BILL WILDER RE-APPEARS
BILL WILDER RE-APPEARS
BILL WILDER RE-APPEARS
Hesther was perturbed, yet she was engaged on the task of all tasks which appealed to her in her life’s routine.
It was wash-day. She was standing over a boiler of steaming water, frothing with soap suds and full of a laundry made up of the rainbow hues of a Joseph’s coat. The kitchen was reeking with steam. It was also littered with piles of well-wrung garments awaiting the services of Mary Justicia for transfer to the drying ground outside. The swarming flies were more than usually sticky in the humid atmosphere, and the prevailing confusion in the rough living room was as splendid as the most ardent housewife could have desired on such an occasion.
Perturbation with Hesther could only have one source. Something must be amiss with one of the large family for which she held herself responsible. Nothing else could have disturbed her equanimity. She was completely single-minded and even in her emotions. Beyond the four walls of her house she had no concern. She was utterly abandoned to the six young lives entrusted to her efforts by her dead husband, and the girl who, from her earliest infancy, had been called “the Kid.”
It was of the Kid she was thinking now. Their talk of the day before had filled her with disquiet. The girl had denied so much, and yet, to the patient mother-woman, there had been signs that only afforded one interpretation.
And now she was asking herself all the many questions which her woman’s heart instinctively prompted. Who was the man? Where was the man? When had the Kid encountered the man? What was he like? How far had this thing gone that it had stirred the child to a fever of excited interest in another woman’s love for her man? She was mystified beyond words. None but trailmen and trappers had come near them throughout the years. They were mostly half-breeds and Eskimos, and one or two poor whites who thought of nothing but the mean living they were able to scratch out of this Euralian-ridden territory.
No. It was none of these. Of that she was convinced. And for all the girl’s denial her mind persistently turned to Placer. There had been a definite change in the Kid, she fancied, since her return from the gold city. A change which her keen anxiety of the moment forthwith exaggerated. She felt that she must take Usak into her confidence. Yes. When he returned from his summer trip with Clarence, trading the trail-broken deer, she would question him. She warned herself that it was imperative for all it seemed like disloyalty, and distrust of the Kid’s denial. Yes. That was the only course for her.
She glanced up from her steaming tub where her busy hands were rubbing and squeezing the highly coloured garments in the suds. Mary Justicia had appeared in the doorway and was standing outlined foggily in the steam.
“Those,” Hesther said, indicating the litter on the rough-boarded table. “It’s a big wash, child,” she observed contentedly, “but I guess we’ll get through in time for dinner. You see we got all Janey’s stuff, an’ it’s that stained with mud an’ the like it makes you wonder the sort o’ muck that comes down the river.”
Mary Justicia seized on the garments. Then she paused and turned with her arms full.
“The kids are comin’ right along up from the river, Mum,” she declared, dismissing her mother’s remarks under an interest much more to her liking. “Guess they’re coming along up on the run, an’ Alg’s with ’em. You wouldn’t say Perse had located something, or—or got hurt? I didn’t just see him comin’ along with the bunch.”
The mother wiped the suds from her hands and dried them on her overall.
“It’s an hour an’ more to food,” she said, with a sharp inquiry in her tone and look. “Wot’s got ’em beatin’ it to home now? Alg should be along up at the corrals with the Kid.”
She hurried to the door and looked out. Sure enough there was a tailing procession of children racing for the house. But all four of them were there. Perse was running last, behind the toddling figure of Jane Constance.
It was a breathless crew that broke into the steaming kitchen. From the sixteen-year-old Alg down to the round, grubby-faced Janey, with her mass of curling brown hair and dark eyes, excitement was a-riot, and they hurled their amazing news at the busy mother in a chorus that set her flourishing a half-wrung garment at them in protest.
