CHAPTER XXI
The short November day was closing in a freezing drizzle of rain as old Indian Tom, milk pail in hand, set out for the cowstable to do his evening “chores.” As he turned into the stable yard he was startled to see a horseman waiting him there, gazing round about him, a tall, lean young man, hard of face and so dark of skin that he might have been a blood brother but for the blue-grey eyes that looked down upon Tom as he drew near.
“Hah!” grunted Tom. “Who come?”
“Hello, Tom! Don’t you know me?” said the young man, smiling at him.
The smile revealed him to the old Indian. Dropping his pail, Tom ran to him with a cry.
“Kai-yai! Little chief come back! Good! good!” With both hands upstretched he reached for the hand extended to him and almost dragged the rider from his horse. Then followed a stream of jubilant Chippewayan which continued unbroken while the horse was being unsaddled, rubbed down and made comfortable for the night.
“You have everything in good order, Tom,” said Paul, returning from a survey of the stables. “But where are the horses and cattle?”
“No more,” said Tom, spreading wide his hands. “Only cochon, heem at house.”
“At the house?”
“Huh! Heem and his small leetle cochons at house. Come! I show heem,” said Tom, leading the way to the woodshed attached to the kitchen, where Paul discovered a sow and some half dozen half grown porkers, happily and conveniently domesticated, the explanation of their proximity to the bungalow being the desire of the Indian to save himself the annoyance of exposure to the inclemency of the weather in their care during the winter months.
“And where are the rest of the stock?” inquired Paul.
“Colonel Pelham, he mak de beeg sale. He’s all gone—all gone!” replied Tom.
“And the money? But you won’t know.”
“No.”
“And the Colonel—where is he?”
“Me not know. Over de beeg water, think. He go some place,” replied Tom, waving his hand in the direction of the universe generally.
“Oh, all right. I shall get into touch with him and he will tell me everything,” said Paul more to himself than to Tom.
“And Sleeman, Tom?” inquired Paul.
“Sleeman? He at ranch. Ole woman she go dead. Girl she at home—good clothes—oh!” Here, English failing him, Tom launched forth in his native tongue into a highly coloured description of the magnificence of the Sleeman girl. Asa, too, according to Tom, had developed into a “beeg man,” “fat,” with plenty of money and gorgeously apparelled. Sleeman, as far as Paul could gather, had made “much big money” through his contracts in supplies with the railway construction gangs. He listened with growing bitterness of spirit to Tom’s glowing accounts of the good fortune that had come to the Sleemans, with which he contrasted the unhappy fate that had befallen his father and his family, due to Sleeman’s crimes. The age-long problem of the prosperity of the wicked in a world ruled by a righteous God pressed hard upon his soul. During those six lonely years with the Chippewayans in the North land, while he was passing from boyhood to manhood, he had pondered long and deeply upon that problem. True, his father had committed his sin. But he had repented of his sin, bitterly repented, and to the utmost of his power had made atonement. His sin had been forgiven and he himself reinstated in the Divine favour. That was simple and right. Paul had come to estimate at its full ethical value that sin and not according to the standard of the savage or of the frontier people with whom he had met. In her hasty flight from the consequences of her crime his Indian stepmother had taken care to pack with her necessities a few books, snatched up almost at random, among them two engineering books of his father’s, a volume of Shakespeare and his Bible, his mother’s gift to him. The engineering books and the Shakespeare he had practically mastered, as far at least as the text was concerned. As for the Bible, during those years of isolation from civilisation no day passed without his giving an hour or more to its study. More than that, at the request of his stepmother it became his daily practice to make the Bible a text book for her children. For Tanna this was an hour of unmixed delight, but for Peter the trail was heavy and progress was at the cost of much toil and suffering.
In regard to his problem of evil and its punishment Paul had founded his system of ethics upon the doctrine set forth in the Old Testament and in the tragedies of the great master of the drama in the English or indeed in any other tongue. That doctrine was simple and straightforward. The criminal in due course received the just reward of his crime, both here and hereafter. That was entirely as it should be.
