XIV
Besshad followed the trail through the snow clear to the dark edge of the woods when the sound of voices behind her caused her to turn. Neither Doomsdorf nor Knutsen had spoken loudly. Indeed, their tones had been more subdued than usual, as is often the way when men speak in moments of absolute test. Bess had not made out the words: only the deep silence and the movements of the wind from the sea enabled her to hear the voices at all. Thus it was curious that she whirled, face blanching, in knowledge of the impending crisis.
Thereafter the drama on the shore seemed to her as something that could not possibly be true. She saw in the deep silence Doomsdorf overturn and push off the boat, Knutsen’s desperate effort to rescue it, the flash of light from the former’s upraised pistol. And still immersed in that baffling silence, the brave seaman had groped, swayed, then toppled forward into the shallow water.
It was a long time after that the report of the pistol reached her ears, and even this was not enough to waken her to a sense of reality. It sounded dull, far-off, conveying little of the terrible thing it was, inadequate to account for the unutterable disaster that it had occasioned. Afterward the silence closed down again. The waves rolled in through the harbor mouth with never a pause. The dark shadow that lay for an instant on the face of the waters slowly sank beneath. The boat drifted ever farther out to sea.
Except for the fact that Doomsdorf stood alone on the shore, it might have been all the factless incident of a tragic dream. The blond man walked closer to the water, peering; then the pistol gleamed again as he pocketed it. The wind still brushed by, singing sadly as it went; and the sleet swept out of the clouds. And then, knowing her need, she strove to waken the blunted powers of her will.
She must not yield herself to the horror that encroached upon her. Only impotence, only disaster lay that way. She must hold steady, not break into hopeless sobs, not fall kneeling in impotent appeal. Bess Gilbert was of good metal, but this test that had been put upon her seemed to wrench apart the fibers of her inmost being. But she won the fight at last.
Slowly she stiffened, rallying her faculties, fighting off the apathy of terror. Presently her whole consciousness seemed to sharpen. In an instant of clear thought she guessed, broadly, the truth of that tragedy beside the sea; that Knutsen had died in a desperate attempt to break free from an unspeakable trap into which he and his charges had fallen. He had preferred to take the chance of death rather than submit to the fate that Doomsdorf had in store for him.
Just what that fate was and how it concerned herself, Bess dared not guess. She had known a deadly fear of Doomsdorf at the first glance; she had instinctively hated him as she had never hated any living creature before; and now she knew that this was the most desperate moment of her life. He had shown himself capable of any depth of crime; and that meant there must be no limit to her own courage. She too must take any chance of freedom that offered, no matter how desperate; for no evil that could befall her seemed as terrible as his continued power over her.
It meant she must work quick. She must not lose a single chance. The odds were desperately long already: she must not increase them. In an instant more he would be glancing about to see if his crime were observed. If she could conceal the fact that she had witnessed it, he would not be so much on guard in the moment of crisis that was to come. Her body and soul seemed to rally to mighty effort.
She was already at the edge of the timber. Stooping down, she made one leap into its shelter. She was none too soon: already Doomsdorf had looked back to see if the coast were clear.
Everything depended on Ned, henceforth. She couldn’t work alone. With his aid, perhaps, they could destroy this evil power under which they had fallen before it could prepare to meet them. Doomsdorf’s cabin—a long, log structure on the bank of a dark little stream—was only a hundred feet distant in the wood. Now that she was out of sight of the shore, she broke into a frenzied run.
She had no desperate plan as yet. In Ned’s manhood alone lay her hope: perhaps in the moment or two before Doomsdorf appeared Ned could conceive of some plan to meet him. Perhaps there was a rifle in the cabin!
She fought back the instinct to scream out her story from the doorway. At the bidding of an instinct so sure and true that it partook of a quality of infallibility, she checked her wild pace before she crossed the threshold. Everything depended on Ned and the cool, strong quality of Ned’s nerves. She must not jeopardize his self-control by bursting in upon him in frenzy, perhaps exciting him to such an extent that he would be rendered helpless to aid her. She must keep him cool by being cool herself. She caught her breath in a curious deep gasp, then stepped into the room.
Then that gasp became very nearly a sob. The way of deliverance was not clear. A wrinkled native woman, an Aleut or an Eskimo, who was evidently Doomsdorf’s wife, looked up at her with dark inscrutable eyes from the opposite side of the room.
It was a heart-breaking blow to Bess’s hopes. The presence of the woman increased, to a dread degree, the odds against her. She was ugly, brown as leather, heavily built; her face gave no sign that human emotion had ever touched her heart, yet she was likely a staunch ally of their foe.
The whole picture went home to her in a glance. Lenore was huddled in a chair before the stove, yielding herself to the blessed warmth, already shaking off the semi-apathy induced by the night’s chill. But as yet there was no hope in her. She was shivering, helpless, impotent. Ned bent over her, his arms about her, now and then giving her sips from a cup of hot liquid that he held in his hand. His care, his tender solicitude, struck Bess with a sense of unutterable irony. Evidently he had no suspicion of the real truth.
He looked up as Bess entered. Partly because the light was dim, partly because he was absorbed in the work of caring for Lenore to the exclusion of all other thought, he failed to see the drawn look of horror on Bess’s face. “I’ll need a little help here, Miss Gilbert,” he said. “I want to get this girl to bed. The night seemed to go harder with her than with the rest of us, and rest is the best thing for her.”
Bess almost sobbed aloud. The sound caught in her throat, but quickly she forced it back. Ned was already himself again; the danger and stress of the night had seemingly affected him only so far as to enscribe his face with tired lines, to leave him somewhat hollow-eyed and drawn. In reality, he was the man of cities come again. He was on solid earth; food and shelter and warmth were his once more; his old self-confidence was surging through him with the glow from the stove. He had no inkling of the truth. His mind was far from danger.
At that instant she knew she must work alone. She must give no sign of her own desperation before this stolid squaw. And yet she almost screamed with horror when she realized that any second she might hear Doomsdorf’s step on the threshold. She glanced about till she located the Russian’s rifle, hung on the wall almost in front of the squaw’s chair.