“Say, quit it, all of you!” she cried. “I haven’t ears all over my head if you think I have. Outfit? What outfit? Here, quit right away, the whole bunch. An’ you Alg, tell your crazy yarn while I get right on with the wash. You ‘shoo’ the others right out into the open, Mary Justicia, while Alg hands me his fairy tale. They’ll be takin’ pneumonia in this steam else.”
The elder girl obediently “shooed” the rest of the children from the room, and stood guard in the doorway lest the avalanche returned. But she was all eyes and ears for Alg who was simply bursting with his astonishing news.
“It’s an outfit come right up the river,” he began at once, his eyes alight and dilating with an excitement he could scarcely contain sufficiently to leave him coherent. “It’s a swell outfit of white folk, ever so many of ’em. I guess they must ha’ come through in the night an’ passed right up to the gravel flats along up beyond the corrals. Guess they pitched camp three miles up, an’ they got five big canoes, an’ all sorts of camp stuff. Ther’s a feller with bright red hair, an’ two fellers who’re sort of bosses. The rest are just river folk, an’ the like. It was Perse located ’em, an’ I guess he come along and tell us, and we went right up, an’—”
“Did you tell the Kid?”
Hesther’s sharp demand was the natural impulse which the boy’s news stirred in her. The arrival of a strange outfit of white folk on the river was a matter of serious enough importance in their lives, but it was outside her province. Her real concern was for her washing and all that that implied. The Kid, in the absence of Usak, was her resource in such a situation. The boy shook his rough head.
“I didn’t see her around as we came along back,” he said, “an’ I didn’t wait to chase her up. I guessed I best come along an’ tell you first.”
The mother nodded and wrung and rinsed a flannel garment as though nothing else in the world mattered. She was thinking as hard as a mind concentrated upon her manual effort would permit. And somehow the result was sufficiently negative to leave her without any inspiration beyond that the Kid should be told at once so that there should be no delay in the responsibility of the newly developed position finding the proper person to deal with it.
“Beat it right up to the corrals,” she said at last, “an’ locate the Kid, and hand her your yarn, son.” Then the working of her simple mind eased to its normal condition. “An’ when you done that come right back to home, an’ don’t get running around pecking at them folks. We don’t know who they are. Maybe they’re a bum outfit o’ low down whites chasing after no good. You’re mostly a grown feller, Alg, an’ you got women-folk around. I guess it’s right up to you, an’ me, an’ the Kid, with Usak away, an’ with strangers around. Now you get right along an’ beat it. Food’ll be about ready against you get along back. An’ I’ll finish the wash after. Ho, Mary, here’s another bunch to set out dryin’.”
But Hesther was infinitely disturbed. Her perturbation on the Kid’s account had been something very much less disturbing than this sudden and totally unlooked for development. Strangers! White strangers! Strangers on their river! What had they come for? And, more than all, what manner of white folk were they? The woman in her had taken alarm, for all she gave no sign. There was the Kid and Mary. They were alone, without any sort of help except Alg and the two or three half-breed Eskimo working about the farm. At that moment she would have given all she possessed to have had Usak on hand to look to for the protection she desired.
It was curious. For years she had lived under the threat of the Euralian marauders who had passed through the country like a devastating pestilence. They were foreigners. They were savages. Their crimes were wanton in their cruelty. Yet the dread of them failed to quicken her sturdy pulse by a single beat. Now, however, at the coming of these men of her own race, it was utterly different. A sort of stupefied panic suddenly descended upon her, and her wash day had ceased to interest her. She removed the boiler from her cook-stove, and prepared for the mid-day meal.
Mary Justicia had abandoned her post at the doorway. She had cleared the table of the litter of washing and was setting the meal ready while her mother gave herself up to the work at the cookstove, when a small head was thrust in at the doorway.
“Mum!”
There was a note of suppressed excitement in Perse’s eager summons.
Hesther turned from the stove on the instant.
