XVIII
Nedwas spared the misery and despair that overswept Doomsdorf’s cabin the first night of his imprisonment. His master dropped him on the floor by the stove, and there he lay, seemingly without life, the whole night through. Even the sound of the wind could not get down into that dim region of half-coma where he was: he heard neither its weird chant on the cabin roof, or that eerie, sobbing song that it made to the sea, seemingly the articulation of the troubled soul of the universe. He did not see the snow piling deeper on the window ledge; nor sit straining in the dreadful, gathering silence of the Arctic night. The promised reward of food was not his because he could not get up to take it.
Yet he was not always deeply insensible. Sometimes he would waken with a knowledge of wracking pain in his muscles, and sometimes cold would creep over him. Once he came to himself with the realization that some one was administering to him. Soft, gentle hands were removing his wet, outer garments, rolling him gently over in order to get at them, slipping off his wet shoes and stockings. A great tenderness swept over him, and he smiled wanly in the lantern light.
Since he was a child, before the world was ever too much with him, no living human being had seen him smile in quite this way. It was a smile of utter simplicity, childishly sweet, and yet brave too,—as if he were trying to hearten some one who was distressed about him. He didn’t feel the dropping tears that were the answer to that smile, nor feel the heart’s glow, dear beyond all naming, that it wakened. To the girl who, scarcely able herself to stand erect, had crept from her warm cot to serve him, it seemed almost to atone for everything, to compensate for all she had endured.
“Lenore?” the man whispered feebly.
But there was no spoken answer out of the shadow at the edge of the lantern light. Perhaps there was the faint sound, like a gasp, almost as if a terrible truth that was for an instant forgotten had been recalled again; and perhaps the administering hands halted in their work for one part of an instant. But at once they continued to ply about him, so strong and capable, and yet so ineffably gentle. It couldn’t be Lenore, of course. No wonder,—Lenore had suffered grievously from the events of the past night. In his half-delirium it occurred to him that it might be his mother. There had been times in the past, when his mother had come to his bedside in this same way, with this same gentleness, during his boyhood sicknesses. But he couldn’t remain awake to think about it. His wet, clinging clothes had been removed, and blankets, already warmed, were being wrapped about him. He fell into deep, restful sleep.
But it ended all too soon. A great hand shook him, snatching him into a sitting position, and a great, bearded face, unspeakably terrible in the weird, yellow light of the lantern, showed close to his own. “Up and out,” he was shouting. “It’ll be light enough to work by the time you have breakfast. Out before I boot you out.”
He meant what he said. Already his cruel boot was drawn back. Ned’s conscious world returned to him in one mighty sweep, like a cruel, white light bursting upon tired eyes. The full dreadfulness of his lot, forgotten in his hours of sleep, was recalled more vividly than ever. It wasn’t just a dream, to be dispersed on wakening. Even yesterday’s blessed murk of unreality, dimming everything and dulling all his perceptions, was gone now that he was refreshed by sleep. His brain worked clear, and he saw all things as they were. And the black wall of hopelessness seemed unbroken.
Yet instantly he remembered Lenore. At least he must continue to try to shelter her—even to make conditions easy as possible for Bess. His love for the former was the one happiness of his past life that he had left; and he didn’t forget his obligation to the latter. Bess was already up, building up the fire at Doomsdorf’s command, but Lenore, with whom she had slept, still lay sobbing on her cot.
Ned pulled on his clothes, scarcely wondering at the fact that they were hanging, miraculously dry, back of the stove; and immediately hurried to Lenore’s side. He forgot his own aching muscles in distress for her; and his arms went about her, drawing her face to his own.
“Oh, my girl, you mustn’t cry,” he told her, with a world of compassion in his tone. “I’ll take care of you. Don’t you know I will——?”
But with tragic face Lenore drew back from his arms. “Howcan you take care of me?” she asked with immeasurable bitterness. “Can you stand against that brute——?”
“Hush——!”
“Of course you can’t. You’re even afraid to speak his name.”
“Oh, my dear! Don’t draw away.” The man’s voice was pleading. “I was just afraid he’d take some awful punishment from you. Of course I’m helpless now——”
“Then how can you take care of me?” she demanded again, for a moment forgetting her despair in her anger at him. “Can you make him let me stay in bed, instead of going out to die in this awful snow? Death—that’s all there’s here for me. And the quicker it comes the better.”
She sobbed again, and he tried in vain to comfort her. “We’ll come through,” he whispered. “I’ll make everything as light as I can——”
But she thrust off his caressing hands. “I don’t want you to touch me,” she told him tragically. “You can’t make things light for me, in this living hell. And until you can protect me from that man, and save me, you can keep your kisses. Oh, why did you ever bring me here?”
“I suppose—because I loved you.”
“You showed it, in taking me into this awful land in an unsafe boat. You can keep your love. I wish I’d never seen you.”
Just a moment his hands dropped to his sides, and he showed her the white, drawn visage of utter despair. Yet he must not hold these words against her. Surely she had cause for them; perhaps she would find him some tenderness when she saw how hard he had tried to serve her, to ease her lot. Her last words recalled his own that he had spoken to Bess aboard theCharon: if he had railed as he had to Bess for such little cause, at least he must not blame Lenore, even considering the fact of their love, in such a moment as this. Hehadbrought her from her home and to this pass. Save for him, she would be safe in her native city, not a slave to an inhuman master on this godless island.
He looked down at her steadfastly. “I can’t keep my love,” he told her earnestly. “I gave it to you long ago, and it’s yours still. That love is the one thing I have left to live for here; the one thing that’s left of my old life. I’m going to continue to watch over you, to help you all I can, to do as much of your work as possible; to stand between you and Doomsdorf with my own life. I’ve learned, in this last day, that love is a spar to cling to when everything else is lost, the most important and the greatest blessing of all. And I’m not going to stop loving you, whether you want me to or not. I’m going to fight for you—to the end.”
“And in the end I’ll die,” she commented bitterly.
Doomsdorf reëntered the room then, gazing at them in amused contempt, and Ned instinctively straightened.
“I trust you’re not hatching mutiny?” the sardonic voice came out.
“Not just now,” Ned answered with some spirit. “There’s not much use to hatch mutiny, things being as they are.”
“You don’t say! There’s a rifle on the wall——”
“Always empty——”
“But the pistol I carry is always loaded. Why don’t you try to take it away from me?” Then his voice changed, surly and rumbling again. “But enough of that nonsense. You know what would happen to you if you tried anything—I’ve told you that already. There’s work to do to-day. There’s got to be another cabin—logs cut, built up, roof put on—a place for the three of you to bunk. That’s the work to-day. The three of you ought to get a big piece of it done to-day——”
“Miss Hardenworth? Is she well enough? Couldn’t she help your wife with the housework to-day?”
