CHAPTER XIIITHE SUMMONS
Mrs. Hastings was standing beside her wagon in the gathering dusk when Agatha and Wyllard joined her. After Wyllard had helped the two women into the vehicle she looked down at him severely as she gathered up the reins.
“By this time Allen will have had to put the kiddies to bed,” she said. “Christina, as you might have borne in mind, goes over to Branstock’s every evening. Anyway, you’ll drive across and see him about that team as soon as you can; come to supper.”
“I’ll try,” promised Wyllard with a certain hesitation. Mrs. Hastings turned to Agatha as they drove away.
“Why did he look at you before he answered me?” she asked, and laughed, for there was just light enough left to show the color in the girl’s cheek. “Well,” she added, “I told Allen he was sure to be the first.”
Agatha looked at her in evident bewilderment, but she nodded. “Yes,” she said, “of course, I knew it would come. Everybody knows by now that you have fallen out with Gregory.”
“But, as I told you, I haven’t fallen out with him.”
“You certainly haven’t married him, and if you have said ‘No’ to Harry Wyllard because you would sooner take Gregory after all, you’re a singularly unwise young woman. Anyway, you’ll have to meet Harry when hecomes to supper. Allen’s fond of a talk with him; I can’t have him kept away.”
“I was a little afraid of that,” replied Agatha slowly. “What makes the situation more difficult is that he told me he would ask me again.”
Mrs. Hastings was thoughtful for a moment. “In that case he will in all probability do it; but I don’t think you need feel diffident about meeting him, especially as you can’t help it. He’ll wait and say nothing until he considers it advisable.”
She changed the subject, and talked about other matters until they reached the homestead.
As the weeks went by Agatha found that what Mrs. Hastings had told her was warranted. Wyllard drove over every now and then, but she was reassured by his attitude. He greeted her with the quiet cordiality which had hitherto characterized him, and it went a long way towards allaying the embarrassment of which she was conscious at first. By and by, however, she felt no embarrassment at all, in spite of the disturbing possibility that he might at some future time once more adopt the role of lover.
In the meanwhile, she realized that despite the efforts she made to think of him tenderly she was drifting further apart from Gregory. She had two other offers of marriage before the wheat had shot up a hand’s breadth above the rich black loam. This was a matter of regret to her, and, though Mrs. Hastings assured her that the “boys” would get over it, she was rather shocked to hear that one of them had shortly afterwards involved himself in difficulties by creating a disturbance in Winnipeg.
The wheat, however, was growing tall when, at Mrs. Hastings’ request, Agatha drove over to Willow Range. Wyllard was out when they reached the homestead, and leaving Mrs. Hastings and his housekeeper together, thegirl wandered out into the open air. She went through the birch bluff and towards the slough, which had almost dried up now, and it was with a curious stirring of confused feelings that she remembered what Wyllard had said to her there. Through all her thoughts ran a regret that she had not met him four years earlier.
Regrets, however, were useless, and in order to get rid of them she walked more briskly up a low rise of ground where the grass was already turning white again, over the crest of the hill, and down the side to another hollow. The prairie rolled in wide undulations as the sea does when the swell of a distant gale underruns a glassy calm. Agatha had grown fond of the prairie. Its clear skies and fresh breezes had brought the color to her cheeks and given her composure, though there were times when the knowledge that she was no nearer a decision in regard to Gregory weighed heavily upon her. She had seen very little of him and he had not been effusive then. She could not guess what his feelings might be, but it had been a relief to her when he had ridden away from the home of the Hastingses. For a while after she saw him he faded to an unsubstantial, shadowy figure in the back of her mind.
On this afternoon when Agatha tried to put out of her mind the disturbing reflections that came to her as she walked, the prairie stretched away before her, gleaming in the sunlight under a vast sweep of cloudless blue. She was half-way down the long slope when a clash and tinkle reached her, and she noticed that a cloud of dust hung about the hollow where there had been another slough, which evidently had dried up weeks before. As men and horses were moving amid the dust she supposed that they were cutting prairie hay, which grows longer in such places than it does upon the levels. She went on another half-mile, and then sat down, for she had walked farther thanshe had intended to go. She could now see the men more clearly, and, though it was fiercely hot, they were evidently working at high pressure. Their blue duck clothing and bare brown arms appeared among the white and ocher tinting of the grass that seemed charged with brightness, and the sounds of their activity came up to her. She could distinguish the clashing tinkle of the mowers, the crackle of the harsh stems, and the rattle of wagon wheels.
A great mound of gleaming grass, overhanging two half-seen horses, moved out of the slough, and she watched it draw nearer until she made out Wyllard sitting in the front of it. She sat still until he pulled the team up close beside her and looked down with a smile.
“It’s almost two miles to the homestead. If you could manage to climb up I could make you a comfortable place,” he said.
Agatha held her hands up with one foot upon a spoke of the wheels as Wyllard leaned down, and next moment she was lifted upwards. She felt his supporting hand upon her waist. Then she found herself standing upon a narrow ledge, clutching at the hay while he tore out several big armfuls of it and flung it back upon the top of the load.
“THE NEXT MOMENT SHE WAS LIFTED UPWARDS”Page146
“THE NEXT MOMENT SHE WAS LIFTED UPWARDS”Page146
“Now,” he announced, “I guess you’ll find that a snug enough nest.”
She sank into it with a sense of physical satisfaction. The grass was soft and warm; it was scented with the aromatic odors of wild peppermint, and it yielded like a downy cushion beneath her limbs. Still, she was just a little uneasy in mind, for she fancied that she had seen a sudden sign of feeling in Wyllard’s face when he had held her for a moment on the ledge of the wagon. She glanced at him and was reassured. He was looking straight before him with unwavering eyes, and his face was set and quiet. Neither of them spoke until the team moved on. Then he turned to her.