“Did you hear a shot?” she asked. With all the powers of her spirit, she kept her voice commonplace, casual.
“Yes,” Ned answered. “It wasn’t anything—was it?” His tone became cold. “Will you please give me a little help with Miss Hardenworth?”
“It was a bear—Mr. Doomsdorf shot at it with his pistol,” she went on in the same casual way. She thought it incredible that they would not take alarm from the wild beating of her heart. She turned easily to the squaw. “He wants me to bring his rifle so he can shoot at it again,” she said. “That’s it—on the wall?”
She stepped toward the weapon. Even in her own heart she did not know what was her plan of action after that gun was in her hands: she had not yet given thought to the stress and desperate deed that lay before her. She only knew that life, honor, everything that mattered in this world depended on the developments of the next few seconds. Later, perhaps, resistance would be crushed out of her; her cruel master would be constantly on guard: in this little moment lay her one chance. She knew vaguely that if she could procure the weapon, she could start down to the shore and meet Doomsdorf on the way. Perhaps her nerve would break soon; it could not keep up forever under such a strain. Thus her whole universe depended on immediate action. She must not hesitate now. She must go any lengths. Her eyes were cold and remorseless under her straight brows.
“Sure—take him gun,” the squaw answered her.
She was vaguely aware that Ned was watching her in amazement. He was speaking too, his voice coming from infinitely far off. “I’m surprised, Miss Gilbert,” he was saying with grave displeasure. “You don’t seem to realize that Miss Hardenworth is still in a serious condition. Perhaps you will be willing to forget Mr. Doomsdorf’s sport for a moment——”
But Bess hardly heard. Her hands were trembling, waiting for the feel of the steel. Now the Indian was getting up and presently was lifting down the weapon. But she did not put it at once into Bess’s hands. She pushed back the lever, revealing the empty breech. Then Bess saw a slow drawing of her lips—a cruel upturning that was seemingly as near as she could come to a smile.
“Sure—take him gun,” she said. “Got any shells——?”
Bess shook her head. Her heart paused in her breast.
“Maybe him got shells. He took ’em all out when he saw your canoe come in.”
XV
If, like her husband, the brown squaw was a devotee of cruelty, she must have received great satisfaction from the sight of that slender, girlish figure standing in the gloom of the cabin. The fact that there were no shells in the rifle—otherwise a desperate agent of escape—seemed nothing less than the death of hope. The strength born of the crisis departed swiftly from her, and her only impulse was to yield to bitter tears. Her erect body seemed to wilt, her sensitive lips, so straight and firm before, drooped like those of a child in some utter, unconsolable tragedy of childhood. It was a curious thing how the light died in her eyes. All at once they seemed to be at some strange, below-zero point of darkness,—like black wounds in the utter whiteness of her face. Yet the squaw gave no sign that she had seen. Her face was impassive, that of an imperturbable Buddha that sits forever in a far temple.
Great terror is nothing more or less than temporary loss of hope. In that moment Bess was finding out what real hopelessness meant, so far as it is ever possible for human beings to know. For that moment she couldn’t see a rift in the darkness that enfolded her. In the first place she felt infinitely alone: Knutsen was dead; Lenore still sat yielding to self-pity; Ned still extended to her his solicitous care. The thing went beyond mere fear of death. She could conceive of possibilities now wherein death would be a thing desired and prayed for; a deliverance from a living hell that was infinitely worse. The terror that was upon her was incomparable with any previous experience of her life.
Yet her eyes remained dry. Some way, she was beyond the beneficence of tears; partly because of her terror, partly, perhaps, because the instinct was with her yet to hide the truth from Ned and Lenore so long as possible. Thus she was not, in the last analysis, absolutely bereft of hope. It might be, since Ned was a man and she a woman, he would never become the prey of Doomsdorf to such a degree as she herself. And now there was no time to try to formulate other plans; to seek some other gateway of escape; no time more to listen to Ned’s complaints of her inattention to Lenore. She heard Doomsdorf’s heavy step at the door.
The man came in, for an instant standing framed by the doorway, the light of morning behind him. Ned looked up, expecting some inquiry as to his own and Lenore’s condition, some word of greeting on his lips. It came about, however, that his thought fell quickly into other channels. Doomsdorf closed the door behind him.
The man turned contemptuously to Ned. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
Startled and indignant at the tone, Ned instinctively straightened. “I didn’t say anything was the matter. Where’s Knutsen?”
“Knutsen—has gone on. Hell didn’t suit him. He went against its mandates the first thing. I hope it doesn’t happen again—I would hate to lose any more of you. I’ve other plans in mind.”
Ned hardly understood, yet his face went white. Partly it was anger because of the unmistakable insult and contempt in Doomsdorf’s tone. Partly it was a vague fear that his good sense would not permit him to credit. “I don’t—I don’t understand, I’m afraid,” he remarked coldly. “We’ll talk it over later. At present I want to know where we can put this girl to bed. She’s in a serious condition from her last night’s experience.”
The lips curled under the great blond beard. “I may put her to bed, all right—if I like her looks,” he answered evenly. “It won’t be your bed, either.”
Appalled, unbelieving, yet obeying a racial instinct that goes back to the roots of time, Ned dropped the girl from his arms and leaped to his feet. His eyes blazed with a magnificent burst of fury, and a mighty oath was at his lips. “You——” he began.
Yet no second word came. Doomsdorf’s great body lunged across the room with the ferocity and might of a charging bear. His arm went out like a javelin, great fingers extended, and clutched with the effect of a mighty mechanical trap the younger man’s throat. He caught him as he might catch a vicious dog he intended to kill, snatching him off his feet. Ned’s arm lashed out impotently, and forcing through with his own body, Doomsdorf thrust him into the corner. For a moment he battered him back and forth, hammering his head against the wall, then let him fall to a huddled heap on the floor.
Lenore’s voice raised in a piercing scream of terror; but a fiercer instinct took hold of Bess. The impulse that moved her was simply that to fight to the death, now as well as later. A heavy hammer, evidently a tool recently in use by Doomsdorf, lay on the window sill, and she sprang for it with the strength of desperation. But her hand had hardly touched it before she herself was hurled back against the log wall behind her.