“It will take all three of you to do the work I’ll lay out. Lenore can learn to do her stint with the others. And hereafter, when you address me, call me ‘Sir.’ A mere matter of employer’s discipline——”
Because he knew his master, Ned nodded in agreement. “Yes, sir,” he returned simply. “One thing else. I can’t be expected to do real work in this kind of clothes. You’ve laid out furs and skins for the girls; I want to get something too that will keep me warm and dry.”
“I’m not responsible for the clothes you brought with you. You should have had greater respect for the North. Besides, it gives me pleasure, I assure you, to see you dressed as you are. It tones up the whole party.”
Stripped of his late conceit that might otherwise have concealed it from him, Ned caught every vestige of the man’s irony. “Do I get the warm clothes?” he demanded bluntly.
“When you earn them,” was the answer. “In a few days more you’ll be running out your traps, and everything you catch, at first, you can keep. You’ve got to prove yourself smarter than the animals before you get the right to wear their skins.”
XIX
Theprevious day and night had been full of revelation for Ned; and as he started forth from the cabin with his axe, there occurred a little scene that tended even further to illustrate his changing viewpoint. Gloating with triumph at the younger man’s subjection, Doomsdorf called sardonically from the cabin doorway.
“I trust I can’t help you in any way?” he asked.
Discerning the premeditated insult in his tone, Ned whirled to face him. Then for an instant he stood shivering with wrath.
“Yes,” he answered. His promise to say “sir” was forgotten in his rage. “You can at least treat me with the respect deserved by a good workman.”
The words came naturally to his lips. It was as if they reflected a thought that he had considered long, instead of the inspiration of the moment. The truth was that, four days before, he had never known that good work and good workmen were entitled to respect. The world’s labor had seemed apart from his life; the subject a stupid one not worth his thought and interest. In one terrible day Ned had found out what the word work meant. He had learned what a reality it was. All at once he saw in it a possible answer to life itself.
He stood aghast at the magnitude of his discovery. Why,workwas the beginning and the end of everything. Reaching back to the beginnings of creation, extending clear until the last soul in heaven had passed on and through the training camp of the last hereafter, it was the thing that counted most. He had never thought about it in particular before. Strangely it had not even occurred to him that the civilization that he worshipped, all the luxury and richness that he loved, had been possible only through the toil of human hands and brains.
Suddenly he knew that his father had been right and he had been wrong. The life of the humblest worker had been worth more than his. It would have been better for him to die, that long-ago night of the automobile accident, than for Bess to lose one of her working hands! He had been contemptuous of work and workers, but had not his own assumption of superiority been chiefly based upon the achievements of working men who had gone before him? What could he claim for himself that could even put him on the par with the great mass of manhood, much less make him their superior? He had played when there was work to do, shirked his load when the backs of better men were bent.
In his heart Ned had been a little ashamed of his father. He had felt it would have been more to his credit if the wealth that sustained him should have originated several generations farther back, instead of by the sole efforts of Godfrey Cornet. It had made Ned himself feel almost like one of thenouveaux riches. The more the blood of success was thinned, it seemed, the bluer it was; and it wasn’t easy to confess, especially to certain young English bloods, that the name emblazoned in electric lights across a great house of trade was, but one generation removed, his own. He had particularly deplored his father’s tendency to mention, in any company, his own early struggles, the poverty from which he sprung. But how true and genuine was the shame he felt now at that false shame! In this moment of revelation he saw his father plainly and knew him for the sturdy old warrior, the man of prowess, most of all for the sterling aristocrat that he was. He was a good workman: need anything more be said?
Ever since his college days he had snubbed him, patronized him, disregarded his teachings whereby he might have come into his own manhood. He had never respected good work or good workmen; and now it was fitting retribution that he should spend his natural life in the most grinding, bitter work. Even now he was making amends for his folly at the hands of the most cruel, ironical fate that could befall him. His axe was in his arms; his savage taskmaster faced him from the cabin doorway.
All these thoughts coursed through Ned’s keenly wakened brain in an instant. They seemed as instantaneous as the flood of wrath that had swept through him at Doomsdorf’s irony. And now would he suffer some unspeakable punishment for insolence to his master?
But little, amused lines came about Doomsdorf’s fierce eyes. “A good workman, eh?” he echoed. “Yes, you did work fair enough yesterday. Wait just a minute.”
He turned into his door, in a moment reappearing with a saw and several iron wedges from among his supplies of tools. He put them in Ned’s hands, and the latter received them with a delight never experienced at any favor of fortune in the past. The great penalty of such a life as he had lived, wherein almost every material thing came into his hands at his wish, is that it costs the power to feel delight, the simple joy and gratitude of children; but evidently Ned was learning how again. Just a saw of steel and wedges of iron for splitting! Workmen’s tools that he once regarded with contempt. But oh, they would save him many a weary hour of labor. The saw could cut through the fallen logs in half the time he could hack them with his axe; they could be split in half the number of strokes with the aid of the wedges.
He went to his toil; and he was a little amazed at how quickly he felled the first of the tall spruce. Seemingly his yesterday’s toil had bestowed upon him certain valuable knowledge. His strokes seemed to be more true: they even had a greater degree of power for the same amount of effort. There were certain angles by which he could get the best results: he would learn them, too—sooner or later.
As he worked, the stiffness and pain that yesterday’s toil had left in his muscles seemed to pass away. The axe swung easily in his arms. When the first tree was chopped down, he set Lenore and Bess at trimming off the branches and sawing twelve-foot logs for the hut.
It came about that he chopped down several trees before the two girls had finished cutting and trimming the first. Seemingly Lenore had not yet recovered from the trying experience of two nights before, for she wholly failed to do any part of the work. What was done at this end of the labor Bess did alone. The unmistakable inference was that Ned would have to double his own speed in order to avoid the lash at night.
Yet he felt no resentment. Lenore was even more inured to luxury and ease than he himself: evidently the grinding physical labor was infinitely beyond her. Bess, however, still toiled bravely with axe and saw.
The day turned out to be not greatly different from the one preceding. Again Ned worked to absolute exhaustion: the only apparent change seemed to be that he accomplished a greater amount of work before he finally fell insensible in the snow. This was the twilight hour, and prone in the snow he lay like a warrior among his fallen. About him was a ring of trees chopped down and, with Bess’s aid, trimmed of their limbs, notched and sawed into lengths for the cabin. They had only to be lifted, one upon another, to form the cabin walls.
Bess had collapsed too as the twilight hour drew on; and Lenore alone was able to walk unaided to the shack. Again Ned lay insensible on the floor beside the stove, but to-night, long past the supper hour, he was able to remove his own wet clothes and to devour some of the unsavory left-overs from the meal. Again the night fell over Hell Island, tremulous and throbbing with all the mighty passions of the wild, and again dawn came with its gray light on the snow. And like some insensible, mechanical thing Ned rose to toil again.