“You won’t be jolted much,” he assured her. “They’ve been at it since four o’clock this morning.”
“That,” replied Agatha, “must mean that you rose at three.”
Wyllard smiled. “As a matter of fact, it was half-past two. There was no dew last night, and we started early. I’ve several extra teams this year, and there’s a good deal of hay to cut. Of course, we have to get it in the sloughs or any damp place where it’s long. We don’t sow grass, and we have no meadows like those there are in England.”
Agatha understood that he meant to talk about matters of no particular consequence, as he usually did. She had noticed a vein of poetic imagination in him, and his idea that she had been with him through the snow of the lonely ranges and the gloom of the great forests of the Pacific slope appealed to her. Since the day when he told her that he loved her he had spoken only of commonplace subjects. Sitting close beside him in the hay she decided to let him talk about his farm, while she listened half-absently.
“But you have a foreman who could see the teams turned out, haven’t you?” she asked, going back to the subject of his early rising.
“I had, but he left me three or four days ago. It’s a pity, since I’ve taken up rather more than I can handle this year.”
“Then why didn’t you keep him?”
“Martial was a little mulish, and I’m afraid I’m troubled with a shortness of temper now and then. We had a difference of opinion as to the best way to drive themower into the slough, and he didn’t seem to recognize that he should have deferred to me. Unfortunately, as the boys were standing by, I had to insist upon his getting out of the saddle.”
He had turned a little further towards her, and Agatha noticed that there was a bruise upon one side of his face. After what he had just told her the sight of it jarred upon her, though she would not admit that there was any reason why it should. She could not deny that on the prairie a resort to physical force might be warranted by the lack of any other remedy, but it hurt her to think of him as descending to an open brawl with one of his men.
Then it occurred to her that the other man in all probability had suffered more, and this brought her a certain sense of satisfaction which she admitted was more or less barbarous. She had made it clear that Wyllard was nothing to her, but she could not help watching him as he lay back against the hay. His wide hat set off his bronzed face, which, though not exactly handsome, was pleasant and reassuring. The dusty shirt and old blue trousers accentuated the long, clean lines of his figure, and she realized with a faint sense of anger that his mere physical perfection, his strength and suppleness, stirred her heart. She recognized a feeling to be judiciously checked. After all, in spite of her denial of it, she was endowed with power to love as women close to nature love, with an emotion all-encompassing and not subject to cold reasoning.
They talked of trifles of no great consequence, for both of them were conscious of the necessity for a certain reticence; and when they reached the homestead Agatha joined Mrs. Hastings, while Wyllard pitched the hay off the wagon. He came in to supper presently with about half of his men, and they all sat down together in the long, barely furnished room. Wyllard was unusually animated. Hedrew Mrs. Hastings into a bout of whimsical badinage, which was interrupted when a beat of hoofs rose from the prairie.
“Somebody’s riding in; I wonder what he wants,” remarked Wyllard. “I certainly don’t expect anybody.”
The drumming of hoofs rang more sharply through the open windows, for the sod was hard and dry. It stopped suddenly and Agatha saw Wyllard start as a man came into the room. He was a little, thick-set man with a seamed and tanned face. He was dressed in rather old blue serge, and he walked as if he were a seaman.
The stranger stood still, looking about him, and Wyllard’s lips set tight. A thrill of apprehension ran through Agatha, for she felt that she knew what this stranger’s errand must be.
Wyllard rose and walked towards the man with outstretched hand.
“Sit right down and have some supper. You’ll want it if you have ridden in from the railroad,” he said. “We’ll talk afterwards.”
The stranger nodded. “I’m from Vancouver,” he announced, “had quite a lot of trouble tracing you.”
He sat down, and Wyllard, who sent a man out to take the newcomer’s horse, went back to his seat, but he was very quiet during the remainder of the meal. When supper was finished he asked Mrs. Hastings to excuse him, and leading the stranger into a smaller room, pulled out two chairs and laid a cigar on the table.
“Now you can get ahead,” he said laconically.
The seaman fumbled in his pocket, and taking out a slip of wood handed it to his companion.
“That’s what I came to bring you,” he remarked.
Wyllard’s eyes grew grave as he gazed at the thing. It was a slip of willow which grows close up to the limits ofeternal ice, and it bore a rude representation of the British ensign union down, which signifies “In distress.” Besides this there were one or two indecipherable words scratched on it, and three common names rather more clearly cut. Wyllard recognized every one of them.
“How did you get it?” he asked, in tense suspense.
The seaman once more felt in his pocket and took out a piece of paper cut from a chart. He flattened the paper out on the table, and it showed, as Wyllard had expected, a strip of the Kamtchatkan coast.
“I guess I needn’t tell you where that is,” the seaman said, as he pointed to the parallel of latitude that ran across it. “Dunton gave it to me. He was up there late last season well over on the western side. A northeasterly gale fell on them, and took most of the foremast out of their ship. I understand they tried to lash on a boom or something as a jury mast, but it hadn’t height enough to set much forward canvas, and that being the case she wouldn’t bear more than a three-reefed mainsail. Anyway, they couldn’t do anything with her on the wind, and as it kept heading them from the east she sidled away down south through the Kuriles into the Yellow Sea. They got ice-bound somewhere, which explains why Dunton fetched Vancouver only a week ago.”
“But the message?”
“When they were in the thick of their troubles they hove to not far off the icy beach, and a Husky came down on them in some kind of boat.”
“A Husky?” repeated Wyllard, who knew the seaman meant an Esquimau.
“That’s what Dunton called him, but I guess he must have been a Kamtchadale or a Koriak. Anyway, he brought this strip of willow, and he had Tom Lewson’s watch. Dunton traded him something for it. Theycouldn’t make much of what he said except that he’d got the message from three white men somewhere along the beach. They couldn’t make out how long ago.”