The squaw had not sat supine in this stress. With the swiftness and dexterity of an animal, she had sprung to intercept the deadly blow, hurling the girl back by her hand upon the latter’s shoulder. If she made any sound at all, it was a single, chattering sentence that was mostly obliterated in the sound of battle. And already, before seemingly a second was past, Doomsdorf was standing back in his place in the center of the room.
Except for the huddled heap in the blood-spattered corner of the cabin, it was as if it had never happened. The squaw was again stolid, moving slowly back to her chair; Doomsdorf breathed quietly and evenly. The two girls stood staring in speechless horror.
“I hope there won’t be any more of that,” Doomsdorf said quietly. “The sooner we get these little matters straightened out, the better for all concerned. It isn’t pleasant to be hammered to pieces, is it?”
He took one step toward Ned, and Lenore started to scream again. But he inflicted no further punishment. He reached a strong hand, seized Ned’s shoulder, and snatched him to his feet.
“Don’t try it again,” he advised. “Here in this cabin—on this island—I do and say what I like. I don’t stand for any resentment. The next time it won’t be so easy, and that will be too bad for everybody. You wouldn’t be able to do your work.”
Racked by pain but fully conscious, Ned looked into the glittering eyes. It was no longer possible to disbelieve in this hairy giant before him. The agony in his throat muscles was only too real. And the only recourse that occurred to him was one of pitiful inadequacy.
It was a moment of test for Ned, and he knew of no way to meet it except as he met such little crises as sometimes occurred to him in his native city. The only code of life he knew was that he practiced in his old life: now was its time of trial. His own blood on his hands; the grim, wicked face before him should have been enough to convince a man less inured in his own creed of self-sufficiency and conceit; yet Ned would not let himself believe that he had found his master.
As a child has recourse to senseless threats, he tried to take refuge in his old attitude of superiority. “I don’t know what you mean, and I don’t care to,” he said at last. In pity for him Bess’s eyes filled with tears. “I only know we won’t accept the hospitality of such men as you. We’ll go—right now.”
Doomsdorf’s answer was a roaring laugh of scorn. Presently he walked to the door and threw it wide.
But he wasn’t smiling when he turned back to face them, the morning light on his bearded face. The sight of the North through the open door had sobered and awed him, as it awes all men who know its power. Beyond lay only the edge of the forest and the snow-swept barrens, stretching down to a gray and desolate sea.
“It’s snowing a little, isn’t it?” he said. “Just the North—keeping its tail up and letting us know it’s here. Where, my young friend, do you think of going?”
“It doesn’t matter——”
“There’s snow and cold out there.” His voice was deeply sober. “Death too—sure as you’re standing here. A weakling like you can’t live in that, out there. None of your kind can stand it—they’d die like so many sheep. And as a result you have to bow down and serve the man that can!”
Ned had no answer. The greatest fear of his life was clamping down upon him.
“That’s the law up here—that the weak have to serve the strong. I’ve beat the North at its own game, and it serves me, just as you’re going to serve me now. You’re not accepting any hospitality from me. You’re going to pay for the warmth of this fire I’ve grubbed out of these woods—you’ll pay for the food you eat. You can go out there if you like—if you prefer to die. There’s no boat to carry you off. There never will be a boat to carry you off.”
Ned’s breath caught in a gasp. “My God, you don’t mean you’ll hold us here by force!”
“I mean you’re my prisoners here for the rest of your natural lives. And you can abandon hope just as surely as if this island was the real hell it was named for.”
Quietly, coldly he told them their fate, these three who had been cast up by the sea. He didn’t mince words. And for all the strangeness of the scene—the gray light of the dawn and the snow against the window and the noise of the wind without—they knew it was all true, not merely some shadowed vista of an eerie dream.
“You might as well know how you stand, first as last,” he began. “When you once get everything through your heads, maybe we won’t have any more trouble such as we had just now. You ought to be glad that the seaman—Knutsen, you called him?—is sliding around on the sea bottom instead of being here with you; he’d be a source of trouble from beginning to end. He’d have been hard to teach, hard to master—I saw that in the beginning—and he’d never give in short of a fight every morning and every night. None of you, fortunately, are that way. You’ll see how things stack up, and we’ll all get along nicely together.”
He paused, smiling grimly; then with an explosive motion, pulled back the lid of the stove and threw in another log. “Sit down, why don’t you?” he invited. “I don’t insist on my servants standing up always in my presence. You’ll have to sit down sometime, you know.”
Lenore, wholly despondent, sank back in her seat. To show that he was still her protector, Ned stood behind her, his hands resting on the back of her chair. Bess stole to a little rough seat between them and the squaw.
A single great chair was left vacant, almost in the middle of the circle. Doomsdorf glanced once about the room as if guarding against any possibility of surprise attack by his prisoners, then sat down easily himself. “Excuse me for not making you known to my woman,” he began. “In fact, I haven’t even learned your own names. She is, translating from the vernacular, ‘Owl-That-Never-Sleeps.’ You won’t be expected to call her that, however—although I regret as a general thing that the picturesque native names so often undergo such laceration on the tongues of the whites. When I took her from her village, they gave her to me as ‘Sindy.’ You may call her that. It will do as good as any—every other squaw from Tin City to Ketchikan is called Sindy. It means nothing, as far as I know.
“ ‘Owl-That-Never-Sleeps,’ however, fits her very well. You might make a point of it. And if you are interested in the occult sciences, perhaps you might explain to me how, when she was a pappoose, her parents could understand her character and nature well enough to give her a name that fits her so perfectly. I notice the same thing happens again and again through these northern tribes. But I’m wandering off the point. Sindy, you must know, speaks English and is second in command. What she says goes. Get up and do it on the jump.
“You’ll be interested to know that you are on one of the supposedly uninhabited islands of the Skopin group. Other islands are grouped all around you, making one big snow field when the ice closes down in winter. I could give you almost your exact longitudinal position, but it wouldn’t be the least good to you. The population consists of we five people—and various bear, caribou, and such like. The principal industry, as you will find out later, is furs.