“You be off with you!” she cried. “Food won’t be—”
“Tain’t food, Mum,” retorted the boy urgently, as he gazed into the steam-filled room. “It’s a feller, a great big feller, bigger than Usak, comin’ right along. What’ll I do? Tain’t any use tryin’ to ‘shoo’ him. He’s too big fer that. Guess it wouldn’t be any use Mary ‘shooin’’ him either. I—”
Hesther ran to the doorway. She stood framed in it, her thin, bare arms folded across her spare bosom. It was an attitude that might have suggested defiance. But at that moment there was only a deepening panic surging in her mother heart.
And standing there she beheld the approach of a man of unusual stature. He was clad in trail-stained, hard clothing that by no means helped his appearance. His buckskin coat was open, and under it was revealed a plain cotton shirt that gaped wide at the neck, about which was knotted a coloured scarf. His dark hair hung loose below his low-pressed cap. But these things passed unnoticed. For the woman was concerned only with the face of the man, and the thing she was trying to read there. As he came up he removed his cap and stood bareheaded before her. And he smiled down into her troubled, inquiring face out of a pair of grey eyes that never wavered for a moment.
“I guessed I’d best come right along down at once, mam,” he said in easy, pleasant tones. “We pulled in up the river last night And seeing things are kind of lonesome about here, and we’re a biggish outfit of strangers such as maybe you weren’t guessing to see about, I felt it might get you worried. Well, I just want to make it so you don’t feel that way. We’re a gold outfit figgering to prospect this river, and I’m running it. My name’s Bill Wilder. It won’t tell you a thing, I fancy. But I want to say right here that just so long as we’re around ther’s not a feller in my bunch that’s going to worry you or yours without getting a broken neck from me. That’s all I came along to pass you. You see, mam, it’s a queer country full of queer folk, and I sort of fancied making things easy for you.”
The woman in Hesther was deeply stirred. The man’s whole attitude was one of simple respect and kindliness. There was no mistaking it, and her favourable judgment of him was as instantaneous and headlong as had been her panic of the moment before. It was the voice, the clear smiling eyes of this whiteman stranger that claimed her ready confidence. For she was a woman whose simplicity of heart dictated at all times.
“Why, say, now, that’s real kind of you, sir,” she replied beaming with genuine relief. “It surely is a rough country for a lone woman with a bunch of God’s Blessings around her.” Then she moved back into the house with an air of removing the hurriedly set up defences of her home, and turned to Mary Justicia, while the other children gawked at the stranger. “You’ll set another platter, girl. I guess Mr. Wilder’ll take hash with us, if he ain’t scared to death eating with a bunch of kids with the manners of low-grade Injuns.” Then she smiled apologetically at the man with his powerful shoulders and great height. “You see, it’s wash-day with us, sir,” she went on, “an’ it ’ud take a wise feller to rec’nise our kitchen from a spring fog. But the ducks have been shot four days by the Kid, an’ I reckon they’ll eat as tender as Thanksgiving turkey. Will you step right in an’—welcome?”
The cordiality of the little woman’s invitation was irresistible. But Wilder shook his head in partial denial. Her reference to “the Kid” had changed his original intention of complete refusal.
“Mam,” he said, “ordinarily I’d be mighty glad to take that food with you all. But I guess I need to get back to camp in awhile. You see, we only pulled in last night at sundown, and ther’s a deal needs fixing when you’re runnin’ a bunch of tough-skinned gold men. But I’d be glad to step in and yarn some if wash-day permits.”
Wilder’s reputation amongst the men of his craft was that of scrupulous straight dealing and honesty for all he was an astute man of affairs in the business in which they trafficked. They knew him for a man who never needed to sign when his word was given. Beyond that they knew little of the real man. Amongst those whom he counted as friends there was an infinitely warmer side to the man. They saw the native simplicity and kindliness which he usually kept closely hidden under a harder surface. But, somehow, the real man was reserved for the eyes of such women as he encountered. His chivalry for the sex was innate. It was no make-believe veneer. To him it mattered nothing if a woman were plain or beautiful, old or young. Even her morals had no power to influence his attitude. A woman, with all her faults and virtues, was just the most sacred creature that walked the earth. Good, bad, or in a category between the two, she left the mundane gods of daily life nothing comparable in their claim upon him.