“Dunton tried for them?”
“How could he? His vessel would hardly look at the wind, and the ice was piling up on the coast close to lee of him. He hung on a week or two with the floes driving in all the while, and then it freshened hard and blew him out.”
The stranger had told his story, and Wyllard, who rose with a quick gesture of deep anxiety, stood leaning on his chairback. His face was grave.
“That,” he said, “must have been eight or nine months ago.”
“It was. They’ve been up there since the night we couldn’t pick up the boat.”
“It’s unthinkable,” declared Wyllard. “The thing can’t be true.”
The seaman gravely produced a little common metal watch made in Connecticut, and worth five or six dollars. Opening it, he pointed to a name scratched inside it.
“You can’t get over that,” he said simply.
Wyllard strode up and down the room. When he sat down again with a clenched hand laid upon the table he and the seaman looked at each other steadily for a moment or two. Then the stranger made a significant gesture.
“You sent them,” he said, “what are you going to do?”
“I’m going for them.”
The sailor smiled. “I knew it would be that. You’ll have to start right away if it’s to be done this year. I’ve my eye upon a schooner.”
He lighted a cigar, and settled himself more comfortably in his chair. “Well,” he answered, “I’m going with you, but you’ll have to buy my ticket to Vancouver. Itcleaned me out to get here. We’d a difficulty with a blame gunboat last season, and the boss went back on me. Sealing’s not what is used to be. Anyway, we can fix the thing up later. I won’t keep you from your friends.”
Wyllard left the sailor and though he did not find Mrs. Hastings immediately, he came upon Agatha sitting outside the house. She glanced at his face when he sat down beside her.
“Ah,” she said, “you have had the summons.”
Wyllard nodded. “Yes,” he replied, “that man was the skipper of a schooner I once sailed in. He has come to tell me where those three men are.”
He told her what he had heard, and the girl was conscious of mingled admiration and fear, the fear of losing him from her everyday life.
“You are going up there to search for them?” she asked. “Won’t it cost you a great deal?”
She saw his face harden as he gazed at the tall wheat, but his expression was resolute.
“Yes,” he admitted, “that’s a sure thing. Most of my money is locked up in this crop, and there’s need of constant watchfulness and effort until the last bushel’s hauled in to the elevators. It probably sounds egotistical, but now I’ve got rid of Martial I can’t put my hand on any one as fit to see the thing through as I am. Still, I have to go without delay. What else could I do?”
“Wouldn’t the Provincial Government of British Columbia or your authorities at Ottawa take the matter up?”
Wyllard shook his head. “It wouldn’t be wise to give them an opportunity. For one thing, they’ve had enough of sealing cases, and that isn’t astonishing. We’ll say they applied for the persons of three British subjects who are supposed to be living somewhere in Russian Asia—andfor that matter I couldn’t be sure that two of them aren’t Americans—the Russians naturally inquire what the men were doing there. The answer is that they were poaching for the Russians’ seals. Then the affair on the beach comes up, and there’s a big claim for compensation and trouble all round. It seems to me the last thing those men—they’re practically outlaws—would desire would be to have a Russian expedition sent up on their trail. They would want to lie hidden until they could somehow get off again.”
“But how have they lived up there? The whole land is frozen, isn’t it, most of the year?” she questioned.
“They had sealing rifles, and the Koriaks make out farther north in their roofed-in pits. One can live on seal and walrus meat and blubber.”
Agatha shivered. “But they had no tents, nor furs, nor blankets. It’s horrible to imagine it.”
“Yes,” agreed Wyllard gravely; “that’s why I’m going for them.”
Agatha sat still a moment. She could realize the magnitude of the sacrifice that he was making, and in some degree the hazards that he must face. It appealed to her with an overwhelming force, but she was also conscious of a strange dismay. She turned to him with a flush of color in her cheeks and her eyes shining.
“Oh,” she said, “it’s splendid.”
Wyllard smiled. “What could I do?” he said, “I sent them.”
CHAPTER XIVAGATHA PROVES OBDURATE
It was two days later when Agatha, coming back from a stroll across the prairie with the two little girls, found Mrs. Hastings awaiting her at the homestead door.
“I’ll take the kiddies. Harry Wyllard’s here, and he seems quite anxious to see you, though I don’t know what he wants,” she said.
She flashed a searching glance at the girl, whose face, however, remained impassive. It was not often that Agatha’s composure broke down.
“Don’t wait,” she added, “you had better go in this minute. Allen has been arguing with him the last half-hour, and can’t get any sense into him. It seems to me the man’s crazy; but he might, perhaps, listen to you.”
“I think that is scarcely likely,” replied Agatha.
Mrs. Hastings made a sign of impatience. “Then,” she rejoined, “it’s a pity. Anyway, if he speaks to you about his project you can tell him that it’s altogether unreasonable.”
She drew aside, and Agatha walked into the room in which she had had her painful interview with Gregory. Wyllard, who rose as she came in, stood quietly watching her.
“Nellie Hastings or her husband has been telling you what they think of my idea?” he said questioningly.
“Yes,” Agatha answered. “Their opinion evidently hasn’t much weight with you.”
“Haven’t you a message for me?” he asked. “You were sent to denounce my folly—and you can’t do it. Ifyou trusted your own impulses you would give me your benediction instead.” He smiled down at her.
Agatha, who was troubled with a sense of regret, saw a suggestive wistfulness in his face.
“No,” she said slowly, “I can’t denounce your folly, as they call your decision to go North. For one reason, I have no right of any kind to force my views on you.”
“You told Mrs. Hastings that?”
It seemed an unwarranted question, but the girl admitted the truth frankly.
“In one sense I did. I suggested that there was no reason why you should listen to me.”
Wyllard smiled again. “Nellie and her husband are good friends of mine, but sometimes our friends are a little too officious. Anyway, it doesn’t count. If you had had that right, you would have told me to go.”