The third day was given to lifting the great logs, one upon another, for the walls of the cabin. It was, in reality, the hardest work he had yet done, as to shift each log into place took every ounce of lifting power the man had. The girls could help him but little here, for both of them together did not seem to be able to handle an end of the great logs. He found he had to lift each end in turn.
Yet he was able to drag to the cabin to-night, and torpid with fatigue, take his place at the crude supper table. He was hardly conscious that he was eating—lifting the food to his mouth as mechanically as he had lifted the great logs into place toward the end of the day—and the faces opposite him were as those seen in a dream, never in the full light, vague and dim like ghosts. Sometimes he tried to smile at one of them—as if by a long-remembered instinct—and sometimes one of the assembled group—a different face than that to which he addressed his smiles—seemed to be smiling at him, deep-blue eyes curiously lustrous as if with tears. Then there was a brown, inscrutable face that just now and then appeared out of the shadow, and a stealing, slipping, silent some one that belonged to it,—some one that now and then brought food and put it on the table.
But none of these faces went home to him like the great, hairy visage of the demon that sat opposite. Ned eyed him covertly throughout the meal, wondering every time he moved in his chair if he were getting up to procure his whip, flinching every time the great arm moved swiftly across the table. He didn’t remember getting up from his chair, stripping off part of his wet clothes and falling among the blankets that Doomsdorf had left for his use on the floor. Almost at once it was dawn again.
A new, more vivid consciousness was upon him when he wakened. The stabbing ache in his legs and arms was mostly worn off now; but there was a sharp pain in the small of his back that at first seemed absolutely unendurable. But it wailed, too, as he went to the work of finishing the cabin, laying the roof and hanging the crude door. To-day he was conscious of greater physical power, of more prolonged effort without fatigue. The whole island world was more vivid and clear than ever before.
It was with a certain vague quality of pleasure that he regarded this cabin he had built with his own hands, finished now, except for the chinking of the logs. It was the first creative work he had ever done, and he looked at it and saw that it was good.
He could forget, now, the dreadful, heart-breaking toil he had put into it. It had almost killed him, but he was no worse for it now. Indeed his arms were somewhat stronger, he was even better equipped to meet the next, greater task that Doomsdorf appointed him. It was curious that, slave of a cruel taskmaster that he was, he experienced a dim echo of something that was akin to a new self-respect.
These logs, laid one upon another, were visible proof that so far he had stood the gaff! He had done killing work, yet he still lived to do more. The fear that his spirit would fly from his exhausted frame at the end of one of these bitter days could soon be discarded; seemingly he could toil from dawn to dark, eat his fill, and in a night’s sleep build himself up for another day of toil. More and more of Lenore’s work could be laid on his ever-strengthening shoulders.
The cabin itself was roomy and snug: here he could find seclusion from Doomsdorf and his imperturbable squaw. It was blessing enough just to be out of his sight in the long winter nights after supper, no more to watch every movement of his arm! Besides, he was down to realities, and it was a mighty satisfaction to know that here was a lasting shelter from the storm and the cold. The Arctic winter was falling swiftly, and here was his defense.
Doomsdorf gave him a rusted, discarded stove; and it was almost joy to see it standing in its place! With Doomsdorf’s permission, he devoted a full day to procuring fuel for it.
Four days more the three of them worked at the task of laying in fuel,—Ned doing the lion’s share of the work, of course; Bess toiling to the limit of her fine, young strength; Lenore making the merest pretense. The result of the latter’s idleness was, of course, that her two companions had to divide her share of work between them. Every day Doomsdorf allotted them certain duties,—so many trees to cut up into stove wood, or some other, no less arduous duty; and he seemed to have an uncanny ability to drive them just short of actual, complete exhaustion. The fact that Lenore shirked her share meant that at the close of every day, in order to complete the allotment provided, Ned and Bess had to drive themselves beyond that point, practically to the border of utter collapse. The short rests that they might otherwise have allowed themselves, those blessed moments of relaxation wherein the run-down batteries of their energy were recharged, they dared not take. The result was hour upon hour of such sustained toil that it seemed impossible that human frames could bear the strain.
But the seemingly impossible came to pass, and every day found them stronger for their tasks. Evidently the human body has incredible powers of adaptation to new environment. While, at the end of the day’s toil, it seemed beyond all possibility that they could ever stagger back to the cabins, when the only wish they had left was to lie still in the snow and let the bitter cold take its toll, yet a few minutes’ relaxation in the warmth of the stove always heartened them and gave them strength to take their places at the supper table. As the days passed, it was no longer necessary to seek their cots the instant they left the table. They took to lingering a little while in the crude chairs about the stove, mostly sitting silent in absolute dejection, but sometimes exchanging a few, primitive thoughts. Very little mattered to them now but food and shelter and sleep. They were down to the absolute essentials. As the days passed, however, they began to take time for primitive, personal toilets. They took to washing their faces and hands: Bess and Lenore even combed out the snarls in their hair with Doomsdorf’s broken comb. Then the two girls dressed their tresses into two heavy braids, to be worn Indian fashion in front of the shoulders, the method that required the least degree of care.
They consumed great quantities of food,—particularly Bess and Ned. What would have been a full day’s rations in their own home, enough concentrated nutriment to put them in bed with indigestion, did not suffice for a single meal. Never before had Ned really known the love of food—red meat, the fair, good bread, rice grains white and fluffed—but it came upon him quickly enough now. Before, his choice had run toward women’s foods, exotic sauces, salads and ices and relishes, foods that tickled the palate but gave no joy to the inner man; but now he wanted inner fuel, plenty of it and unadorned. He cared little how it was cooked, whether or not it had seasoning. The sweet taste of meat was loved by him now,—great, thick, half-done steaks of nutritious caribou. He didn’t miss butter on his bread. He would eat till he could hold no more, hardly chewing his food; and as he lay asleep, the inner agents of his body would draw from it the stuff of life with which was built up his shattered tissue.
The physical change was manifest in a few days. His spare flesh went away as if in a single night, and then hard muscle began to take its place. His flesh looked firmer; sagging fat was gone from his face; his skin—pasty white before—was brownish-red from the scourge of the wind. Now the manly hair began to mat about his lips and jowls. A hardening manifested itself in his speech. The few primitive sentences, spoken in the tired-out sessions about the stove, became him more than hours of his former chatter. He no longer gabbled lightly like a girl, his speech full of quirks and affectations: he spoke in blunt, short sentences, with blunt, short words, and his meaning was immediately plain.