His feelings, however, reduced him to no extravagant display of sentiment towards women. On the contrary. He loved to regard them as creatures created for the beautifying of human life, companions on complete equality with man, except where the disability of sex was involved. It was in such circumstances he claimed man’s right to succour to the limit of his powers.
Something of all this had stirred him at the sight of the brown-eyed, work-worn woman with her “God’s Blessings,” as she called them, about her. But it had had nothing to do with the inspiration of his prompt visit to the homestead he had discovered ten miles up from the mouth of the Caribou River. He had contemplated this visit all the way down the long journey on the Hekor River. He had visualized the existence of some such home, and had determined to locate it. And the purpose had remained in his mind ever since that day, two summers ago, when the girl who was called “the Kid” had flung him her parting invitation. Even now, as he bulked so hugely in the one real chair the homestead afforded, and which was the rest place for Hesther when her many labours permitted, he saw again in fancy the girl’s frankly smiling blue eyes, full of delight and pride at the masterly fashion in which she had piloted the great outfit up the narrow channel of the Hekor rapids. Her pretty weather-tanned face had lived with him every day of his long sojourn in the desolate wastes farther north, and he had longed for the time when he could run her to earth in that home which she had told him lay ten miles from the mouth of the Caribou River.
At last it had come. And in how strange a fashion. It almost looked as though Fate had taken a hand in bringing about the thing he desired. It was not only his desire to look again upon the sun-browned face of the girl who had so surely leapt into his heart that had brought him to the Caribou River. It was the diagram map, so carefully drawn by the dead Marty Le Gros’ hand, which the terrified little Japanese woman had thrust upon him in the hope of saving her blinded husband.The great gold “strike” of the dead missionary was on the Caribou River, and he held the detailed key of it.
He was thinking of the Kid now as he listened to the ripple of talk which flowed so naturally from Hesther’s lips as she stood over the savoury stew on the cook-stove.
“It makes me want to laff,” she said, “you folks reckoning to try out the Caribou for gold. You’re jest like my Perse, only you don’t skid out the seat of your pants chasing the stuff. Say, that kid—he’s nigh thirteen years—has the gold bug dead right, an’ he reckons to locate it around this valley. I’d say you couldn’t beat it, only you’re reckoning that way, too. Gold? Gee! Gold on this mud an’ rock bottom? Why, you’ll need all the dynamite in the world to loosen up this territory, ’cept where it’s muskeg, an’ then you’ll need a mighty long life line to hit bottom.”
Bill nodded.
“Guess you folks should know the valley, mam,” he admitted, with a smile of amusement in his eyes.
Hesther turned about from her work.
“You aren’t thinking that?” she said quickly.
“No.”
“Ah, that’s a man all through. You reckon ther’s gold on Caribou, and you’ll chase it to a finish. Say, my Perse ’ud just love you to death for that.”
Wilder watched Mary Justicia moving silently around the room preparing the table.
“Where did—Perse—get his notion from, mam?” Wilder inquired disarmingly.
In a moment Hesther’s brown eyes became serious. There crept into them an abstracted far-off look. And in repose a curious sadness marked her expression.
“Why, the Kid’s father. The missionary, Marty Le Gros, who was murdered by the Euralians nigh eighteen years back.”
Wilder started. A flood of excitement hurled through his body. He almost sprang from the square, raw-hide seat of his chair. But he controlled himself with an effort and spoke with a calmness that betrayed nothing of his sudden emotion.
“You said Perse was only thirteen,” he argued.