“There is no need to tell in detail how and why I came here—unlike Caliban, I am not a native of the place. I hope you are not so deficient as to have failed to read ‘Tempest.’ I find quite an analogy to our present condition. Shakespeare is a great delight on wintry nights; he remains real, when most of my other slim stock of authors fades into air. I like ‘Merry Wives’ the best of the comedies, though—because we have such fine fun with Falstaff. Of the tragedies I like Macbeth the best and Lear, by far the worst; and it’s a curious paradox that I didn’t like the ending of the first and did like the second. Macbeth and his lady shouldn’t have fallen. They were people with a purpose, and purpose should be allowed to triumph in art as well as in life. In life, Macbeth would have snipped off Macduff’s head and left a distinguished line. Lear, old and foolish, got just what was coming to him—only it shouldn’t have been dragged over five acts.
“But I really must get down to essentials. It’s so long since I’ve talked to the outside world that I can’t help being garrulous. To begin with—I came here some years ago, not entirely by my own choice. Of course, not even the devil comes to such a hell as this from his own choice. There’s always pressure from above.”
He paused again, hardly aware of the horrified gaze with which his hearers regarded him. A startling change had come over him when he spoke again. His eyes looked red as a weasel’s in the shadowed room; the tones of his voice were more subdued, yet throbbing with passion.
“I remember gray walls, long ago, in Siberia,” he went on slowly and gravely. “I was not much more than a boy, a student at a great university—and then there were gray walls in a gray, snow-swept land, and gray cells with barred doors, and men standing ever on watch with loaded rifles, and thousands of human cattle in prison garb. It was almost straight west of here, far beyond Bering Sea; and sometimes inspectors would come, stylish people like yourselves, except that they were bearded men of Petrograd, and look at us through the bars as at animals in a zoo, but they never interfered with the way things were run! How I came there doesn’t matter; what I did, and what I didn’t do. There I found out how much toil the human back can stand without breaking, one day like another, years without end. I knew what it was to have a taskmaster stand over me with a whip—a whip with many tails, with a shot and wire twisted into each. I can show you my back now if you don’t believe me. I found out all these things, and right then there came a desire to teach them to some one else. I was an enemy of society, they said—so I became an enemy of society in reality. Right then I learned a hate for such society and a desire to burn out the heart of such weak things as you!”
He turned to them, snarling like a beast. His voice had begun to rumble like lavas in the bowels of the earth. There could be no question as to the reality of this hatred. It was a storm cloud over his face; it filled his gray eyes with searing fire, it drew his muscles till it seemed that the arms of his chair, clutched by his hands, would be torn from the rounds. To his listeners it was the most terribly vivid moment of their lives.
“I swore an oath then, by the devil himself, that if the time ever came that I’d have opportunity, I’d show society just what kind of an enemy I was. Sometime, I thought, that time would come. What made me think so I can’t tell. Sometime I’d pay ’em back for all they had done to me.
“One day the chance came to escape. While more cowardly men would have hesitated, I pushed through and out. On the way I learned a little lesson—that none of the larger creatures of the wild die as easily as men. I found out that there is nothing more to killing a man that is in your way than killing a caribou I want to eat. I didn’t feel any worse about it afterward. After that I decided I would never compromise with a man who was in my way. The other method was too easy. Remember it in all our relations to come.
“I had to come across here. I couldn’t forever escape the hue and cry that was raised. Ultimately I landed on this little island—with Sindy and a few steel traps.
“In this climate we can trap almost the whole year round. We can start putting them out in a few days more—keep them out clear till June. Every year a ship—theIntrepidthat you’ve likely heard of—touches here to buy my furs—just one trip a year—and it leaves here supplies of all kinds in exchange. But don’t take hope from that. Hope is one thing you want to get out of your systems. The captain of theIntrepidand his Japanese crew are the only human beings that know I live here, except yourself—that know there’s a human occupant on this island. On their yearly visit I’ll see to it that none of them get a sight of you.
“Once I was used to working all day from dawn to dark, with an armed master on guard over me. It isn’t going to be that way from now on. I’m going to be the armed master. The next few days you’re going to spend building yourselves a shack and cutting winter fuel. Then each of you will have a trap line—a good stiff one, too. Every day you’ll go out and follow your line of traps—baiting, skinning and fleshing, drying the skins when you get to the cabins. You’ll know what it really is to be cold, then; you’ll know what work means, too. With you three I expect to triple my usual season’s catch, building up three times as fast the fortune I need.
“All my life I’ve looked forward to a chance to give society the same kind of treatment it gave to me—and when that fortune is large enough to work with, there will be a new dynasty arise in Russia. In the meantime, you’re going to get the same treatment I did—hard labor for life! You’re going to have an armed guard over you to shoot you down if you show the least sign of mutiny. You’ll obey every command and lick my boots if I tell you to. I said then, when the chance came, I’d grind society down—or any representatives of society that came into my power—just as it ground me down. This is the beginning of my triumph. You, you three—represent all I hated. Wealth—constituted authority—softness and ease and luxury. I’ll teach you what softness is! You’ll know what a heaven a hard bed can be, after a day in the wind off Bering Straits. You’ll find out what luxury is, too.” His wild laugh blew like a wind through the room. “And incidentally, my fur output will be increased by three, my final dream brought three times nearer.
“What I want from you I’ll take. You’re in hell if there is such a place—and you’ll know it plenty soon.” He turned to Ned, his lip curled in scorn. “Your feeble arms over the chair back won’t protect that girl if I make up my mind I want her. At present you may be safe from that—simply because some conquests aren’t any pleasure if they’re made with force. If I want either of you,” his gaze flashed toward Bess, “I’m not afraid that I’ll have to descend to force to get you.
