his throat. "One of the few things I remember from years ago is a song called 'The City Four-Square,'" he said. "And when you, of all men, call me four-square—why——" Darkness hid his face. "Good night, Peter!"
"Good night," said Peter.
Carter, as usual, had made his bed in deep shadow, and there after a time he slept. The moon rose, but still the shadow enveloped him, while Peter lay in a glow of light when the man-hunter roused himself. He looked at his watch and found the hour a little after midnight. A second time he slept, and a second time he awakened, and thick darkness had come in place of the moonglow. This he knew to be the dark prelude to dawn, and he rose out of his blanket and crept cautiously away from the camp, moving a foot at a time and making no sound. In a quarter of an hour darkness and distance had swallowed him. He waited then. Dawn broke first over the tree-tops and filtered down softly and swiftly into the lower depths of the forest until Carter could see to travel. He lighted a last match to look at his watch and compass and struck due south.
He traveled fast, free of pack and gun. Dawn grew into the grayer softness of day. Peter would be awakening now, he thought, or very soon. In an hour, or two at the most, he would know he had been tricked. Even with his advantage Carter sensed the thrill of an impending race and the tragedy of it, if he should lose.Peter was swift and sure in the woods and it was a long way to Five Fingers.
High up in the sky a fleet of white clouds took on a crimson flush. The sun rose, and it found Carter's face settling into the hard and grim lines of the hunter whose game had so frequently been the lives of men. In a small leather pouch he had stored some food, and a part of this he ate as he traveled. He lost no time in seeking log and driftwood dams to pave his way over streams but plunged waist-deep into water that was still cold with the chill of snow and ice. It was noon before he stopped to rest and eat what was left of the food in the leather pouch.
A second time a miracle of change swept over him, and in his face, his eyes and the lithe swiftness with which he moved he was the ferret again, hot on the trail of game. Late in the afternoon he felt the cool breath of Lake Superior in his face. The sun sank lower. Dusk came. In the beginning of that dusk he emerged from the last rim of the forest and stood with the water of the big inland sea moaning under the dark cliffs at his feet.
A sense of exultation and of triumph swept over him. It was something to have mastered the wilderness in this way and to have come out within half a dozen miles of Five Fingers. Peter could not beat that, even in this country which was his own.
Thickening darkness made these last miles more difficult and for two hours Carter progressed slowly.The sky was beautifully clear, but rocks and slides and ragged cracks and pits at the cliff edge made his feet wary, and countless stars only served to deepen their shadows. When the moon came up he had reached the huge cliff whose sheer walls rose two hundred feet above the sea, less than half a mile from Five Fingers.
A last time he sat down, and with a strange smile on his thin lips watched the full moon as it rose swiftly over the forests, as if eager to reach its higher and more permanent place in the arch of the heavens. He was tired and wet and his clothes were torn. Until now, when the settlement was only a step ahead, he had not realized how exhausted he was or what a fight he had gone through. Surely he had beaten Peter by many miles and could afford to rest for a little while before finishing his task!
His eyes closed in restful stillness. In half a dozen minutes he could have slept, but each time that his body wavered on the rock where he sat he forced himself into rigid wakefulness. The temptation persisted, and at last he gave himself five minutes and slept thirty.
The rattle of a stone roused him, and he gathered himself up, blinking at the moon. Then he heard iron nails scraping on rock. Instantly he was wide awake. Someone was advancing along the face of the cliff from the direction of Five Fingers. He could see first the shadow of that person, growing in the illusive light mist of moon and stars. It was big and grotesque and the tread of its substance was slow and heavy. Heheard a cough which was as unpleasantly heavy as the tread, and a few steps more brought the advancing figure to the little plateau of rock where he sat. Not until then did he rise. The other stopped. The moon laughed down into their faces. The stars seemed to send upon them a more brilliant light. A dozen paces separated them. Then, uncertainly, they shortened it to half the distance. Carter's heart gave a great throb. He would not have to go down to Five Fingers now,for this was his man!
"Curry!" he greeted.
The other stared, half disbelieving. "Is that you—Carter?" he gasped. He advanced again, peering into the other's face. "By Heaven,it is!"
Carter was very white and thin and strange-looking in the moonlight, and Aleck Curry was heavy and huge, even to his neck and face. He thrust out a hand, but Carter did not touch it.
"Yes, it's me," he said, in a voice cold as ice. "Queer why you should be coming this way, Curry. I was going down there to find you."
Aleck's eyes pierced the blanket of moonlight behind him. "What luck?" he asked. His voice thrilled with nervous eagerness. He bent his big shoulders toward Carter, looking into his face, his thick lips parted and his narrow eyes gleaming anxiously as he tried to read an answer before words came. "Any?"
Carter's slowness was an insult, and with that insult his eyes and lips were smiling.
"Yes, I've had luck," he said, when the tenseness of the other's silence seemed about to break. "Donald McRae is dead, and Peter is back there—my prisoner!"
Half an hour later, down in Five Fingers, the bell over the little log church rang out sweetly and softly the good news that Father Albanel had come in from his monthly trip into the farther wilderness, and that services would be held tomorrow, which was Sunday. In the stillness of the night the music of the bell carried far through the forests, creeping in and out and high above the hidden places, bearing with it the peace and gentleness of benediction and prayer to all things.