“That’s so,” Hesther nodded, setting the tea-kettle to boil beside the stew. Then she turned about to the two children squatting on the doorstep. “That’s Perse,” she said, indicating the boy who was listening avidly to the talk. “He’s only heard of the yarn that the Kid’s pore father made a big ‘strike.’ I know he made it. Jim and me—Jim’s my dead husband who used to run the Fur Valley Store at Fort Cupar—handled the chunks of yellow stuff he showed us. They were wonderful. Oh, yes, he made a big ‘strike’—somewhere. But I don’t guess it was on Caribou. We were to have known. He was going to hand us the yarn. But he didn’t. You see, they got after him, an’ murdered him. So no one ever knew. You see Perse hasn’t a notion beyond Caribou. So he reckons if ther’s gold anywhere in creation it must be on Caribou.”
“He’s a wise kid.”
Hesther laughed.
“Because he thinks your way?”
“Sure. But say, mam, I guess you’re waiting to serve out that food and I’m holding things up.”
The woman shook her head.
“The Kid ain’t down from the corrals yet. We don’t eat till she comes.”
The man nodded and made no attempt to take his departure.
“I see,” he said reflectively. Then he laughed.
“Say, mam,” he went on with a gesture of deprecation, “you’ve got me guessing good. I’m just a gold man an’ not a highbrow logician or guesser of riddles. You’re here with your bunch of God’s Blessings, as you call these dandy kids of yours. You talk of corrals as if you were running a swell cattle ranch. You talk of the Kid’s father who was Marty Le Gros, a missionary, murdered by Euralians eighteen years ago. An’ you haven’t even spoke as if you had any sort of name yourself. Well, as I said I’m just a gold man chasing up a creek you don’t reckon to hold anything better than mud and rock, but I’m liable to be a neighbour of yours for something like a year at least. And if it isn’t putting you about I’d just love to sit and listen to anything you feel like handing out.”
It was the way it was said. It was so frankly ingenuous and inviting. Hesther looked into the stranger’s grey eyes, and no question remained in her mind. So she laughed in response and shook her greying head.
“Say, living on the edge of the Arctic has quite a way of cutting out the manners we’re brought up to,” she said at once. “I’m Mrs. McLeod, and my man, Jim, as I said, was factor at Fort Cupar. Well, he died.”
For one thoughtful moment she glanced into the stew pot. Then she dipped some steaming beans from a boiler and emptied them into the stew. After that she turned again to the waiting man in the chair.
“This is a reindeer farm. It’s a sort of crazy notion in a way, but it’s handed us a living ever since Marty Le Gros, who started it up, was murdered by the Euralian toughs. Will I hand you the story of that? Or maybe you’re heard it? Most folks in the North have.”
Wilder nodded.
“Don’t trouble to tell it, mam,” he said quickly. “It’s bad med’cine that I’ve heard all about. And it’s not likely to hand you comfort in the telling. So this was his farm?”
“Sure it was. He started it reckoning to build it up for his little baby, Felice, who we call the Kid, and the Indian man, Usak, who was his servant, ran it for him. Well, after he was done up and his place was burnt out, Usak came along from here and found his little kiddie flung into the bluff to die, or get eaten by wolves and things. Usak was nigh crazy. But he claimed the Kid and raised her on this farm, which he went on building for her. When the Kid was about twelve my man Jim took ill and died, and I came along right over from the store with my bits and my kiddies, and just live with ’em. It helped me and mine, and it helped the Kid and Usak some. And that’s all ther’ is to it. I’m sort of foster-mother to the Kid. And we all scratch a living out of Usak’s trading the trail-broke caribou with such Eskimo as the Euralians have left within reach.” She laughed, shortly and without mirth. “It’s nothing much to tell, sir, but there it is, and you’re welcome to know it.”
The woman’s brief outline contained the whole drama of the past eighteen years told without emphasis, almost as though it were a simple matter of everyday occurrence. Years ago it might have been different, but now—why, now only the present seriously concerned her, and that was the preparation of food and the execution of those many duties which were demanded by the young lives who looked to her mothering.