“When I said to abandon hope I meant it. You have no boat, and I’ll give you no chance to make one. The distance is too great across the ice ever to make it through; besides, you won’t be given a chance to try. No ships will come here to look for you. No matter what wealth and power you represented down there, you’ll be forgotten soon enough. Others will take your place, other girls will reign at the balls, and other men will spend your money. You will be up here, as lost and forgotten as if you were in the real hell you’ll go to in the end.
“Even if your doting fathers should send out a search party, they will overlook this little island. It was just a freak of the currents that you landed here—I don’t see yet why you weren’t blown to Tzar Island, immediately east of here. When they find you aren’t there, and pick up any other lifeboats from your ship that in all probability landed there, they’ll be glad enough to turn around and go back. Especially if they see your lifeboat floating bottom upward in the water!
“You should never have come to the North, you three! Society should never move from the civilization that has been built to protect it—otherwise it will find forces too big and too cruel to master. You’re all weaklings, soft as putty—without the nerve of a ptarmigan. Already I’ve crushed the resistance out of you. All my life I’ve dreamed of some such chance as this, and yet you can’t fight enough to make it interesting for me. You’ll be docile, hopeless slaves until you die.”
He paused, scanning their pale, drawn faces. He turned to Ned first, but the latter was too immersed in his own despair ever to return his stare. Lenore didn’t raise her golden head to meet his eyes. But before his gaze ever got to her, Bess was on her feet.
“Don’t be too sure of yourself,” she cautioned quickly. He looked with sudden amazement into her kindling eyes. “Men like you have gone in the face of society before. You’re not so far up here that the arm of the law can’t reach you.”
The blond man smiled into her earnest face. “Go on, my dear,” he urged.
“It’s got you once, and it’ll get you again. And I warn you that if you put one indignity on us, do one thing you’ve said—you’ll pay for it in the end—just as you’ll pay for that fiendish crime you committed to-day.”
As her eyes met his, straight and unfaltering, the expression of contemptuous amazement died in his face. Presently his interest seemed to quicken. It was as if he had seen her for the first time, searching eyes resting first on hers, then on her lips, dropping down over her athletic form, and again into her eyes. He seemed lost in sinister speculations.
Something seemed strained, ready to break. The four in the little circle made no motion, all of them inert and frozen like characters in a dream. And then, before that speculative, searching gaze—a gaze unlike any that he had bent on Lenore—her eyes faltered from his. Ned felt a wild, impotent fury like live steam in his brain.
Bess’s little mutiny was already quelled. Her blue eyes were black with terror.
XVI
Doomsdorfhad seemingly achieved his purpose, and his prisoners lay crushed in his hands. A fear infinitely worse than that of toil or hardship had evidently killed the fighting spirit in Bess; Lenore had been broken by Doomsdorf’s first words. And now all the structure of Ned’s life had seemingly toppled about him.
The lesson that Doomsdorf taught had gone deep, not to be forgotten in any happier moment that life might have in store for him. There was no blowing into flame the ashes of his old philosophy. It was dead and cold in his breast; no matter what turn fate should take, his old conceit and self-sufficiency could never come again. He was down to earth at last. The game had been too big for him. The old Ned Cornet was dead, and only a broken, impotent, hopeless thing was left to dwell in his battered body.
He had found the training camp, but it was more bitter than ever his father had hinted that it could be. Indeed Godfrey Cornet, in those brooding prophecies at which his son had laughed, had been all too hopeful regarding it. He had said there was a way through and on, always there was a way through and on; but here the only out-trail was one of infinite shadow to an unknown destination. Death—thatwas the way out.Thatwas the only way.
It was curious how easy it was to think of death. Formerly the word had invoked a sense of something infinitely distant, nothing that could seemingly touch him closely, a thought that never came clearly into focus in his brain. All at once it had showed itself as the most real of all realities. It might be his before another night, before the end of the present hour. It had come quick enough to Knutsen. The least resistance to Doomsdorf’s will would bring it on himself. Many things were lies, and the false was hard to tell from the true, but in this regard there was no chance for question. Doomsdorf would strike the life from him in an instant at the first hint of revolt.
It was wholly conceivable that such a thing could occur. Ned could endure grinding toil till he died; even such personal abuse as he had received an hour or so before might find him crushed and unresisting, but yet there remained certain offenses that could not be endured. Ned could not forget that both Lenore and Bess were wholly in Doomsdorf’s power. A brutal, savage man, it was all too easy to believe that the time would come soon when he would forget the half-promise he had given them. The smoky gaze that he had bent toward Bess meant, perhaps, that he was already forgetting it. In that case would there be anything for him but to fight and die? No matter how great a weakling he had been, the last mandate of his honor demanded that. And a bitterness ineffable descended upon him when he realized that even such bravery could not in the least help the two girls,—that his death would be as unavailing and impotent as his life.
How false he had been to himself and his birthright! He had been living in a fool’s paradise, and he had fallen from it into hell! Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage: for less return Ned had sold himself into slavery. He had been a member of a dominant race, the son of a mighty breed that wrested the soil from the wilderness and built strong cities on the desolate plains; but he had wasted his patrimony of strength and manhood. A parlor knight, he had leaned upon his father’s sword rather than learning to wield his own; and he had fallen vanquished the instant that he had left its flashing ring of steel.
For in this moment of unspeakable remorse, he found he could blame no one but himself for the disaster. Every year men traversed these desolate waters to buy furs from the Indians; he had been in a staunch boat, and with a little care, a little foresight, the journey could have been made in perfect safety. It was a man’s venture, surely; but he could have carried through if he had met it like a man instead of a weakling. He knew perfectly that it was his own recklessness and folly that set the cups of burning liquor before Captain Knutsen as he stood at his wheel. It was his own unpardonable conceit, his own self-sufficiency that made him start out to meet the North half prepared, daring to disturb its ancient silences with the sound of his wild revelry; and to live, in its grim desolation, the same trivial life he lived at home. He hadn’t even brought a pistol. Sensing his weakness and his unpreparedness, Doomsdorf hadn’t even done him the honor of searching him for one.