The prosperity and happy fortune of Sleeman and his family, in contrast to the tragic death of his father and his family, constituted an insoluble problem for Paul. Had the Indian woman’s knife found its intended vital spot and had Sleeman in consequence “gone to his own place,” as was the case both in the Old Testament and in Shakespeare, the demands of righteous government would have been met. But his father slept on the hillside, done to death practically by Sleeman; his Indian wife, balked of her just vengeance, lay in her far North land grave, leaving her children homeless among strangers; while, prosperous and happy, Sleeman and his family still lived, untouched by the vengeance of man or God. Here upon the scene of this tragedy and in the atmosphere in which it had been consummated, the pain of the insoluble problem became almost unbearably acute. Paul thrust it from him in the meantime and turned to matters more immediately pressing.
Indian Tom had evidently been making his abode in the kitchen, which reproduced in its condition of general disorder and dirt the Indian mode of housekeeping. From the kitchen Paul passed into the living room, and went through the rest of the house, followed by Tom, whose face exhibited every sign of anxiety. Paul was amazed and delighted at what he saw. The rooms were in a condition of perfect order and cleanliness.
“Why, Tom, this is wonderful! You are a splendid housekeeper.” He ran his hand over the face of the piano. “Not a speck of dust anywhere! Did you have a housecleaning today?”
“Huh!” grunted Tom, in a state of high delight. “Every day! Every day! Clean! clean! sweep! sweep! Every day! Every day! Colonel’s Pelham’s woman she say clean him up every day. Look!” He caught down a shot gun from the wall and threw open the breach. Paul looked through the barrels. They glistened like silver.
“Good! Fine! Father himself never had it better. You have kept everything in the very best shape.”
“De beeg chief, he good man to Tom,” said the Indian in a husky voice, his face set in an unmistakable mould of grief.
The emotion manifested by the stoical and simple-hearted savage released the flood of grief and loneliness that, without his knowledge, had been gathering within Paul’s heart ever since he had turned in at the Pine Croft drive. He threw himself into a chair, put his face in his hands, while great sobs shook his body. On the floor beside him the Indian sat, silent, his face rigid, immovable, as if cut in stone, his eyes unseeing, staring straight into space. Thus they sat, master and man, separated far as the poles asunder by race, breeding and convention, but finding a meeting point in the great and profound emotions of love and sorrow, in which all men, red, black, brown and white, are one.
After supper Tom took Paul to a special store-room where were piled up the family boxes and trunks, each labelled as to its contents in the Colonel’s neat hand-writing: “House linen,” “Silver,” “Books,” “Private papers,” etc. From a cupboard in the kitchen Tom took a ring of keys and indicated without the slightest hesitation the key for each trunk and box. Indian Tom had been faithful to the trust imposed by the Colonel’s “woman,” for the sake of the old chief who had saved his life many years ago.
“We will open this one, Tom,” said Paul, pointing to the box labelled “Private papers,” “and then you can go to bed. I shall be busy for a couple of hours.”
But the grey dawn was coming over the mountains before Paul had gone through the papers found in the box. The work was greatly facilitated by the exactitude with which his father had tabulated and classified his papers. The early letters from his wife before marriage, letters from her during his absences from home, business documents, correspondence with old friends of art school days, all were in their proper bundles, rubber banded, dated and annotated in the neat lettering characteristic of draughtsmen trained in the offices of the homeland. Nothing in the way of private papers of date later than that of his wife’s death had been preserved. It was as if his life in things of the heart and soul had been buried in that grave which held all that was dearest in life to him.
The private letters Paul left untouched. Some day he might be able to slip off those bands and peruse the words that would be like windows into the inmost shrine of his mother’s heart. But not today. He had a business on hand for which he would need a cool head and a cool heart, and a business for which he must prepare himself by an exhaustive study of his father’s affairs. His knowledge of business matters was that of a child. Business methods, business terminology, business principles, were to him as English to a Chippewayan. The matter to which he addressed himself was to discover the extent of his father’s indebtedness to Sleeman. But after hours spent in figuring and comparing statements of various dates he found himself compelled to acknowledge that he had come to no assured opinion on the matter in hand.