Agatha felt the warm blood rise to her cheeks. It seemed to her that he had paid her a great and sincere compliment in taking it for granted that if she had loved him she would still have bidden him undertake his perilous duty.
“Ah,” she said, “I don’t know. Perhaps I should not have been brave enough.”
It was not a judicious answer. She realized that, but she felt that she must speak with unhesitating candor.
“After all,” she added, “can you be quite sure that this is your duty?”
Wyllard kept his eye on her. “No,” he said, “I can’t. In fact, when I sit down to think I can see at least a dozen reasons why it doesn’t concern me. In a case of this kind that’s always easy. It’s just borne in upon me—I don’t know how—that I have to go.”
Agatha crossed to the window and sat down. He leaned upon a chairback looking at her gravely.
“Well,” he continued, “we’ll go on a little further. It seems better that I should make what’s in my mind quite clear to you. You see, Captain Dampier and I start in a week.”
Agatha was conscious of a shock of dismay.
“We may be back before the winter, but it’s also quite likely that we may be ice-nipped before our work is through, and in that case it would be a year at least before we reach Vancouver,” he went on steadily after a little pause. “In fact, there’s a certain probability that all of us may leave our bones up there. Now, there’s a thing I must ask you. Is it only a passing trouble that stands between you and Gregory? Are you still fond of him?”
Agatha’s heart beat fast. It would have been a relief to assure herself that she was as fond of Gregory as she had been, but she could not do it.
“That is a point on which I cannot answer you,” she declared in a voice that trembled.
“We’ll let it go at that. The fact that Gregory sent me over for you implied a certain obligation. How far events have cleared me of it I don’t know—and you don’t seem willing to tell me. But I believe there is now less cause than there was for me to thrust my own wishes into the background, and, as I start in another week, the situation has forced my hand. I can’t wait as I had meant to do, and it would be a vast relief to know that I had made your future safer than it is before I go. Will you marry me at the settlement the morning I start?”
Half-conscious, as she was, of the unselfishness which had prompted this suggestion, Agatha faced him in hot anger.
“Can you suppose for a moment that I would agree to that?” she asked.
“Wait,” he pleaded. “Try to look at it calmly. First of all, I want you. You know that—though you havenever shown me any tenderness, you can’t doubt it—but I can’t stay to win your liking. I must go away. As things stand, your future is uncertain; but as my wife it would, at least, be safe. However badly the man I leave in charge of the Range may manage there would be something saved out of the wreck, and I would like to make that something yours. As I said, I may be away a year, perhaps eighteen months, and I may never come back. If I don’t return the fact that you would bear my name could cause you no great trouble. It would lay no restraint on you in any way.”
Agatha looked him in the eyes, and spoke with quick intensity. “We can’t contemplate your not coming back. It’s unthinkable.”
“Thank you,” said Wyllard, still with the grave quietness she wondered at. “Then I’m not sure that my turning up again would greatly complicate the situation. There would, at least, be one way out of the difficulty. You wouldn’t find your position intolerable if I could make you fond of me.”
Agatha broke into a little, high-strung laugh that was near to weeping.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, “aren’t you taking too much for granted? Am I really to believe you are making this fantastic offer seriously? Do you suppose I would marry you—for your possessions?”
“My proposition does sound cold-blooded. Perhaps it is in one way, but you wouldn’t always find me so practical and calculating. Just now, because my hand is forced, I am only anticipating things. If I live, you will some day have to choose between Gregory and me. In that case he must hold his own if he can.”
“Against what you have offered me?” she flung the question at him.
He looked at her with his face set.
“I expect I deserved that. I wanted to make you safe. It’s the most pressing difficulty.”
The resentment was still in the girl’s eyes.
“So far as I am concerned, you seem to believe it is the only difficulty. Oh, do you imagine that an offer of the kind you have made me, made as you have made it, would lead anyone to love you?”
Wyllard spoke with a new tenderness. “When I first saw your picture, and when I saw you afterwards, I loved your gracious quietness. Now you seem to have lost your repose and I love you better as you are. There is one thing, Agatha, that I must ask again, and it’s your duty to tell me. Are you fonder of Gregory than you feel you ever could be of me?”
Agatha’s eyes fell. She felt that she could not look at him nor could she answer his question honestly as she desired to answer it.
“At least I am bound to him until he releases me.”
“Ah!” responded Wyllard, “that is what I was most afraid of. All along it hampered me, and in it you have the reason for my cold, business-like talk to-day. It is another reason why I should go away.”
“For fear that you should tempt me from my duty?”
Wyllard’s expression changed, and there crept into his eyes a gleam of the passion that he was smothering.
“My dear,” he said, “I seem to know that I could make you break faith with that man. You belong to me. For three years you have been everywhere with me. Now I must go away and Gregory will have a clear field, but the probability is in favor of my coming back again, and then, if he has failed to make the most of his chance, I’ll enforce my claim.”
He seized both her hands, holding them firmly.
“That is my last word. At least, you will let me thinkthat when I go up yonder into the mists and snow I shall take your good wishes for my success away with me.”
She lifted her flushed face, and once looked him steadily in the eyes.
“My good wishes are yours, most fervently,” she replied. “It would be intolerable that you should fail.”
He looked sad as he let her hands fall. “After all,” he said, “one can do only what one can.”
He went away without another glance at her.
Not long afterwards Mrs. Hastings, who was possessed of a reasonable measure of curiosity, found occasion to enter the room.
“You have said something to trouble Harry?” she began.
“I’m not sure he’s greatly troubled. In any case, I told him I would not marry him,” Agatha answered.
Mrs. Hastings gave her a glance of compassionate astonishment.
“Oh,” she said, “he’s mad. Did he tell you that he means to leave Gregory in charge of Willow Range?”