Knutsen’s death was on his own head: the life of utter wretchedness and hopelessness and insult that lay before Lenore and Bess was his own doing, too. It wouldn’t compensate to die in their defense, merely leaving them continued helpless prey to Doomsdorf. He saw now, with this new vision that had come to him, that his only possible course was to live and do what he could in atonement. He mustn’t think of himself any more. All his life he had thought of nothing but himself; self-love had been his curse to the end of the chapter,—and now he could not make himself believe but that it had been some way intertwined in his love for Lenore. He would have liked to give himself credit for that, at least—unselfish devotion, these past years, to Lenore—but even this stuck in his throat. But his love for her would be unbiased by self-love now. He would give all of himself now—holding nothing back.
In spite of his own despair, his own bitter hopelessness, he must do what he could to keep hope alive in Lenore and Bess. It was the only chance he had to pay, even in the most pitiful, slight degree for what he had done to them. He must always try to make their lot easier, doing their work when he could, maintaining an attitude of cheer, living the lie of hope when hope seemed dead in his breast.
Ned Cornet was awake at last. He knew himself, his generation, the full enormity of his own folly, the unredeemed falsehood of his old philosophy. Better still, he knew what lay before him, not only the remorselessness of his punishment but also his atonement: doing willingly and cheerfully the little he could to lighten the burdens of his innocent victims. He could havethatto live for, at least, doing the feeble little that he could. And that is why, when Doomsdorf looked at him again, he found him in some way straightened, his eyes more steadfast, his lips in a firmer, stronger line.
“Glad to see you’re bucking up,” he commented lightly.
Ned turned soberly. “Iambucking up,” he answered. “I see now that you’ve gone into something you can’t get away with. Miss Gilbert was right; in the end you’ll find yourself laid out by the heels.”
It can be said for Ned, for the reality of his resolve, that his words seemed to ring with conviction, giving no sign of the utter despair that was in his heart. Of course he was speaking them for the ears of Lenore and Bess, in order to encourage them.
“You think so, eh?” Doomsdorf yawned and stretched his arms. “Just try something—that’s all. And since you’re feeling so good, I don’t see why you shouldn’t get to work. You can still put in a fairly good morning. And you”—he turned, with the catlike swiftness that marked so many of his movements, toward Bess—“what’s your name?”
“You just heard him say. Miss Gilbert——”
“You can forget you are a ‘Miss.’ You’re a squaw out here—and can do squaw’s work. What’s your first name?”
Bess, in her misery, looked at him with dread. “Bess Gilbert,” she answered quietly.
“Bess it will be. Lenore, I think you call the other—and Ned. Good thing to know first names, since we’ve got an uncertain number of years before us. Well, I suggest that all three of you go out and see what you can do about wood. You’ll have to cut some and split it. I’ve been lazy about laying in a winter store.”
Much to his amazement, Ned stood erect, pulled down his cap over his brown curls, and buttoned his coat. “I’ll see what we can do,” he answered straightforwardly. “I have, though, one thing to ask.”
“What is it——”
“That you let the two girls take it easy to-day—and get warmed through. If you sent them out now, weakened as they are, it might very easily mean pneumonia and death. It’s to your interest to keep them alive.”
“It’s to my interest, surely—but don’t rely on that to the extent of showing too much independence. The human body can stand a lot before it gives up the ghost. The human voice can do a lot of screaming. I know, because I’ve seen. I don’t mind running a little risk with human life to get my way, and I know several things, short of actual killing, that go toward enforcing obedience and quelling mutiny.”
Lenore, staring wildly at him, caught her breath in a sob. “You don’t mean——”
Doomsdorf did not look at her. He still smiled down at Ned. “You’ve never felt a knout, have you, on the naked back?” he asked sweetly. “I found out what they were like in Siberia, and with the hope of showing some one else, I took one out—in my boot. It’s half-killed many a man—but I only know one man that it’s completely killed. He was a guard—and I found out just how many blows it takes. You can stop a hundred—fifty—perhaps only ten before that number, and life still lingers.” The man yawned again. “But your request is granted—so far as Lenore is concerned. You can leave her here for me to entertain. Bess has spirit enough to talk—she has undoubtedly spirit enough to work.”
Ned, deeply appalled and unspeakably revolted, looked to Lenore for directions. Her glorious head was on her arms, and she shook it in utter misery. “I can’t go out there now,” she said. “I’ll just die if I do—I’m so cold still, so weakened. I wish I had died out there in the storm.”
Ned turned once more to Doomsdorf. “She’s telling the truth—I think she simply can’t stand to go,” he urged gravely. “But though she’s absolutely in your power, there are some things even a beast can’t do. You just the same as gave me your word——”
“There are things a beast can’t do, but I’m not a beast. There’s nothing I can’t do that I want to do. I make no promises—just the same, for this time, I don’t think you need be afraid. I don’t take everything that comes along in the way of a woman. I want a woman of thews!”
Bess dared not look at him, but she felt the insult of his searching gaze. She buttoned her coat tight, then stood waiting. An instant later Doomsdorf was holding the door open for her as she went to her toil.
XVII
Therewere a number of axes in the little work-room that comprised one end of the long cabin, and Doomsdorf flung three of them over his shoulder. “Right up through here,” he urged, pointing to the little hillside behind the cabin. “Of course I can’t let you cut fuel from these trees so close to the house. You, as city people, surely know something about house beautifying. You’ll have to carry the wood a little farther—but you won’t mind, when you know it’s for the sake of beauty.”
The snow was noticeably deeper in the two hours since they had come. It clung to Ned’s trouser legs almost to the knees, soaking through his thin walking shoes; and both he and Bess found it some degree of labor just to push through it. Doomsdorf halted them before one of the half-grown spruce.
“Here’s a good one,” he commented. “Just beyond is another. You can each take one—cut them down with your axes and then hack them into two-foot lengths for the stove. Better split each length into three pieces—the larger ones, anyway. If you have time, you can carry it down to the cabin.”
He swung his axes down from his shoulder. He seemed to be handling them with particular care, but several seconds elapsed before Ned realized that the moment had some slight element of drama. Heretofore he had been unable to observe that Doomsdorf was in the least on guard against his prisoners. He had seemingly taken no obvious precautions in his own defense. It was plain to see, however, that he did not intend to put axes into the hands of these two foes until he had one ready to swing himself.