A red leather-bound note book contained a record of receipts and expenditures, but the record could not be made, by any arithmetical process of which Paul was master, to square with the papers in the trunk. Certain things appeared to be clear, however. There was a mortgage on the ranch for fifteen thousand dollars, of the proceeds of which ten thousand had been paid to the bank in Vancouver. To this entry was attached the note, “This squares the bank, and Sleeman too, outside of the mortgage, thank Heaven! Would to God I could square other accounts as well. Those, alas! I must commit to the mercy of Almighty God and to the love of those I love dearer than life itself.” Long Paul pondered this note, but without clear understanding. A list of entries of sums of money, following the mysterious letters, “I.O.U.,” with dates and Gaspard’s signature, was found on one page and on the opposite page a list of sales of Holsteins and Percherons, but the sums did not correspond, nor did the entries marked I.O.U. correspond to a neatly labelled bundle of slips of paper, duly dated and signed, similarly marked with the letters I.O.U. and figures representing certain sums of money. Finally Paul threw up the struggle and resolved that he would get the truth from Sleeman himself. He had little knowledge and less experience of business matters, but he had an instinctive knowledge of men. Indeed he knew himself to be possessed of a strange power of reading the hearts of men. No man had ever been able to lie successfully to him.
Filled as he was with a settled and deadly rage toward Sleeman, he knew that though he could kill him with his bare hands and though some such vengeance was the man’s due for the killing of his father, yet from such an act of vengeance he was prevented by the conscience within him and by his solemn word to both his father and his Indian stepmother. No, he must not and would not execute vengeance upon his enemy. Upon that he was resolved. But he was equally resolved that he would find a method by which he would extract the truth from Sleeman’s soul. With this resolve arrived at, he fell into sleep as the dawn was breaking, from which he was roused by Indian Tom only when the forenoon was half gone.
He found that his mind had carried over from the previous night the bitter hate toward Sleeman which had been with him during his six years’ absence from home, and in an intensified degree. Before setting out on his visit to Sleeman he walked up the hill at the back of the house, to the little enclosed piece of ground where were the graves of his father and mother. The poplars and birches about were bare and gaunt, but the balsams and spruce clustered in a kindly way near the little plot, and overhead the tall pines waved their feathery tops and sighed softly in the wind. To Paul the place was as a temple of God, but as he looked upon his father’s grave and remembered how it was that he came to be lying there, into his heart there came a prayer that justice should be done on him who had wrought this evil, and with the prayer a solemn vow that the execution of that act of justice should not be by his hand. For to him it came clear and certain that this matter lay in other hands than his and that he should hold himself in readiness to act only as he should be clearly guided. That he would be guided was to him a settled conviction that left him with mind undisturbed and will resolved to follow the path that should be made clear to him. In this mind he set forth on his journey.
He took the old mountain trail to the Sleeman ranch. Every turn in the trail was familiar to him, every turn associated with some incident in his boyhood days. But he was in no mood to linger. Swiftly he rode and came to the door of Sleeman’s new house, which stood on a site a little removed from that which had been fired by his father’s Indian wife. The door of the living room was open and standing within was Sleeman, lighting his pipe. Without knocking Paul entered the room and walking slowly toward Sleeman spoke in tones that cut like cold steel, “I am Paul Gaspard. I have business with you.”
At his words Sleeman’s face turned a sickly, greenish yellow, the pipe slipped from his fingers and fell clattering to the floor. He backed away toward the door of an inner room, opened it and with a swift leap was behind it, locked.
“Open that door,” commanded Paul. A moment he waited, then drove his heel at the lock just below the door knob. With a crash the door flew open. Within the room Sleeman was standing, a gun in his hand, hanging loose by his side.
“Keep back,” he shouted hoarsely.
“Put—that—gun—down—quick!” came from Paul in sharp, staccato tones.
“You keep out of this room,” said Sleeman, in a blustering voice that shook for all his bravado.