Agatha’s face showed her surprise, but Mrs. Hastings nodded reassuringly. “It’s a fact,” she asserted. “He asked Gregory to meet him here to save time, and”—she turned towards the window—“there’s his wagon now.”
She went to the door, and then turned again.
“Is there any blood—red blood we will call it—or even common-sense in you? You could have kept Harry here if you had wanted to do so?”
“No,” replied Agatha, “I don’t think I could. I’m not even sure that, if I’d had the right, I would have done it. He recognized that.”
Mrs. Hastings looked at her dubiously. “Then,” she commented, “you have either a somewhat extraordinary character, or you are in love with him in a way that is beyondmost of us. In any case, I can’t help feeling that you will be sorry some day for what you have done.”
Next moment the door closed with a bang, and Agatha was left alone to analyze her sensations during her interview with Wyllard. She found the task difficult, for her memory of what had happened was confused and fragmentary. She had certainly been angry with Wyllard. It was humiliating that he had evidently taken it for granted that the greater security she would enjoy as his wife would have preponderance of weight with her, yet there was a certain satisfaction in the reflection that to leave her dependent upon Mrs. Hastings caused him concern. For another thing, his reserve had been perplexing, and it was borne in upon her that it would have cost her a more determined effort to withstand him had he spoken with fire and passion.
If the man had been fervently in love with her, why had he not insisted on that fact? she asked herself. Could it have been because, with the fantastic generosity of which he was evidently capable, he had been willing to leave his friend unhandicapped with an open field? That seemed too much to expect from any man. Then there was the other explanation—that he preferred to leave the choice wholly to her, lest he should tempt her too strongly to break faith with Gregory. This idea brought the blood to her face since it suggested that he believed that he had merely to urge her sufficiently in order to make her yield. There was, it seemed, no satisfactory explanation at all! The one fact remained that he had made her a dispassionate offer of marriage, and had left her to decide.
Wyllard could not have made the matter very much clearer. Shrewdly practical, as he was in some respects, there were times when he acted blindly, merely doing without reasoning what he felt sub-consciously was right. Thishad more than once involved him in disaster, but in the long run the failures of such men often prove better than the dictates of calculating wisdom.
Agatha found a momentary relief from her thoughts as she watched Hawtrey get down from his wagon and approach the house. The change in him was plainer than it had ever been. It may have been because she had now a standard of comparison that it was so apparent. He was tall and well-favored, and he moved with a jaunty yet not ungraceful swing; but it seemed to her that his bearing was merely the result of an empty self-sufficiency. There was, she felt, no force behind it. Gregory was smiling, and there was certainly a hint of sensuality in his face which suggested that the man might sink into a self-indulgent coarseness. Agatha remembered that she was still pledged to him and determinedly brushed these thoughts aside.
Hawtrey entered a room where, with a paper in his hand, Wyllard sat awaiting him.
“I asked you to drive over here because it would save time,” said Wyllard. “I have to go in to the railroad at once. Here’s a draft of the scheme I suggested. You had better tell me if there’s anything you’re not quite satisfied with.”
He threw the paper on the table, and Hawtrey took it up.
“I’m to farm and generally manage the Range on your behalf,” said Hawtrey after reading its contents. “My percentage to be deducted after harvest. I’m empowered to sell out grain or horses as appears advisable, and to have the use of teams and implements for my own place when occasion requires it.”
He looked up. “I’ve no fault to find with the thing, Harry. It’s generous.”
“Then you had better sign it, and we’ll get Hastings to witness it in a minute or two. In the meanwhile there’s a thing I have to ask you. How do you stand in regard to Miss Ismay?”
Hawtrey pushed his chair back noisily. “That,” he said, “is a subject on which I’m naturally not disposed to give you any information. How does it concern you?”
“In this way. Believing that your engagement must be broken off, I asked Miss Ismay to marry me.”
Hawtrey was clearly startled, but in a moment or two he smiled.
“Of course,” he said, “she wouldn’t. As a matter of fact, our engagement isn’t broken off. It’s merely extended.”
The two men looked at each other in silence for a moment or two, and there was a curious hardness in Wyllard’s eyes. Hawtrey spoke again.
“In view of what you have just told me, why did you want to put me, of all people, in charge of the Range?” he asked.
“I’ll be candid,” answered Wyllard. “For one thing, you held on when I was slipping off the trestle that day in British Columbia. For another, you’ll make nothing of your own holding, and if you run the Range as it ought to be run it will put a good many dollars into your pocket, besides relieving me of a big anxiety. If you’re to marry Miss Ismay, I’d sooner she was made reasonably comfortable.”
Hawtrey looked up with a flush in his face.
“Harry,” he said, “this is extravagantly generous.”
“Wait,” returned Wyllard; “there’s a little more to be said. I can’t be back before the frost, and I may be away eighteen months. While I am away you will have a clear field—and you must make the most of it. If you are notmarried when I come back I shall ask Miss Ismay again. Now”—and he glanced at his comrade steadily—“does this stand in the way of you’re going on with the arrangement we have arrived at?”
There was a rather tense silence for a moment or two, and then Hawtrey said:
“No; after all there is no reason why it should do so. It has no practical bearing upon the other question.”
Wyllard rose. “Well,” he suggested, “if you will call Allen Hastings in we’ll get this thing fixed up.”
The document was duly signed, and a few minutes later Wyllard drove away.
Mrs. Hastings contrived to have a few words with Hawtrey before he left the house.
“I’ve no doubt that Harry took you into his confidence on a certain point,” she remarked.
“Yes,” admitted Hawtrey, “he did. I was a little astonished, besides feeling rather sorry for him. There is, however, reason to believe that he’ll soon get over it.”
“You feel sure of that?” Mrs. Hastings smiled.