He was standing the gaff! Every day found him with greater physical mastery. Yet it was not altogether innate strength, or simple chemical energy derived from the enormous quantities of food he consumed that kept him on his feet. More than once, as the bitter night came down to find him toiling, a strange, wan figure in the snow, he was all but ready to give up. The physical side of him was conquered; the primitive desire for life no longer manifested itself in his spirit. Just to fall in the snow, to let his tired legs wilt under him, perhaps to creep a little way back into the thicket where Doomsdorf’s lantern would fail to reveal him: then he would be free of this dreadful training camp for good! The sleep that would come upon him then would not be cursed with the knowledge of a coming dawn, as gray and hopeless as the twilight just departed! He would be safe then from Doomsdorf’s lash! The Arctic wind would convey his wretched spirit far beyond the madman’s power to follow; his aching, bleeding hands would heal in some Gentleness far away. The fear of which psychologists speak, that of the leap into darkness that is glibly said to be the last conscious instinct, was absolutely absent. Death was a word to conjure with no more. It was no harder for him to think of than the fall of a tree beneath his axe. The terror that surrounded it was ever only a specter: and in the clear vision that came to him in those terrible twilights, only realities were worth the effort of thought. The physical torture of staggering through the snow back to the cabin was so infinitely worse than any conception that he could retain of death; the life that stretched before him was so absolutely bereft of hope that the elemental dread of what lay beyond would not have restrained him an instant. The thing went deeper than that. The reason why he did not yield to the almost irresistible desire to lie down and let the North take its toll had its fount in the secret places of the man’s soul. He was beyond the reach of fear for himself, but his love for Lenore mastered him yet.
He must not leave Lenore. He had given his love to her, and this love was a thousand times more compelling than any fear could possibly be. He must stand up, he must go on through,—for the sake of this dream that counted more than life. Was not her happiness in his whole charge? Did he not constitute her one defense against Doomsdorf’s persecutions? He must live on, carrying as many of her burdens as he could.
Bess too knew an urge beyond herself; but she would not have found it so easy to get it into concrete thought. Perhaps women care less aboutcauseand more abouteffect, willing to follow impulse and scarcely feeling the need of justifying every action with a laborious thought process. In her own heart Bess knew she must not falter, she must not give up. Whence that knowledge came she had no idea, and she didn’t care. There was need of her too on this wretched, windy island. She had her place here; certain obligations had been imposed upon her. She didn’t try to puzzle out what these obligations were. Perhaps she was afraid of the heart’s secret that might be revealed to her. Her instinct was simply to stay and play her part.
The only one of the three to whom the fear of death was still a reality was Lenore, simply because the full horror of the island had not yet gone home to her. She thought she knew the worst; in reality, she had no inkling of it. So far Ned had succeeded in sheltering her from it.
How long he could continue to do so, in any perceptible degree, he did not know. In the first place he had the girl herself to contend with: now that she was recovering, Lenore would likely enough insist on doing her own share of the work. Besides, the problem was greatly complicated, now that the winter’s supply of fuel was laid by, and the real season’s activities about to begin. Could he spare her such bitter, terrible hours that he and Bess must endure, following the trap lines over the wild? Must she be cursed and lashed and tortured by the cold, know the torment of worn-out muscles, only to be rewarded by the knout for failing to bring in a sufficient catch of furs? Doomsdorf would be more exacting, rather than more lenient, in these months to come. He had been willing enough for Ned to do Lenore’s share in the work of laying in winter fuel; but the size of the fur catch was a matter of greater moment to him. It was unthinkable that Ned could handle to the best advantage both Lenore’s trap line and his own. Work as hard as he might, long into the night hours, one man couldn’t possibly return two men’s catch. For Lenore’s sake Ned regarded the beginning of the trapping season with dread, although for himself he had cause to anticipate it.
He hadn’t forgotten that the first furs taken would be his, and he needed them sorely enough. Indeed, the matter was beginning to be of paramount importance to his health and life. The clothes he had worn from theCharon, flimsy as the life of which they had been a part, were rapidly wearing out. They didn’t turn the rain, and they were not nearly warm enough for the bitter weather to come. Ned did not forget that the month was only October; that according to Doomsdorf, real winter would not break over them for a few weeks, at least. The snow flurries, the frost, the bitter nights were just the merest hint of what was to come, he said: the wail of the biting wind at night just the far-off trumpet call of an advancing enemy. A man could go thinly garbed on such days as this and, except for an aching chill throughout his frame, suffer no disagreeable consequences; but such wouldn’t hold true in the forty-below-zero weather that impended. Only fur and the thickest woolens could avail in the months to come.
Besides, the trapper’s life offered more of interest than that of the woodchopper. It would carry him through those gray valleys and over the rugged hills that now, when he had time to look about him, seemed to invite his exploration. Best of all, the work would largely carry him away from Doomsdorf’s presence. If only he could spare Lenore, not only by permission of Doomsdorf but by the consent of the girl herself.
The matter came up that night while Doomsdorf was sorting out some of his smaller traps. “We’ll light out to-morrow,” he said. “The sooner we get these things set, the better. The water furs seem to be absolutely prime already—I’m sure the land furs must be too. I wonder if you three have any idea what you’re going to do.”
Ned saw an opportunity to speak for Lenore, but Doomsdorf’s speech ran on before he could take it. “I don’t suppose you do,” he said. “Of course, I’m going to show you—nevertheless it would help some if any of you knew an otter from a lynx. You may not know it, but this island contains a good many square miles—to trap it systematically requires many lines and hundreds of traps. I’ve already laid out three lines—sometimes I’ve trapped one, and sometimes another. Two of ’em are four-day lines, and one a five-day line—that is, they take four and five days respectively to get around. On each one I’ve built series of huts, or shacks, all of them with a stove and supplies of food, and you put up in them for the night. They are a day’s march apart, giving you time to pick up your skins, reset, and so on, as you go. Believe me, you won’t have any time to loaf. After you get into the cabins at night, eat your supper and get some of the frost out of your blood, you’ll enjoy thawing out and skinning the animals you’ve caught in your trap. If it’s a big animal, dead and frozen and too big to carry, you’ll have to make a fire out in the snow and thaw him out there. So you see you’ll have varied experience.
“You’ll be away from me and this cabin for days at a time, but if you’re figuring on any advantage from that, just put it out of your mind, the sooner the better. Maybe you think you can sneak enough time to make a boat, smuggle it down to the water, and cast off. Let me assure you you’ll have no time to sneak. Besides, this patch of timber right here is nearer to the shore than any other patch on the island—you’d simply have no chance to get away with it. If you think you could cross the ice to Tzar Island, after winter breaks, you’re barking up the wrong tree too. In my daily hunts I’ll manage to get up on one of these ridges, and I can keep a pretty fair watch of you over these treeless hills. You’d never get more than a few hours’ start; and they wouldn’t help you at all on the ice fields! I trust there’s no need to mention penalties. You already know about that.