A movement swifter than the eye could follow, the snap of a gun, and Sleeman’s gun was flung against the wall, his fingers dripping blood.
“A mistake, Sleeman. Didn’t intend to hurt you,” said Paul quietly. “I should have warned you I am a trick hand with the gun. I tell you now. Don’t try anything on me. There are five shots left in this gun. I can shoot five fingers off you before you could draw. I should love to do it. Do you know, Sleeman,” here Paul’s voice dropped a note, “I find it hard not to kill you. I stood by my father’s grave this morning. You killed him. Don’t speak, you dog! Only God Almighty is keeping me from killing you now. Listen carefully. Do what I ask you and for God’s sake if you want to live beyond this hour, do it quick!”
Paralysed with fear, the wretched man sank into a chair and sat there, voiceless, staring at Paul, his breath choking him.
“You need a drink,” said Paul after looking at him disgustedly for a few moments. “Get it, and quick.”
Quickly, gladly, Sleeman went to a cupboard, poured himself a stiff glass of Scotch and drank it off.
“Now, Sleeman, I want from you a statement of how my father stood with you in money matters.”
An amazed relief expressed itself in Sleeman’s blotched countenance.
“Yes, yes, certainly. Quite simple,” he said, striving to speak calmly.
“Get your papers,” ordered Paul sharply.
Sleeman went to a safe, brought out a tin box and selected some papers.
“There’s the mortgage,” he said. “That’s about all.”
Paul glanced at the document. He knew very little about such matters.
“This is for fifteen thousand dollars. Did you pay him the full amount?” asked Paul, recalling an entry in his father’s red book.
“Yes—ah—the full proceeds of the mortgage,” said Sleeman.
“Sleeman, don’t try to deceive me. I know when a man is lying. Did you give my father fifteen thousand dollars in money?” Paul’s voice carried to Sleeman the fear of death.
“Not exactly. That is—he owed me something—we had other deals, you understand.”
“No, I understand nothing but that you are trying to deceive me.” His eyes, like points of steel, were boring into Sleeman’s. He leaned far over the table. “Sleeman,” he entreated, “don’t make me hurt you. I would love to, but unless it is necessary I must not. Listen! If it should become necessary I will, and gladly. I should like to hear you groan—as—as—oh, Sleeman!—as I heard my father groan the day you killed him.”
“I didn’t kill——”
Paul’s open hand flashed to Sleeman’s face. “Liar!” he snarled, half rising from his chair.
“Stop! stop!” cried Sleeman, utterly cowed and unmanned. “I’ll tell you straight. I have the papers here. Don’t—do—anything!”
“Oh, you poor cur!” cried Paul. “If you were only a man I should know what to do with you.” He was bitterly, horribly balked. He could not bring himself to punish this abject creature. The truth was Sleeman was by no means the man he was six years ago. He had been heavily dissipating, and his face showed his physical and moral degeneration. “Get through with this,” said Paul angrily. “Put your papers on the table.”
Sleeman hastened to obey.
“Make a list of them.”
“Why? What do you——”
“Make a list of them!” snapped Paul.
The list was made out, Paul supervising and hastening the operation.
“You are sure these are all the papers relating to my father?” said Paul, again boring him with steely eyes.
“Certain,” said Sleeman. “They are all there.”
Paul took the list, read it carefully, wrote a few words under it, signed the paper and handed it back. “I shall take these for a few weeks,” he said quietly, making a sheaf of the papers and snapping a rubber band about them. “I shall return them to you in good order.”
“You have no right! You can’t——” began Sleeman, sputtering in his wrath.
Paul rose, put the bundle in his inner pocket. “Why can’t I?” he said. “Do you see any reason? I don’t.” So saying he turned about and left Sleeman standing with his mouth open and in a fury, if the colour of his face gave any indication. At the door he turned and came back to Sleeman.
“You have a new house. Your old house was burned. You know by whom.”
“Yes, I know. The——”
Paul with one stride was close to him. “Stop!” he said, gripping him by the arm. “You are speaking of my father’s wife. You fool! Don’t you know you are trifling with death?”