“Isn’t it evident? If he had cared much about her he certainly wouldn’t have gone away.”
“You mean you wouldn’t?”
“No,” declared Hawtrey, “there’s no doubt of that.”
Mrs. Hastings smiled again. “Well,” she commented, “I would like to think you were right about Harry; it would be a relief to me.”
Hawtrey presently drove away, and soon after he left the homestead Agatha approached Mrs. Hastings.
“There’s something I must ask you,” she said. “Has Gregory consented to take charge of Wyllard’s farm?”
“He has,” answered Mrs. Hastings in her dryest tone.
There was a flash in Agatha’s eyes.
“Oh,” she said, “it’s almost unendurable.”
Agatha saw Wyllard only once again, and that was when he called early one morning. He got down from the wagon where Dampier sat, and shook hands with her and Allen and Mrs. Hastings. Few words were spoken, and she could not remember what she said, but when he swung himself up again and the wagon jolted away into the white prairie she went back to the house with a feeling of loss and depression.
CHAPTER XVTHE BEACH
For a fortnight after they reached Vancouver Wyllard and Dampier were very busy. They had various difficulties to contend with, for while they would have preferred to slip away to sea as quietly as possible a British vessel’s movements are fenced about with many formalities, and they did not wish to ship a white man who could be dispensed with. Wyllard knew there were sailors and sealers in Vancouver and down Puget Sound who would have gone with him, but there was a certain probability of their discussing their exploits afterwards in the saloons ashore, which was about the last thing that he desired. It was essential that he should avoid notoriety as much as possible.
He had further trouble about obtaining provisions and general necessaries, for considerably more attention than the free-lance sealers cared about was being bestowed upon the North, and he did not desire to arouse the curiosity of the dealers as to why he was filling his lazaret up with Arctic stores. He obviated that difficulty by dividing his orders among all of them, and buying as little as possible. Dampier proved an adept at the difficult business, and eventually the schoonerSelache, painted a pale green, crept out from the Narrows, at dusk one evening, under all plain sail, with her big main-boom making at least a fathom beyond her taffrail. On board were Wyllard, Dampier, and two other white men. A week later theSelachesailed into a deep, rock-walled inlet on the western coast of Vancouver Island. At the settlement the storekeeper made no difficulty about selling Wyllard allhis flour and canned goods at higher figures than there was any probability of obtaining from the local ranchers.
TheSelacheslid down the inlet again, and lay for several days in a forest-shrouded arm near the mouth of it. When she once more dropped her anchor off a Siwash rancherie far up on the wild west coast, she was painted a dingy gray, and her sawn-off boom just topped her stern. One does not want a great main-boom in the northern seas, and a big mainsail needs men to handle it. Wyllard, however, shipped several sea-bred Indians who had made perilous voyages on the trail of the seal and halibut in open canoes. All of them had also sailed in sealing schooners. Their comrades sold him furs, and filled part of the hold with redwood billets and bark for the stove, for he had not considered it advisable to load too much Wellington coal.
Wyllard pushed out into the waste Pacific, and once when a beautiful big white mail boat reeled by him, driving with streaming bows into an easterly gale, he sent back a message to his friends upon the prairie. It duly reached them, for three weeks afterward Allen Hastings, openingThe Colonist, which he had ordered from Victoria as soon as Wyllard sailed, read to his wife and Agatha a paragraph in the shipping news:
“Empress of India, from Yokohama, reports having passed small gray British schooner, flying——” There followed several code letters, the latitude and longitude, and a line apparently by the water-front reporter: “No schooner belonging to this city allotted the signal in question.”
Hastings smiled as he laid down the paper. “No,” he observed, “that signal is Wyllard’s private code. Agatha, won’t you reach me down my map of the Pacific? It’s just behind you.”
As he looked around he noticed the significant expression on his wife’s face, for the girl already had turned towards the shelf where he kept the lately purchased map.
The easterly gale that started did not last, for the wind came out of the west and north, and sank to foggy calms when it did not blow wickedly hard. This meant that theSelache’scourse was all to windward, and though they drove her unmercifully under reefed book-foresail, main trysail, and a streaming jib or two, with the brine going over her, she had made little headway when each arduous day was done. They were drenched to the skin continuously, and lashed by stinging spray. Cooking except of the crudest kind was out of the question, and sleep would have been impossible to any but worn-out sailors. The little crew was often aroused in the blackness of the night to haul down a burst jib, to get in another reef, or to crawl out on a plunging bowsprit washed by icy seas as the schooner lay with her lee rail under. Glad as they were of the respite it was even more trying to lie rolling wildly on the big smooth waves that hove out of the windless calm, while everything in the vessel banged to and fro. When the breeze came screaming through the fog or rain they sprang to make sail again.
Fate seemed to oppose them, as it was certain that, if their purpose was suspected, the hand of every white man whom they might come across would be against them. But they held on over leagues of empty ocean.
The season wore away, and at last the wind freshened easterly, and they ran for a week under boom-foresail and a jib, with the big gray combers curling as they foamed by high above her rail. Then the wind fell, and Dampier, who got an observation, armed his deep-sea lead, and, finding shells and shoal water, went aft to talk to Wyllard with the strip of Dunton’s chart.
Wyllard, who was clad in oilskins, stood by the wheel. His face was tanned and roughened by cold and stinging brine. There was an open sore upon one of his elbows, and both his wrists were raw. Forward, a white man and two Siwash were standing about the windlass, and when the bows went up a dreary stretch of slate-gray sea opened beyond them, beneath the dripping jibs. TheSelachewas carrying sail, and lurching over the steep swell at some four knots an hour.
Dampier stopped near the wheel, and glanced at Wyllard’s oilskins.
“You’ll have to take them off. It’s stuffed boots and those Indian seal-gut things or furs from now on,” he said. “That leather cuff’s chewing up your hand.”