He took the handle of the largest axe in his right hand; with his left he extended the other two implements, blades up, to Ned and Bess. “I suppose you know we’ve had no experience——” Ned began.
“It doesn’t matter. Just be careful the trees don’t fall on you. They sometimes do, you know, on amateur woodsmen. The rest is plain brute strength and awkwardness.” He handed them each, from his pocket, a piece of dried substance that looked like bark. “Here’s a piece of jerked caribou each—it ought to keep life in your bodies. And the sooner you get your wood cut and split, the sooner you see any more.”
Then he turned and left them to their toil.
Thus began a bitter hour for Ned. He found the mere work of biting through the thick trunk with his axe cost him his breath and strained his patience to the limit. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. He did not strike true; the blade made irregular white gashes in the bark; his blows seemed to lack power. The great, ragged wound deepened but slowly.
Finally it was half through the trunk, and yet the tree stood seemingly as sturdy as ever. Reckless from fatigue, he chopped on more fiercely than ever. And suddenly, with the grinding noise of breaking wood, the tree started to fall.
And at that instant Ned was face to face with the exigency of leaping for his life. The tree did not fall in the direction planned. An instant before, weary and aching and out of breath, Ned would have believed himself incapable of swift and powerful motion. As that young spruce shattered down toward him, like the club of a giant aimed to strike out his life, a supernatural power seemed to snatch him to one side. Without realization of effort, the needed muscles contracted with startling force, and he sprang like a distance jumper to safety.
But he didn’t jump too soon or too far. The branches of the tree lashed at him as it descended, hurling him headlong in the snow. And thereafter there were three things to cause him thought.
One of them was the attitude of Bess,—the girl to whom, in weeks past, he had shown hardly decent courtesy: the same girl whom in childish fury he had cursed the bitter, eventful night just gone. Above the roar of the falling tree he heard her quick, half-strangled gasp of horror.
The sound seemed to have the qualities that made toward a perfect after-image; because in the silence that followed, as he lay in the soft snow, and the crash of the fallen tree echoed into nothingness, it still lingered, every tone perfect and clear, in his mind’s ear. There was no denying its tone of ineffable dismay. Evidently Bess was of a forgiving disposition; in spite of his offense of the past night she had evidently no desire to see him crushed into jelly under that giant’s blow. Some way, it had never occurred to him that the girl would harbor a kind thought for him again. She had been right and he had been wrong; in an effort to serve him she had received only his curse, and her present desperate position, worse perhaps than either his own or Lenore’s, was due wholly to his own folly. She had not taken part in the orgy of the night before, so not the least echo of responsibility could be put on her. Yet she didn’t hate him. She had cried out in real agony when she thought he was about to die.
He thought upon this matter as he lay in the soft snow whence the descending branches of the tree had hurled him. He didn’t have many seconds to think about it. Further eccentricity on the part of Bess swiftly gave him additional cause for reflection. She had not only cried out, but she ran to him with the speed of a deer. She was by his side almost before he was aware of the scope of the accident.
The sobbing cry he had heard could very likely be attributed merely to that instinctive horror that a sensitive girl would feel at an impending tragedy, wholly apart from personal interest in the victim; but for a few seconds Ned was absolutely at a loss to explain that drawn, white, terrified face above him. In fear for him, Bess was almost at the point of absolute collapse herself. Nor could mere impersonal horror explain her flying leap to reach his side,—like a snowbird over the drifts. It meant more than mere forgiveness for the terrible pass to which he had brought her. In a few seconds of clear thinking he thought he saw the truth: that even after all that was past Bess still looked to him for her hope, that she regarded him still as her defense against Doomsdorf; and that his death would leave her absolutely bereft. He was a man, and she still dreamed that he might save her.
The result was a quick sense of shame of his own inadequacy. It is not good to know oneself a failure in the face of woman’s trust. Yet the effect of the little scene was largely good, for it served to strengthen Ned’s resolve to spare the girls in every way he could, and by his own feigned hope to keep them from despair. Above all, he found an increased admiration for Bess. Instead of a silly prude, a killjoy for the party, she had shown herself as a sportswoman to the last fiber. She had been a friend when she had every right to be an enemy; she had shown spirit and character when women of lesser metal would have been irremediably crushed. He was far away now from the old barriers of caste. There was no reason, on this barren, dreadful isle, why he shouldn’t accept all the friendship she would give him and give his own in return.
But this subject was only one of three that suddenly wakened him to increased mental activity. If he were amazed at Bess, he was no less amazed at himself. He had been tired out, hopeless, out of wind, hardly able to swing his arms, and yet he had managed to leap out of seeming certain death. The unmistakable inference was that the body in which his spirit had dwelt for thirty years had strength and possibilities of which hitherto he had been unaware. In the second of crisis he had shown a perfect coördination of brain and muscle, an accuracy of transmission of the brain-messages that were conducted along his nerves, and a certain sureness of instinct that he had never dreamed he possessed. It would have been very easy to have jumped the wrong way. Yet he had jumped the right way—the only possible way to avoid death—choosing infallibly the nearest point of safety and hurling himself directly toward it. Perhaps it would have been better to have stayed where he was, to have let the tree crush the life out of him and be done with Hell Isle for good, yet a power beyond himself had carried him out of danger. The point offered interesting possibilities. Could it be that he had had the makings of a man in him all these years and had never been aware of it? Could he dare hope that this side of him might be developed, in the hard years to come, so that he might be better able to endure the grinding toil and hardship? The thought wasn’t reallyhope—he didn’t believe thathopewould ever visit him again—it was only an instant’s rift, dim as twilight, in the gloom of his despair. The most he could ever hope to do was to fortify himself in order to take more and more of the girl’s hardship upon his shoulders.
Thirdly he gave some thought to the matter of felling trees. It was a more complex matter than he had at first supposed. Evidently he had gone about it in the wrong way. It would pay to have more respect for the woodsman’s science if he did not wish to come to an early end beneath a falling tree. He might not be so quick to dodge again.