“My arm!” cried Sleeman. “You are breaking my arm.” Paul flung his arm from him.
“She burned your house after you had attempted to outrage her,” he said. The cold fury in his eyes struck Sleeman’s thumping heart with a new terror. This young man stood to him for the very vengeance of God. Indeed he could not understand why it was that he had not been killed an hour ago for a crime for which western men show no mercy.
For some moments Paul stool regarding him with steady eyes, as if deliberating the man’s fate.
“You know you should not be alive, Sleeman,” he said in a voice low, tense, terrifying. “I wonder if God means me to kill you?”
“No! No! For God’s sake, Paul! I am a sick man! Don’t touch me! I was wrong. I was wrong. I don’t blame her. I—I——” He was shaking in all his body. He looked indeed a sick man.
A sudden thought came to Paul.
“Go and write down what you have said, and sign it! Go quick!” he commanded.
“Yes! yes! What?”
Paul dictated a confession of his crime, and an exoneration of his stepmother from guilt, which the shaking man signed with trembling, eager fingers. He was very near the limit of his endurance, and was anxious only that he should get through this interview alive and scathless.
Putting the confession into his pocket with the other papers Paul turned once more to Sleeman.
“What was your old house worth?”
“Oh—not much—not much. I don’t know. I——”
“Listen to me,” said Paul. “Colonel Pelham will act for me as arbitrator. Appoint your man. I will pay what they decide to be right.”
Sleeman gazed at him in open mouthed astonishment.
“Pay me!” he gasped. “No! no! Oh, Paul, I don’t want pay for that—I——”
“Do what I tell you,” said Paul, and passing out of the house he mounted his horse and was about to depart when into the yard cantered a lady, tall, finely developed, sitting her horse superbly and with a somewhat masculinely dashing style. With a slight bow Paul was passing her when she drew up her horse sharply, swung him round and reaching out her hand, cried:
“Why, glory be! If it ain’t Paul! The years can’t change those eyes. How are you, Paul? It is good to see you again. And so tall and handsome! Get off your horse and come in. Didn’t you come to see me? Or was it Dad?”
Her frank, breezy, kindly manner did much to take the chill out of Paul’s voice.
“I have just had a little business with your father, Adelina,” he said. “But,” he added, taking her hand, remembering that he had no quarrel with her, “I am glad I saw you before I left.”
“But you will come in. Do come. I want awfully to have a talk with you. When did you come home? And how long are you going—I mean—oh, shucks! I want an hour’s talk at the very least.” She paused abruptly, studying his face. Then she turned to her father, who had come to the door. What she saw in his face apparently changed her mind. “I will ride with you a bit, Paul,” she said quietly.
Gladly would Paul have declined her offer, but he could find no convenient excuse, so in silence they rode together toward the Pine Croft Ranch, Paul wondering how much she knew of the whole tragedy of his father’s death and she trying to compose the tumult in her heart which the sight of Paul had awakened. Paul was determined that he would wait her pleasure and her revealing. Suddenly and apropos of nothing, Adelina burst forth into a vivid account of her life’s happenings during the past six years; two years in a Toronto school, a winter in Vancouver with an aunt, the rest of the time poking round this valley, which however had considerably wakened up from its dreamy monotony of their early years—new settlers had come in, surveyors’ parties were everywhere about, a railway was to be put through the Crow’s Nest Pass, times were good, everybody who had anything to sell was making money. Her dad, or rather Asa, A. Warren Sleeman, Esq., now, if you please! was into town sites and railway contracts and that sort of thing, and making slathers of money. Oh, everything was booming. And by the time her history had been related she had herself firmly and fully in hand. “And now for your story, Paul,” she cried, turning her dancing eyes on him.
In three sentences Paul told her. Five years and a half he had lived with his stepmother’s people in the far north. His stepmother had died on the way out, leaving her children at a Mission School. He had herded cattle near Edmonton for the last six months and was on his way to Vancouver now, to learn to be an engineer. That was all. Somehow Adelina’s face shone as with a light of glad relief. Paul had come back to her as free of heart as he had gone.