“We’ll cut that out,” replied Wyllard; “it’s not to the point. Can’t you get on?”
Dampier grinned. “We’re on soundings, and they and Dunton’s longitude ’most agree. With this wind we should pick the beach up in the next two days. Next question is, where were those men?”
“Where are they?” corrected Wyllard.
“If they’ve pushed on it’s probably a different thing, though, if they’d food yonder, I don’t quite see why they’d want to push on anywhere. It wouldn’t be south, anyway. They’d run up against the Russians there.”
“We’ve decided that already.”
“I’m admitting it,” said the skipper. “There’s the other choice that they’ve gone up north. It’s narrower across to Alaska there, and it’s quite likely they might have a notion of looking out for one of the steam whalers. The Koriaks up yonder will have boats of some kind. If the boats are skin ones like those the Huskies have they might sledge them on the ice.”
It was a suggestion that had been made several timesbefore, but both the men realized that there was in all probability very little to warrant it. Wyllard had wasted no time endeavoring to learn what was known about the desolation on the western shore of the Behring Sea. He had bought a schooner and set out at once. It appeared almost impossible to him that any three men could haul the skin boats and supplies they would need far over hummocky ice.
“The point is that we’ll have to fix on some course in the next few days,” added Dampier. “Say we run in to make inquiries”—a gleam of grim amusement crept into his eyes—“what are we going to find? A beach with a roaring surf on it, and if we get a boat through, a desolate, half-frozen swamp behind it. It’s quite likely there are people in the country, Koriaks or Kamtchadales, but, if there are, they’ll probably move up and down after what they get to eat like the Huskies do, and we can’t hang on and wait for them. ’Most any time next month we’ll have the ice closing in.”
Wyllard made no reply for another minute, and, as he stood with hands clenched on the wheel, a puff of bitter spray splashed upon his oilskins. They had been over it all often before, weighing conjecture after conjecture, and had found nothing in any that might serve to guide them. Now, when winter was close at hand, they had leagues of surf-swept beach to search for three men who might have perished twelve months earlier.
“We’ll stand in until we pick up the beach,” he said at length. “Then if there’s no sign of them we’ll push north as long as we can find open water. Now if you’ll call Charly I’ll let up at the wheel.”
Another white man walked aft, and Wyllard, entering the little stern cabin, the top of which rose several feet above the deck, took off his wet oilskins and crawled,dressed as he was, into his bunk. Evening was closing in, and for a while he lay blinking at the swinging lamp, and wondering what the end of the search would be.
TheSelachewas a little fore and aft schooner of some ninety-odd tons, wholly unprotected against ice-chafe or nip, and he knew that prudence dictated their driving her south under every rag of canvas now. There was, however, the possibility of finding some sheltered inlet where she could lie out the winter, frozen in, and he had blind confidence in his crew. The white men were sealers who had borne the lash of snow-laden gales, the wash of icy seas, and tremendous labor at the oar, and the Indians had been born to an unending struggle with the waters. All of them had many times looked the King of Terrors squarely in the face. As an encouraging aid to strenuous effort they had been promised a tempting bonus if theSelachereturned home successful.
While Wyllard pondered upon these things he went to sleep and slept soundly, though Dampier expected to raise the beach some time next morning. The skipper’s expectation proved to be warranted, and, when Wyllard turned out, the stretch of shore lay before them, a dingy smear on a slate-green sea that was cut off from it by a wavy line of vivid whiteness, which he knew to be a fringe of spouting surf. It had cost Wyllard more than he cared to contemplate to reach that beach, and now there was nothing in the dreary spectacle that could excite any feeling, except a shrinking from the physical effort of the search. There was little light in the heavy sky or on the sullen heave of sea; the air was raw, the schooner’s decks were sloppy, and the vessel rolled viciously as she crept shorewards with her mainsail peak eased down. What wind there was blew dead on-shore, which was not as the skipper would have had it.
Wyllard heard the splash of the lead as he and the white man, Charly, ate their breakfast in the little stern cabin. There was a clatter of blocks, and on going out on deck he found the men swinging a boat over. With Charly and two of the Indians he dropped into the boat, and Dampier, who had hove the schooner to, looked down on them over the vessel’s rail.
“If you knock the bottom out of her put a jacket on an oar, and I’ll try to bring you off,” he said, pointing toward the boat. “If you don’t signal I’ll stand off and on with a thimble-headed topsail over the mainsail. You’ll start back right away if you see us haul it down. When she won’t stand that there’ll be more surf than you’ll have any use for with the wind dead on the beach.”
Wyllard made a sign of comprehension, and they slid away on the back of a long sea. Waves rolled up behind them, cutting off the schooner’s hull so that only her gray canvas showed above dim slopes of water. The beach rose fast before them. It looked forbidding with the spray-haze drifting over it, and the long wash of the Pacific weltering among its hammered stones. When the men drew a little nearer Wyllard stood up with the big sculling oar in his hand. There was no point to offer shelter, and in only one place could he see a strip of surf-lapped sand.
“It’s a little softer than the boulders, anyway; we’ll try it there,” he ordered.
The oars dipped again, and in another minute the sea that came up behind them hove them high and broke into a little spout of foam. The next wave had a hissing crest, part of which splashed on board, and, like a toboggan down an icy slide, the boat went shoreward on the shoulders of the third. To keep her straight while the water seethed about them was all that they could do. For a moment their hearts were in their mouths when the waveleft them to sink with a dizzy swing into the hollow of the sea.
They pulled desperately as another white-topped ridge came on astern, and they went up with it amid a chaotic frothing and splashing of spray. After that there was a shock and a crash. They sprang out into the knee-deep water and held fast to the boat while the foam boiled into her. Before the next sea came in they had run the boat up beyond its reach, and they discovered that there was not much the matter with her when they hove her over. Wyllard looked back at the tumbling surf.