Peter heard it, far back in the hollows between the ridges, and he paused to offer his gratitude to God for this voice that was welcoming him home.
And at the edge of the cliff where the moonlight and the starlight made a vivid arena of the table of rock its message seemed to beat with the clearness of a silvery drum. Then it stopped. Its echoes melted away, and the two men who had heard it there remained unchanged.
Carter seemed straighter and harder, his face more like carven stone. But he was ready. And Aleck Curry was like a huge gorilla gathering himself for a leap.
"Carter—if you mean that—I'll kill you!" he said in a voice that was thick with passion.
"I mean it," replied Carter, biting his words short."I've taken the trouble to tell you the whole story. But you can't understand and you never will. You're a snake. You're a traitor to both justice and the law. You think your power over Peter will give you vengeance and something from Mona. But it won't. And I warn you again that if you try to use your knowledge, if you offer Peter as a price to Mona, if you give him up to the law when she strikes you in the face—as she will!—then I shall go to the highest authorities and strip you to the skin. The truth will blast you. I will tell how you offered me bribes, and then threatened; I will tell of your affair in the home of Jacques Gautier and expose the horrible trail you have left wherever your slimy soul has gone. I shall investigate the death of the young Indian girl on the Arrowhead. I——"
He did not finish. Curry, the man who had waited, the fiend who had kept the fires of hatred and passion burning until they were madness, saw more than the threatened ruin for himself. Reputation, family, his place in the service meant nothing to him. What he saw now in the white and almost deathlike face and gleaming eyes of the Ferret was the end of the dream he had built up—the end not only of his power over Peter but of his last chance to possess Mona. If Carter carried out his threat, if he told the story of Gautier's wife and laid naked the truth of the Indian girl's death on the Arrowhead—then all that he might say against Peter would be discounted in the eyes of the law, and punishment would fall upon himself.
But he was not thinking of this punishment. At times the evil mind in his heavy head worked with amazing swiftness—and in this last moment of Carter's threat and defiance he saw the yawning abyss of the cliff behind the Ferret, and its overwhelming temptation. With Carter down there, dead, and Peter walking straight into the trap at Five Fingers, his own power and triumph would be more complete than he had ever dreamed it could be—for he would make Peter also the Ferret's murderer!
The moon revealed the monstrous thought that leaped like flame into his face, and it was then Carter cut his words short to meet the avalanche of flesh and fury that descended upon him.
Swift as a flash he sensed Curry's intention of throwing him over the cliff, and twined his arms about his enemy's neck as they crashed upon the rock. For a moment after that a great shadow of fear darkened the Ferret's soul. A hundred times in their associations on the trail he had witnessed the tests and measured the possibilities of Aleck's huge body and herculean strength. And now he was at death grips with it. That day he had seen a wood-mouse in the fangs of a weasel, and he was the wood-mouse now. And then he thought of Peter—of Peter and Mona and the battle at the pool two years ago when they had beaten this great hulk of a man. Fear went out of him. His biggest thrill in life was in the main chance against death. And this was the biggest of all!
A queer thought shot into his head, a surging back of his old pride. He was not the wood-mouse, nor was he the weasel. He was theferret, and Aleck Curry was an unknown beast, ponderous and mighty, but with that vulnerable spot which the ferret always found in its prey. And this time Carter knew he was fighting for more than himself. He was fighting for a man who was dead, and whose spirit was there on the rock watching them. He was fighting for Peter. And he was fighting for a woman.
His thin arms and legs fastened themselves about Aleck like things made of wire steel instead of flesh and bone. Over and over they rolled, twisting, bending, breaking, heads and faces gouging on the rocks, and always Carter's quickness made up for the other's weight and strength.
Their breath came in panting gasps as the nails in their boots struck fire from the rock. A moan of anguish came from Curry when Carter got the terrible thumb gouge in his eye, and a gasp of agony from the Ferret when Aleck bent his head back until his neck nearly broke. There was something merciless and horrible in the struggle.
A little cloud ran under the face of the moon. It was followed by a larger and darker one, as if spirit hands were drawing a curtain between it and the tragedy on the rock. The light of the stars seemed to grow dimmer, as if they, too, shrank from this thing that was happening between the sea and the sky. Andover the edge of the cliff came a wailing sob of wind that was already beginning to croon its death song for the victim. Minutes were hours. Gasps, chokings, blows and the panting of breaths were the ticking of the seconds. Moments of stillness, when the two lay crumpled and twisted as if they had died together, were like eternities. And foot by foot they had rolled until they were close to the edge of the cliff.
Then it was that a shudder of deeper horror seemed to creep through the night. A black cloud swept under the moon, hiding entirely what was happening at the cliff's edge, and this cloud moved away with appalling slowness. When the moon looked out again one object remained where there had been two. For a long time it lay crumpled there, sobbing for breath. Then it crawled away slowly, dragging itself painfully over the rock, and disappeared at last into the thick growth of the burned-over lands which reached far to the north.