“Vancouver? Oh, bully!” she cried. “I know lots of people in Vancouver. Do you know anyone? No! Then I’ll give you introductions to some swell people. They are Asa’s friends.”
“I shan’t have time for many friends. I must work,” said Paul.
“Oh, shucks!” cried Adelina. “Every fellow needs friends to get on.”
Paul set a grim mouth. “I shall get on,” he said.
Adelina’s eyes showed their admiration, but her words scorned him for his independence.
“Get every friend you can and use him all you can, that’s my theory. Why shouldn’t I? I’m ready to help my friends,” said this worldly wise young lady. “By the way, have you heard anything of the Pelhams? Of Peg?”
“No,” said Paul, looking away across the valley. “They are in England, I hear.”
“Yes, have been for a year. Before that Peg was in school in England for years and years. She is awfully pretty, no end of a swell, and engaged to be married.”
In spite of all his self-control Paul’s hands tightened on his reins so that his horse came to a full stop.
“Go on, you brute,” he said, angry at himself. “Young a bit for that, isn’t she?” he said in a voice which he strove to make casual.
“Young? Dear boy, don’t you know that she is just two years younger than you or I? She is a finished young lady.”
Paul turned this over in his mind as an astounding bit of information. Peg as a young lady, as one whom a man might desire to marry, was something not only amazing but quite disturbing.
“Is she—are the Pelhams coming back home soon?” he inquired, his mind occupied with the picture of a little girl standing in the moonlight, looking up at him and whispering, “I won’t ever forget, Paul.”
“This winter they come back, I think. At least, if Peg doesn’t get married,” said Adelina, her shrewd eyes searching his face and reading it like an open book.
Paul caught the look, resented it, and closed the open book. But he would talk no more of the Pelhams or of their plans. He listened instead, or appeared to listen, to Adelina’s chatter about Vancouver and the possibilities of a gay life in that young and ambitious city, till they came to the Pine Croft drive.
“You are not listening to me a bit, Paul,” she said, with a pout. “You are thinking of Peg I know,” with a gay laugh, “but you might as well put her out of your mind.”
“Yes,” said Paul gravely, “I might as well put her out of my mind, and every other girl, as far as that is concerned.” He pulled up his horse sharply and swinging his arm to include in its sweep the Pine Croft Ranch, he said with a touch of bitterness in his tone, “I have to make twenty thousand dollars to buy back all that, before I think of anything else.”
“Buy back? From whom, Paul?”
“From—why, don’t you know?—from your father, Adelina.”
A gleam came into Adelina’s eyes.
“No, I did not know, Paul. I don’t know anything about your affairs. But why that first?”
But Paul would not discuss the matter. Adelina was quick enough to see that he was keen to be alone. She longed to express sympathy, she longed more to offer aid, but, remembering the look upon her father’s face as he stood at the door a few minutes ago, determined to say nothing.
“Good-bye just now, Paul,” she said, offering her hand. “When do you go?”
“I hardly know,” replied Paul, taking her hand in his, his mind quite evidently far away. Her warm firm grip recalled him. “Good-bye, Adelina,” he said. “Thank you—for—for coming with me.” What he really meant was for the sympathy expressed in her warm hand grip.
“You know, Paul,” said the girl, with a sudden shyness, “I am awfully sorry for you, for everything—you know.”
“Yes, I know, Adelina,” he said, a strange feeling of desolation falling upon him. “Again, thank you. Good-bye.” Again he took her hand.
Adelina let her eyes rest steadily upon his for a moment or two, withdrew her hand and, wheeling her horse, set off down the road at a gallop, while Paul rode thoughtfully up the drive, realising for the first time in his life how utterly alone he was in the world. As he drew near the bungalow he straightened himself in the saddle.
“Well, she is gone,” he said. “And anyway I have my work to do. And God helping me I will do it.” But he was not thinking of the girl who was galloping down the road.