“Dampier was right about that topsail; it won’t be quite so easy getting off,” he declared. “You’ll stand by, Charly, and watch the schooner. If the surf gets steeper you can make some sign. I’ll leave one of the Siwash on the rise yonder.”
Then he walked up the beach. On the crest of the low rise a mile or two behind it, he stopped a while, gazing out at what seemed to be an empty desolation. There were willows in the hollow beneath him, and upon the slope a few little stunted trees, which resembled the juniper that he had seen among the ranges of British Columbia, but he could see no sign of any kind of life. What was more portentous, the mossy sod he stood upon was frozen, and there were stretches of snow among the straggling firs upon a higher ridge. Inland, the little breeze seemed to have fallen dead away, and there was an oppressive silence which the rumble of the surf accentuated.
Wyllard left one of the Indians on the hill and going on with the other scrambled through a half-frozen swamp in the hollow; but when they came back hours afterwards as the narrow horizon was drawing further in, they had found nothing to show that any man had ever entered that grim, silent land. The surf seemed a little smoother, and theyreeled out through it with only a few inches of very cold water splashing about their boots, and pulled across a long stretch of darkening sea toward the rolling schooner.
Wyllard was weary and depressed, but it was not until he sat in the stern cabin with its cheerful twinkling stove and swinging lamp that he understood how he had shrunk from that forbidding wilderness. His consultation with Dampier, who came in by and by, was brief.
“We’ll head north for a couple of days, and try again,” he said.
He crawled into his berth early, and it was some time after midnight when he was awakened by being rudely flung out of it. That fact, and the slant of deck and sounds above, suggested that the schooner had been struck down by a sudden gale. He had grown more or less accustomed to such occurrences and to sleeping fully dressed, and in another moment or two he was out of the deck-house. A sharp wind drove stinging flakes of snow into his face. It was very dark, but he guessed that the schooner’s rail was in the sea, which was washing the decks, and that some of the crew were struggling to get the mainsail off her. A man whom he supposed to be Charly ran into him.
“Better come for’ard. Got to haul outer jib down before it blows away!” he shouted.
Up to his knees in water, Wyllard staggered after him and made out by the mad banging that some one had already cast the peak of the boom-foresail loose. He reached the windlass, and clutched it, as a sea that took him to the waist frothed in over the weather rail. The bows lurched out of it viciously, hurling another icy flood back on him, and he could see a dim white chaos of frothing water about and beneath them. Above rose the black wedge of the jibs.
He did not want to get out along the bowsprit to stopone of them down, but there are many things flesh and blood shrink from which must be faced at sea. He made out that a Siwash was fumbling at the down-haul made fast near his side, and when the man’s shadowy figure rose up against the whiteness of the foam he made a jump forward. Then he was on the bowsprit, lying upon it while he felt for the foot-rope slung beneath. He found it, and was cautiously lowering himself when the man in front of him called out harshly, and he saw a white sea range up ahead. It broke short over with a rush and roar, and he clung with hands and feet for his life as the schooner’s dipping bows rammed the seething mass.
The vessel went into it to the windlass. Wyllard was smothered in an icy flood that seemed bent on wrenching him from his hold, but that was only for a moment or two, and then, streaming with water, he was swung high above the sea again. It was bad enough merely to hold on, but that was a very small share of his task, for the big black sail that cut the higher darkness came rattling down its stay and fell upon him and his companion. As it dropped the wind took hold of the folds of it and buffeted them cruelly. As he clutched at the canvas it seemed to him incredible that he had not already been flung off headlong from the reeling spar. Still, that banging, thrashing canvas must be mastered somehow, though it was snow-soaked and almost unyielding, and with bleeding hands he clawed at it furiously while twice the bowsprit raked a sea and dipped him waist-deep into the water. At last, the other man flung him the end of the gasket, and they worked back carefully, leaving the sail lashed down, and scrambled aft to help the others who were making the big main-boom fast. When this was done Wyllard fell against Dampier and clutched at him.
“How’s the wind?” he roared.
“Northeast,” answered the skipper.
They could scarcely hear each other, though the schooner was lurching over it more easily now with shortened canvas, and Wyllard made Dampier understand that he wished to speak to him only by thrusting him towards the deck-house door. They went in together, and stood clutching at the table with the lamplight on their tense, wet faces and the brine that ran from them making pools upon the deck.
“The wind has hauled round,” said the skipper, “the wrong way.”
Wyllard made a savage gesture. “We’ve had it from the last quarter we wanted ever since we sailed, and we sailed nearly three months too late. We’re too close in to the beach for you to heave her to?”
“A sure thing,” agreed Dampier. “I was driving her to work off it with the sea getting up when the breeze burst on us. She put her rail right under, and we had to let go ’most everything before she’d pick it up. She’s pointing somewhere north, jammed right up on the starboard tack just now, but I can’t stand on.”
This was evident to Wyllard, and he closed one hand tight. He wanted to stand on as long as possible before the ice closed in, but he realized that to do so would put the schooner ashore.
“Well?” he questioned sharply.
Dampier made a grimace. “I’m going out to heave her round. If we’d any sense in us we’d square off the boom then, and leg it away across the Pacific for Vancouver.”
“In that case,” observed Wyllard, “somebody would lose his bonus.”
The skipper swung around on him with a flash in his eyes.“The bonus!” he repeated. “Who was it came for you with two dollars in his pocket after he’d bought his ticket from Vancouver?”
Wyllard smiled at him. “If you took that up the wrong way I’m sorry. She ought to work off on the port track, and when we’ve open water to leeward you can heave her to. When it moderates we can pick up the beach again.”
“That’s just what I mean to do.”
Dampier went out on deck, while Wyllard, flinging off his dripping clothing, crawled into his bunk and went quietly to sleep.