Bess was staring wide-eyed into his face; and he smiled quietly in reassurance. “Not hurt at all,” he told her. Quickly he climbed to his feet. “See that you don’t do the same thing that I did.”
Delighted that he had not been hurt but a little aghast at what heart’s secret she might have revealed in running to his aid, she started to go back to her toil. But Ned had already reached some conclusions about tree-felling. He walked with her to her fallen axe, then inspected the deep cut she had already made in her tree.
“You’re doing the same thing I did, sure enough,” he observed. “The tree will fall your way and crush you. Let me think.”
A moment later he took his axe and put in a few more strokes in the same place. It was the danger point, he thought: a deeper cut might fell the tree prematurely. Presently he crossed to the opposite side, signaled Bess out of danger, and began to hack the tree again, making a cut somewhat above that started on the other side of the trunk. He chopped sturdily; and in a moment the tree started to fall, safely and in an opposite direction.
He uttered some small sound of triumph; but it was a real tragedy to have the tree fall against a near-by tree and lodge. Again he had failed to exercise proper foresight.
There was nothing to do but climb into the adjoining tree with his axe and laboriously cut the lodged tree away. In the meantime Bess went to work on the first tree felled, trimming it of its limbs so to cut it into lengths.
Ned joined her at the work, but long before the first tree was cut into fuel, both were at the edge of utter exhaustion. The point of fatigue he had reached that morning in rowing, when he had rested from the sheer inability to take another stroke, was already far past. There had been a point, some time back, when every muscle of his body had throbbed with a burning ache, when pain crept all over him like a slow fire, but that too was largely passed now. His brain was dulled; he felt baffled and estranged as if in a dream. It was more like a nightmare now,—his axe swinging eternally in his arms, the chips flying, one after another.
He seemed to move so slowly. Hours were passing, one after another, and still great lengths of the trees remained to cut and split. But they couldn’t stop and rest. They dared not return to the cabin till the work was done: the brute that was their master would be glad of an excuse to lay on the lash. They had been taught what mercy to expect from him. Here was one reality that their fatigue could not blunt: their cruel master waiting in the cabin. As the rest of their conscious world faded and dimmed he was ever more vivid, ever more real. The time soon came when he filled all the space in their thoughts.
For Ned life was suddenly immensely simplified. All the complexities of his old life had suddenly ceased to matter: indeed that had perished from his consciousness. The world was forgotten, he had no energy to waste in remembering how he had come hence, even who he was. From the supreme egoist, knowing no world but that of which his own ego was the orbit, to a faltering child hardly aware of his own identity: thus had Ned changed in a single night. The individual who had been Ned Cornet had almost ceased to be; and in his place was a helpless pawn of a cruel and remorseless fate.
He knew Fate now. Through the mists of this nightmare that was upon him he saw the Jester with his bells. And as he looked, the sharp, ironic face grew savage, brutal, half-covered with blond hair; the motley became a cap of silver fox. But this changed too, as his axe swung in the air. Once more the face was sharp, but still unutterably terrible to see; but it was livid now, as if sulphurous flames were playing upon it. And the foot—he saw the foot plain against the snow. It was unspeakable, filling him with cold horror all his length. It was some way cloven and ghastly.
The vision passed, broken and dissolved by the noise of the axe on the tough wood. He knew Fate now. He had seen him in all his forms. In his folly he had scorned him, taunted him by his insolence, had dared to dream that he was greater than Fate, immune from his persecution. If this torment ended now, he had paid the price. He had atoned for everything already if he did not lift the axe again. Yet only eternity lay ahead.
Doomsdorf had seemed almost incredible to him at first. It was as if he couldn’t possibly be true: a figment of nightmare that would vanish as soon as he wakened. But he was real enough now. Nothing was left to him but the knowledge how real he was.
He must not rest, he must not pause till the work was done. The fact that Bess had fallen, fainting, in the snow, did not affect him; he must swing his axe and hew the wood. Day was dying. Grayness was creeping in from the sea. It was like the essence of the sea itself, all gray, gray like his dreams, gray like the ashes of his hopes. He must finish the two trees before the darkness came down and kept him from seeing where to sink the blade. Otherwise it wouldn’t matter—day or night, one year or another. Time had ceased to count; seemingly it had almost ceased to move. But theknoutwould be waiting, hardened and sharp with wire, if he didn’t do his work. Cold fear laid hold of him again.
He did not know that this cold that was upon him was not only that of fear. His clothes had been wet through by perspiration and melted snow, and now the bitter winds off the sea were getting to him. Still he swung his axe. It was always harder to strike true; the tough lengths took ever more blows to split. The time soon came when he was no longer aware of the blows against the wood. The axe swung automatically in his arms; even sense of effort was gone from him. The only reality that lived in him now, in that misty twilight, was the knowledge that he must get through.
It was too dark to see, now, how much of the work remained. The night was cheating him, after all. He struck once more at the tough length that lay at his feet—a piece at which he had already struck uncounted blows. He gave all his waning strength to the effort.
The length split open, but the axe slipped out of his bleeding hands, falling somewhere in the shadows beyond. He must crawl after it; he didn’t know how many more lengths there were to split. It was strange that he couldn’t keep his feet. And how deep and still was the night that dropped over him!
How long he groped for the axe handle in the snow he never knew. But he lay still at last. Twilight deepened about him, and the wind wept like a ghost risen from the sea. The very flame of his life was burning down to embers.
Thus it came about that Doomsdorf missed the sound of his axe against the wood. Swinging a lantern, a titantic figure among the snow-laden trees, he tramped down to investigate. Bess, semi-conscious again, wakened when the lantern light danced into her eyes. But it took him some little time to see Ned’s dark form in the snow.
The reason was, it was lying behind a mighty pile of split fuel. The light showed that only green branches, too small to be of value, remained of the two spruce. And Doomsdorf grunted, a wondering oath, deep in his throat.
They had been faithful slaves. Putting his mighty arm around them, each in turn, he half carried, half dragged them into the warmth of the cabin.