Under that same moon, hours later, Peter came to the edge of Five Fingers. Out of the sky all sign of cloud was gone and the stars glowed in radiant constellations. Peter knew that it was midnight, and as he looked down from the crest of the slope, where he had first walked hand in hand with Mona when he was a boy, a strange and gentle silence rose up from the bottom-lands to greet him. Five Fingers was asleep. He could see no light and at first he heard no sound. Then came to himthe old familiar tinkle of silver bells on distant cattle, and the soft murmur of the sea that was never quite still where it ran in and out among the rocks of the Pit at the end of Middle Finger Inlet.
For a space he stood looking down where the dark shadows of the cabins lay in a great pool of mellow light that was like a gossamer mist of silver and gold. His heart beat fast, so fast that he clutched a hand at his breast and swallowed hard to get his breath. Down there, within sound of his voice, was Mona—and all at once his manhood seemed to leave him and he wanted to shout wildly through his hands like a boy, calling her name, rousing her from sleep, shrieking at the top of his voice that he had come back. A sort of thrilling madness possessed him, but of all his desire only a choking sob rose in his throat.
He walked down the slope and he saw Pierre Gourdon's home among the scattered cabins. It was there he would find Mona, if——
His heart skipped a beat. If anything had happened,anything—sickness—accident—if she had gone away! Two years was a long time. Two years might have brought—a change.
His feet seemed to stumble, and then suddenly he stopped, and a cry came to his lips. For he had come to the smooth little patch of green meadow where Mona had made the men of Five Fingers bury the scores of marauding porcupines they killed each year, and he saw here and there freshly made little mounds of soil. Nearone of these, which was scarcely dried by a day's sun, was a spade. Eagerly he seized it in his hands. It wastheirspade, with its broken edge and the iron rod handle which Simon had put on it to replace the wooden one which porcupines had eaten away. Mona was in Five Fingers! She was alive—well—sleeping in her little room where he had visioned her at prayer every night of his life!
He took off his pack and dropped it near the freshly made mound. Then he went on, and stopped under Mona's window.
It was partly open. He could hear the soft flutter of a curtain in the breath of wind that came up from the shore. Almost afraid to break the stillness he called her name in a low voice.
"Mona!"
The curtain fluttered back at him. It seemed to be laughing at him, seemed to be signaling to him like a hand from the window.
Then he saw on their nails against the log wall the long bamboo poles which Pierre Gourdon used in his fishing. A hundred times when he had come in from the woods late at night he had tapped at Mona's window with one of these poles, and she had thrust out her head to blow him down a kiss and say good night. And now, with two hearts seeming to beat in his breast in place of one, he seized one of the poles and gently tapped the old signal on the window-pane. And all at once the curtain ceased its fluttering and hecould hear the two hearts pounding mightily against his ribs.
He tapped again—tap-tap-tappety-tap!and stepped back into the deep shadow that hung around the edge of the Gourdon cabin in a heavy fringe.
Someone came to the window. He knew it—yet he could not see straight up above his head. He held himself back, waiting for some response to his signal. In a moment he would step out in the moonlight, and then——
He heard the curtain fluttering again. Sound came from her room. It continued for a few moments, and ceased with the quiet opening of a door. Then he heard footsteps, quick, light, almost frightened footsteps, and a slim figure came around the end of Pierre Gourdon's cabin and stood white-faced and trembling in the moonlight.
It was Mona—Mona as he had left her an hour ago—yesterday—two years ago—unchanged—except that she seemed taller to him, more beautiful. She had thrown a long cloak about her and he could see her hand clutching it at the throat as her wide eyes strained to solve the mystery which the misty chaos of the moonlight was hiding from her. For a space he seemed powerless to move. Then he tried to speak as he revealed himself, ragged and torn and bronzed to Indian darkness by his long fight through the wilderness, but it was only an incoherent cry that stumbled on his lips. Mona saw him. For an instant sheswayed like a tall flower, with the whiteness of lily petals in her face as he went to her. And then she gave a cry that even Pierre Gourdon might have heard if he had not slept so deeply—and Peter's arms closed about her.
A minute later she held back his face with her two hands. Her eyes were filled with the glory of the stars and her lips were red with the wild, sweet passion of their kisses. Slowly a shadow came, and with it an unutterable tenderness in the words which she whispered to him:
"Peter,I knew. Carter sent me word—about your father—andyou——"
She drew his head down until she was holding it against her breast. Her heart beat against his cheek. Her lips kissed his hair.
"Only you—you and God—know how sorry I am," she whispered.
And Peter felt once more like the small boy in the edge of the forest years ago, when Mona had come to him in the dusk of evening to mend his broken heart. For in these first moments of his homecoming it was Mona—again—who thought first of his grief, and not of her own happiness; and holding his head close, pressing his rough cheek in the palm of her soft hand, she told him how Carter had sent word to her all the way down through the wilderness, and how she had kept Carter's message to herself—as he had asked her to do—and had waited night and day for his comingwith prayers of gratitude in her heart, and sorrow for him.
"And Carter promised to bring you to me," she whispered, "because he said that in the end he had learned to love your father—and you."