“And maybe you are thinking it will be easy enough to slack—not trying to catch much, so you won’t have many skins to flesh and stretch—maybe hiding what you do catch. I’ll just say this. I have a pretty good idea how this country runs—just how many skins each line yields with fair trapping. I’m going to increase that estimate by twenty per cent.—and that’s to be your minimum. I won’t say what that amount is now. But if at the end of the season you’re short—by one skin—look out! It means that you’ll have to be about twenty per cent. smarter and more industrious than the average trapper.”
“But man——” Ned protested. “We’re not experienced——”
“You’ll learn quick enough. Aren’t you the dominant race? And I warn you again—you’d better drop bitter tears every time you find where a wolverine has been along and eaten an ermine out of a trap!”
The man was not jesting. They knew him well enough by now; the piercing glitter of his keen, gray eyes, the odd fixation about his pupils that was always manifest when he was most in earnest, was plainly in evidence now. Thus it was with the most profound amazement that Lenore’s companions suddenly saw her beautiful mouth curling in a smile.
For themselves they were lost in despair. All too plainly Doomsdorf had merely hinted at the cruel rigors of the trapper’s trail. Yet Lenore was smiling.
Then Ned saw, with a queer little tug of his heart, that the smile was not meant for him. It was not a gracious signal of her love, meant to encourage him in his despair. A woman herself, and understanding women, Bess never dreamed for an instant that it was; she knew only too well the thought and the aim behind that sudden, dazzling sunshine in Lenore’s face. Yet her only reaction, beyond amazement, was a swift surge of tenderness and pity for Ned.
Lenore was smiling at Doomsdorf. She was looking straight into his gray eyes. Her cheeks were flushed a lovely pink; her eyes were smiling too; she presented an image of ineffable beauty. That was what hurt worse,—the fact that her beauty had never seemed more genuine than now. It was the mask of falsehood, yet her smile was as radiant as any he remembered of their most holy moments together. He had not dreamed that any emotion except her love for him could call such a light into her face. It had been, to him, the lasting proof that she was his, the very symbol of the ideal of integrity and genuineness that he made of her; yet now he saw her use it as a wile to win some favor from this beast in human form. The very sacredness of their relations was somehow questioned. The tower of his faith seemed to be tottering.
Yet he forced away the dismay that seemed to cloud him, then began to watch with keenest interest. Not even this man of iron could wholly resist her smile. In a single instant she had captured his mood: he was not so fixed in his intent.
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t be much good to you, as a trapper,” she began quietly, her voice of cloying sweetness. “I’m afraid I’d only get in the way and scare the little—ermines, you call them?—out of the country. Mr. Doomsdorf, do you know how well I can keep house?”
Doomsdorf looked at her, grinning in contempt, yet not wholly unresponsive to the call she was making to him. “Can’t say as I do——”
“You don’t know how I can cook, either,—make salads, and desserts, and things like that. You’d better let me stay here and help your wife with the housework. I’d really be of some value, then.”
For an instant the wind seemed to pause on the roof; and all of them sat in startled silence. The only movement was that of Sindy, imperturbable as ever, rocking back and forth in her chair; and the sound she made had a slow and regular cadence, as of a great clock. Ned sat staring at his hands; Bess’s gaze rested first on him, then on the two principals of the little drama who still sat smiling as if in understanding. Ned needn’t have worried about Lenore insisting on doing her share of the rigorous, outdoor work. The difficulty that he had anticipated in persuading her to let him lighten her burdens had not been serious, after all.
And really there was little cause for his own depression. Lenore meant exactly what she said. After all, this was his own plan,—that she should remain and help Sindy with the housework and the caring for such skins as Doomsdorf himself took, thus avoiding the heart-breaking hardship of the trap lines. Nor could he hold against her the lie in her smile. It was her whole right to use it in her own behalf: to use any wile she could to gain her ends. He was a fool to suppose that there was a moral issue involved! The old moral teaching against compromise with the devil didn’t hold here. Perhaps Bess and himself could get farther, make their toil easier, if they also fawned on Doomsdorf. The fact that he would sooner wear his hands to the bone or die beneath the lash did not imply moral superiority. It simply showed that he was of different make-up. The same with Bess; she was simply of a different breed.
And the wile was not without results. The usual scoffing refusal did not come at once to the bearded lips. Perhaps her master was flattered that Lenore was so tamed, perhaps he wished to reward her attitude of friendliness so that Bess might take example. Lenore had never moved him with the same fire as Bess: perhaps by showing leniency now, the latter could be brought to this same pass! Besides, Lenore was the weakest of the three and he had thus less desire to break what little spirit she had, rather preferring, by complying with her request, to heap fresh burdens of toil and hardship on these two proud-spirited ones before him.
“You want to stay here with Sindy and me, eh?” he commented at last. “Well, Sindy might like some help. I’m willing—but I’ll leave it up to your two friends. They’ll have to work all the harder to make up for it—especially Bess. I was going to have you two girls work together.”
He watched Ned’s face with keenest interest. The younger man flushed in his earnestness, his adoring gaze on Lenore.
“I’m only too glad to make it easier for you,” he said, his crooked, boyish smile dim at his lips. “That’s the one thing that matters—to help you all I can. In this case, though—Bess is the one to say.”
Lenore perceptibly stiffened as Ned’s gaze turned to Bess. It didn’t flatter her that her lover should even take Bess into his consideration. She had grown accustomed to receiving his every duty.
But it came about that Lenore and her little jealousies did not even find a place in Bess’s thought. She returned Ned’s gaze, her eyes lustrous as if with tears, and she understood wholly the prayer that was in his heart.
“Of course she may stay here,” she said. “We’ll make out somehow.”
XX
Doomsdorf’strap lines lay in great circles, coinciding at various points in order to reduce the number of cabins needed to work them, and ultimately swinging back to the home cabin in the thicket beside the sea. They were very simple to follow, he explained—Bess’s line running up the river to the mouth of a great tributary that flowed from the south, the camp being known as the Eagle Creek cabin; thence up the tributary to its forks, known as the Forks cabin, up the left-hand forks to its mother springs, the Spring cabin, and then straight down the ridge to the home cabin, four days’ journey in all. She couldn’t miss any of the three huts, Doomsdorf explained, as all of them were located in the open barrens, on the banks of the creeks she was told to follow. Doomsdorf drew for her guidance a simple map that would remove all danger of going astray.
Ned’s route was slightly more complicated, yet nothing that the veriest greenhorn could not follow. It took him first to what Doomsdorf called his Twelve-Mile cabin at the very head of the little stream on which the home cabin was built, thence following a well-blazed trail along an extensive though narrow strip of timber, a favorable country for marten, to the top of the ridge, around the glacier, and down to the hut that Bess occupied the third night out, known as the Forks cabin; thence up the right-hand fork to its mother spring, the Thirty-Mile cabin; over the ridge and down to the sea, the Sea cabin; and thence, trapping salt-water mink and otter, to the home cabin, five days’ journey in all. “If you use your head, you can’t get off,” Doomsdorf explained. “If you don’t, no one will ever take the trouble to look you up.”
As if smiling upon their venture, nature gave them a clear dawn in which to start forth. The squaw and Bess started up from the river mouth together, the former in the rôle of teacher; Ned and Doomsdorf followed up the little, silvery creek that rippled past the home cabin. And for the first time since his landing on Hell Island Ned had a chance really to look about him.
It was the first time he had been out of sight of the cabin and thus away from the intangible change that the mere presence of man works on the wild. All at once, as the last vestige of the white roof was concealed behind the snow-laden branches of the spruce, he found himself in the very heart of the wilderness. It was as if he had passed from one world to another.
Even the air was different. It stirred and moved and throbbed in a way he couldn’t name, as if mighty, unnamable passions seemed about to be wakened. He caught a sense of a resistless power that could crush him to earth at a whim, of vast forces moving by fixed, invisible law; he felt that secret, wondering awe which to the woodsman means the nearing presence of the Red Gods. Only the mighty powers of nature were in dominion here: the lashing snows of winter, the bitter cold, the wind that wept by unheard by human ears. Ned was closer to the heart of nature, and thus to the heart of life, than he had ever been before.
He had no words to express the mood that came upon him. The wind that crept through the stunted spruce trees expressed it better than he; it was in the song that the wolf pack rings to sing on winter nights; in the weird complaint that the wild geese called down from the clouds. What little sound there was, murmuring branches and fallen aspen leaves, fresh on the snow, rustling faintly together and serving only to accentuate the depth of the silence, had this same, eerie motif,—nothing that could be put in words, nothing that ever came vividly into his consciousness, but which laid bare the very soul and spirit of life. Cold and hunger, an ancient persecution whose reason no man knew, a never-to-be-forgotten fear of a just but ruthless God!
This was the land untamed. There was not, at first, a blaze on a tree, the least sign that human beings had ever passed that way before. It was the land-that-used-to-be, unchanged seemingly since the dim beginnings of the world. Blessed by the climbing sun of spring, warm and gentle in the summer, moaning its old complaint when the fall winds swept through the branches, lashed by the storms of winter,—thus it had lain a thousand-thousand years. And now, a little way up the stream, there was more tangible sign that this was the kingdom of the wild. Instead of an unpeopled desert, it was shown to be teeming with life. They began to see the trails of the forest creatures in the snow.
Sometimes they paused before the delicate imprint of a fox, like a snow etching made by a master hand; sometimes the double track of marten and his lesser cousin, the ermine; once the great cowlike mark of a caribou, seeking the pale-green reindeer moss that hung like tresses from the trees. Seemingly every kind of northern animal of which Ned had ever heard had immediately preceded them through the glade.
“Where there’s timber, there’s marten,” Doomsdorf explained. “Marten, I suppose you know, are the most valuable furs we take, outside of silver and blue fox—and one of the easiest taken. The marten’s such a ruthless hunter that he doesn’t look what he’s running into. You won’t find them far on the open barrens, but they are in hundreds in the long, narrow timber belt between Twelve-Mile cabin, to-night’s stop, and Forks cabin that you’ll hit to-morrow night. And we’ll make our first set right here.”
He took one of the traps from Ned’s shoulder and showed him how to make the set. The bait was placed a few feet above the trap, in this case, on the trunk of the tree, so that to reach it the marten would almost certainly spring the trap.
“Put ’em fairly thick through here,” Doomsdorf advised. “Lay more emphasis on fox and lynx in the open barrens.” He stepped back from the set. “Do you think you can find this place again?”
Ned looked it over with minute care, marking it in relation to certain dead trees that lay across the creek. “I think I can.”
“That’s the very essential of trapping, naturally. It will come to be second nature after a while—without marking it by trees or anything. You’ll have better than a hundred traps; and it isn’t as easy as it looks. Remember, I won’t be with you the next time you pass this way.”
They tramped on, and Doomsdorf pointed out where a wolverine had come down the glade and crossed the creek. “You’ll curse at the very name of wolverine before the season’s done,” Doomsdorf told him, as Ned paused to study the imprint. “He’s the demon of the snow so far as the trapper is concerned. Nevertheless, you’ll want to take a skin for your own use. It’s the one fur for the hood of a parka—you can wear it over your mouth in fifty below and it doesn’t get covered with ice from your breath. But you’ll have to be a smarter man than I think you are to catch him.”
A few minutes later the timber became to be more noticeably stunted, the trees farther and farther apart, and soon they were in the open. These were the barren lands, deep moss or rich marsh grass already heavy with snow; and the only trees remaining were a few willow, quivering aspen, and birch along the bank of the creek. From time to time the two men stopped to place their traps, Doomsdorf explaining the various “sets”, how to conceal the cold steel of which most all creatures have such an instinctive fear, and how to eliminate the human smell that might otherwise keep the more cunning of the fur-bearers from the bait. Once they paused before a great, cruel instrument of iron, seemingly much too large to be a trap, that had been left at the set from the previous trapping season.
“Lift it,” Doomsdorf advised. Ned bent, finding the iron itself heavy in his arms.
“No creature’s going to walk away with that on his leg, is he?”
“No? That’s all you know about it. I’ll admit that you wouldn’t care to walk with it very far. You would see why I didn’t take it into shelter at the close of the season—although of course it’s easy enough to haul on a sled. You notice it’s attached to a chain, and that chain to a toggle.”
“Toggle” was a word that Ned had never heard before, but which plainly represented a great log, or drag, to which the trap chain was attached. Ned gazed, and another foolish question came to his lips. “You use that because there isn’t a tree handy?” he asked.
“If there was a tree handy, I’d use it just the same,” Doomsdorf explained. “There’s no holding the animal I catch in that trap by chaining him fast. No matter how big the tree or how stout the chain, he’d break loose—or else he’d pull out his foot. You’ve got to give him play. That’s why we use a toggle.”
“You don’t mean he drags that great thing——”
“No, only about halfway across the island before I can possibly overtake him and shoot him, bellowing like a devil every step of the way. Moreover, the toggle has to be chained near the end, rather than in the middle—otherwise he’ll catch the ends back of a couple of tree trunks and break loose. Now set the trap.”
It took nearly all of Ned’s strength to push down the powerful springs and set the great jaws. The fact that he didn’t know just how to go about it impeded him too. And when he stood erect again, he found Doomsdorf watching him with keenest interest.
“I didn’t think you were man enough to do it,” he commented. “You’ll say that’s quite a trap, won’t you?”
“It’s quite a trap,” Ned agreed shortly. “What kind of an elephant do you take in it?”
“No kind of an elephant, but one of the grandest mammals that ever lived, at that. I don’t trap them much, because I hardly get enough for their skins to pay for handling them—you can guess they’re immensely bulky. There’s a fair price for their skulls, too, but the skull alone is a fair load for a weak back. Last year I needed a few hides for the cabin. Did you ever hear of the Kodiac bear?”
“Good Lord! One bear can’t move all that.”
Doomsdorf stood erect, and his eyes gleamed. Evidently the great, savage monarch of the islands of which he spoke was some way close to his own savage heart. “He can move your heart into your throat just to look at him!” he said. “One of the grandest mammals that ever lived—the great, brown bear of the islands. Of course, you ought to know he’s by all odds the biggest bear on earth, he and the polar bear just north of here—and the biggest carnivorous animal on earth, for that matter. Your lions, your tigers wouldn’t last a minute under those great hooks of his. He’d tear your whole chest out in one swipe. This seems to be about the northern limit of his range—the big brownies go all the way from Admiralty Islands, in the south, clear up to here, with very little variation as to size and color. There are not many on the Skopins—but going around with just an axe and a hunting knife for weapons, you’ll be glad there aren’t any more. At this point their range begins to coincide, to some slight degree, with the polar bear—but of course just a stray gets down below the Arctic circle. You’ve got to have a whole caribou carcass to interest the old devil in the way of bait. And now I’ll show you how to outfox him.”
He cut a slender whip, about half an inch in diameter, from a near-by willow, and thrusting both ends into the ground in front of the trap, made an arch. “When the old boy comes along, he’ll lift his front foot right over that arch, to avoid stepping on anything that looks so unstable, and then straight down into the trap,” Doomsdorf explained. “If it was heavy wood, he’d rest his foot on it and miss the trap.”
A few minutes later they came to what seemed to Ned a new and interesting geological formation. It seemed to be a noisy waterfall of three or four feet, behind which the creek was dammed to the proportions of a small, narrow lake. Yet the dam itself didn’t appear to be a natural formation of rock. It looked more like driftwood, but it was inconceivable that mere drift could be piled in this ordered way.
Keenly interested, he bent to examine it. Farther up the creek some heavy body struck the water with a mighty splash. It was too swift, however, for him to see what it was. There were no power plants or mill wheels here, and thus it was difficult to believe that human hands had gone to the great labor of building such a dam. Only one explanation remained.
“It must be a beaver dam,” he said.
“You’re right for once,” Doomsdorf agreed. “Did you ever see better engineering? Even the dam is built in an arch—the strongest formation known to man—to withstand the waters. Sometime I’ll tell you how they do it—there isn’t as much premeditated cunning in it as you think. Do you know what a beaver looks like?”
“Got big teeth——”
“Correct. It has to have ’em to cut all this wood. Likely enough the little devils go considerable distances up and down this creek to get their materials. Sometimes they’ll dig great canals for floating the sticks they use in their dams.
“A big beaver weighs about fifty pounds—and he’s about the handiest boy to trap there is. You’ll wonder what the purpose of these dams is. As far as I can make out, simply to keep the water at one level. You know these little streams rise and fall like the tides. They’ve learned, in a few hundred thousand years of their development, that it doesn’t pay to build a nice house and then have the creek come up and wash it away and drown them out. When they put down their winter food, they want to be sure it’s going to be there when they want it—neither washed away nor high and dry out of water. The solution was—to build a dam. Now I’ll show you how to catch a beaver.”
It seemed to Ned that the logical place to lay the trap was on the beaver house itself—a great pile of sticks and mud. But Doomsdorf explained that a trap set on the house itself so alarmed the animals that the entire colony was likely to desert the dam. Instead, the trap was set just below the surface of the water at a landing,—a place where the beaver went in and out of the water in the course of their daily work.
No bait was used this time. The trap was covered with fine mud with the idea that the beaver would blunder into it either on leaving or entering the water. A heavy sack of little stones from the creek bed was attached to the chain, and a long wire, leading from this, was fastened securely to a tree on the creek bank. The arrangement was really a merciful one to the beaver. The instant the trap was sprung, the animal’s instinct was to dive into deep water. Of course he dragged the heavy sack with him and was unable to rise again. The beaver, contrary to expectations, can not live in water indefinitely. An air-breathing mammal, he drowns almost as quickly as a human being would under the same circumstances.
They placed a second trap on the dam itself, then encircling the meadow, continued on up the stream. From time to time they made their sets, as this was a favorable region for mink and otter, two of the most beautiful and valuable furs.
Time was passing swiftly for Ned. There was even a quality of enjoyment in his reaction to the day’s toil. Now as they mounted to the higher levels, he was ever more impressed by the very magnitude of the wilderness about—stretching for miles in every direction to the shores of the sea. The weary wastes got to him and stirred his imagination as never before. He found, when he paused to make the sets, that a certain measure of excitement was upon him. Evidently there was a tang and flavor in this snow-swept wilderness through which he moved to make the blood flow swiftly in the veins.
Partly it lay in the constant happening of the unexpected. Every few rods brought its little adventure: perhaps a far-off glimpse of a fox; perhaps a flock of hardy waterfowl, tardy in starting south, flushing up with a thunderous beat of wings from the water; perhaps the swift dive of that dreadful little killer, the mink; possibly the track of a venerable old bear, already drowsy and contemplating hibernation, who had but recently passed that way. But perhaps the greater impulse for excitement lay in the expectation of what the next turn in the trail might bring forth. There were only tracks here, but the old bear himself might launch forth into a deadly charge from the next thicket of birch trees. The fox was only a fleet shadow far away, but any moment they might run into him face to face, in the act of devouring his prey. Ned found that his senses had miraculously sharpened, that many little nerves of which hitherto he had been unaware had wakened into life and were tingling just under the skin. Until fatigue came heavily upon him—only the first hint of it had yet come to his thighs and back—this particular part of his daily duties need never oppress him.
But this dim, faltering hope was forgotten in the travail of the next few hours. The load of heavy traps on his back; the labor of tramping through the snow; most of all the loss of bodily heat through his flimsy, snow-wet clothes soon rewarded him for daring to seek happiness on this desert of despair. As the gray afternoon advanced, his quickened spirit fell again: once more his senses were dulled, and the crooked, boyish half-smile that had begun to manifest itself faded quickly from his lips. Doomsdorf still marched in his easy, swinging gait; and ever it was a harder fight to keep pace. Yet he dared not lag behind. His master’s temper was ever uncertain in these long, tired hours of afternoon.
Tired out, weakened, aching in every muscle and not far from the absolute limit of exhaustion, Ned staggered to the cabin door at last. He had put out all the traps he had brought from the home cabin: thence his course lay along a blazed trail that skirted the edge of the narrow timber belt, over the ridge to the Forks cabin. Doomsdorf entered, then in the half-light stood regarding the younger man who had followed him in.
Ned tried to stand erect. He must not yield yet to the almost irresistible impulse to throw himself down on the floor and rest. He dared not risk Doomsdorf’s anger; how did he know what instruments of torture the latter’s satanic ingenuity might contrive in this lonely cabin! Nor was his mood to be trusted to-night. His gray eyes shone with suppressed excitement; and likely enough he would be glad of an excuse for some diversion to pass the hours pleasantly. It was very lonely and strange out here, in the open, in the full sweep of the wind over the barren lands.
But Ned wasn’t aware of Doomsdorf’s plans. The great blond man stretched his arms, yawning, buttoned his coat tighter about him, and turned to go. “I’ll see you in about five days,” he remarked laconically.
Ned wakened abruptly from his revery. “You mean—you aren’t going to show me anything more?”
“There’s nothing more you can’t learn by yourself—by hard experience. I’ve given you your map and your directions for the trap line. A baby couldn’t miss it. There’s traps on the wall—scatter ’em along between here and the Forks cabin. There you will find another bunch to put between there and Thirty-Mile cabin. So on clear around. Over your head you see the stretchers.”
Ned looked up, and over the rafters, among other supplies, were laid a large number of small boards, planed smooth and of different sizes.
“I’ve shown you how to set your traps, for every kind of an animal,” Doomsdorf went on. “You ought to be able to do the rest. By the time you come around, we’ll likely have freezing weather—that means you’ll have to thaw out your animals before you skin them. If it’s a big animal, dead in the trap, too heavy to carry into camp, you’ll have to make a fire in the snow and thaw him out there. Otherwise bring ’em in. You saw me skin that otter I shot—skin all the smaller animals the same way. Simply split ’em under the legs and peel ’em out toward the head, as you would a banana. Of course you’ll spoil plenty of skins at first, so far as market value is concerned, but they’ll be all right for your own use. The closer you can skin them, the less fat you leave on the pelts, the less you’ll have to flesh them when you get to your cabin. When you can’t strip off any more fat, turn ’em wrong side out on one of those boards—stretching them tight. Use the biggest board you can put in. Then hang ’em up in the cabin to dry. A skin like a beaver, that you slit up the belly and which comes off almost round, nail on the wall. All the little tricks of the trade will come in time.
“Here and here and here”—he paused, to put in Ned’s hands a clasp hunting knife, razor sharp, a small pocket hone to whet his tools, and a light axe that had been hanging back of the stove—“are some things you’ll need. The time will come when you’ll need snowshoes, too. I ought to make you make them yourself, but you’d never get it done and I’d never get any furs. There’s a pair on the rafters. Now I’m going to tramp back to the cabin to spend the night—in more agreeable company.”
For a moment the two men stood regarding each other in absolute silence. Then Doomsdorf’s keen ears, eager for such sounds, caught the whisper of Ned’s troubled breathing. Presently a leering smile flashed through the blond beard.
It was as he thought. Ned’s mind was no longer on furs. His face had been drawn and dark with fatigue, but now a darker cloud spread across it, like a storm through open skies, as some blood-curdling thought made ghastly progress through his brain. At first it was only startled amazement, then swift disbelief—the manifestation of that strange quirk in human consciousness that ever tries to shield the spirit from the truth—and finally terror, stark and without end. It showed in the tragic loosening of every facial muscle; in the cold drops that came out at the edge of the brown, waving hair; in the slow, fixed light in his eyes.
This was what Doomsdorf loved. He had seen the same look in the faces of prisoners—newly come to a stockade amid the snow and still hopeful that the worst they had heard had been overdrawn—on seeing certain implements of initiation; and it had been a source of considerable amusement to him. This was the thing that his diseased soul craved. As the young man reached imploring hands to his own great forearms, he hurled him away with a ringing laugh.
“You mean—you and Lenore will be alone——” Ned asked.
“You saw the squaw start out with Bess?” was the triumphant answer. “But why should you care? It was Lenore’s own wish to stay. She’d take me and comfort any time, sooner than endure the cold with you. Of such stuff, my boy, are women made.”
The hands reached out again, clasping tight upon Doomsdorf’s forearms. Ned’s face, lifeless and white as a stone, was no longer loose with terror. A desperate fury had brought him to the verge of madness.
“That’s a foul lie!” he shouted, reckless of Doomsdorf’s retaliation. “She didn’t dream that you would do that——”
Doomsdorf struck him off, hurling him against the wall; but it was not with the idea of inflicting punishment. Amused at his impotent rage, his blow was not the driving shoulder blow which, before now, had broken a human jaw to fragments. Nor did he carry through, hammering his victim into insensibility at his leisure.
“That gets you a little, doesn’t it?” he taunted. Ned straightened, staring at him as if he were a ghost. “Your sweetheart—that you’d sworn was yours to the last ditch! I don’t mean that she’d give herself willingly to me—yet. She’s just the kind of girl I’d expect a weakling like yourself to pick out—the type that would sooner go wrong than endure hardship. And that’s why she’s more or less safe, for the time being at least, from me. Even if Sindy wasn’t coming back home to-night—probably already there—you wouldn’t have to fear.”
Ned could not speak, but Doomsdorf looked at him with the fire of a zealot in his eyes.
“I don’t want anything that’s that easy,” he said with infinite contempt. “Sometimes the game is harder. I take back something I inferred a moment ago—thatallwomen would do the same. The best of them, the most of them, still will go through hell for an idea; and that’s the kind whose spirit is worth while to break. Do you know any one who right now, likely enough, is trudging along through this hellish snow with forty pounds of traps over her back?”
Ned shuddered, hurling off his doubt, believing yet in the fidelity of his star. “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” he answered.
“That’s what Bess Gilbert is doing, and you know it. There, young man, is a woman worthy of my steel!”
He turned and strode out the door. Ned was left to his thoughts and the still, small voices of the waste places, alone with the wilderness night whose word was the master word of life, and with the wind that sobbed unhappy secrets as it swept his cabin roof. He couldn’t help but listen, there in the twilight. Thus the work of training Ned Cornet’s soul went on, strengthening him to stand erect when that stern officer, the Truth, looked into his eyes; teaching him the mastery of that bright sword of fortitude and steadfastness whereby he could parry the most pitiless blows of fate.