For some moments Wilder offered no comment. He was concerned, deeply concerned. This woman’s homely trust and courage affected him deeply. But more than all else was a superlative thankfulness that Providence, through George Raymes, had sent him on what had first looked to be a hopeless pursuit of something completely impossible of achievement. He remembered the Superintendent’s final summing up of the work set for him to accomplish.
“Does it get you?” he had asked, “there it is, a great gold discovery, somewhere up there on the Hekor, I suppose, and the mystery of this people filching our trade through a process of outrageous crime. Somewhere up there there’s a girl-child, white—she’d be about nineteen or twenty now—lost to the white world to which she belongs. But above all, from my point of view, there’s a problem. Who are these Euralians, and what becomes of the wealth of furs they steal?”
The whole of the work was well-nigh completed. He is had completely satisfied himself on the problem of the Euralians. He had recovered the plans of Marty Le Gros’ gold “strike” and it only remained for him to follow their directions to complete the re-discovery of the find itself. And now—now he had at length discovered the “girl-child, white,” who, to his mind was heir to the things her dead father had left behind.
Yes, the end of his task looked to be drawing near, but he could not resign himself to the fact. Somehow it seemed to him that he was only approaching the threshold. That the drama of the whole thing was still in being. That there were scenes yet to be depicted that would deeply involve him. There was the blind Japanese man and his panic-stricken woman. There was the terrible Usak whom he had yet to meet. Then there was The Kid.
The Kid. What was her real name? Felice. Yes. That was the name Mrs. McLeod had told him. Felice. It meant happiness. It was a good name. But the irony. Poor child. Raised by the terrible Usak. Fostered here on the barren lands of the North, without a hope beyond the hard living these poor folk were able to scrape with the crude, uncultured assistance of an Indian. The whole thing was appalling. He loved the Northland. But to be condemned to it without hope of better things left him wondering at the amazing courage which Felice and this gentle mother must possess.
In that one brief moment headlong determination came to his assistance. It was not for nothing that Providence had directed his steps into this crude, desolate valley. No. And his heart warmed, and emotions stirred under the gladness of his inspiration.
He eased himself in his chair and rose abruptly to his feet.
“Mam,” he said, thrusting out a hard brown hand towards Hesther, “I want to thank you—I—”
But the out-held hand dropped abruptly to his side, and he broke off in the midst of the thing he had to say. For Perse and Jane Constance had rolled themselves clear of the door-sill to admit their foster-sister. The Kid stood framed in the opening with the grey-noon daylight shining behind her. She was radiant in her mannish parka, and the buckskin trousers terminating in high moccasins reaching almost to her knees. Her eyes were alight and shining in their sunbrowned setting, and her fair hair had fallen from beneath her low-pressed cap. Health and beauty were in every contour of her vigorous young body, and in her smiling eyes as she gazed upon the plain, angular face of the man who had just risen from Hesther’s chair. But a curious shyness left her hesitating and something dismayed.
For one instant the girl’s eyes encountered the man’s. Then she swiftly glanced at the older woman by the stove. And Hesther jumped at the cue she felt to be hers.
“It’s Felice, who we all call the Kid,” she said for the man’s benefit. Then she turned to the girl. “This is Mr. Wilder, my dear—Mr. Bill Wilder.”
The girl’s shyness passed in a quick smile that was like a sudden burst of sunshine.
“I know, Mum, dear,” she cried. “I met him two summers ago on the river and passed him and his outfit up through the rapids at the mouth of the river.” Then she crossed over to the man whose eyes were smiling in perfect content. “You’ve found our little shanty,” she said holding out a soft brown hand, “and I’m glad. You’re real welcome.”
The frankness of her greeting was utterly without embarrassment, and Wilder took the outstretched hand in both of his and held it for a moment while he turned to the mother who was looking on in amazement.
“She saved me a two days’ portage, mam,” he said, in explanation. “And I guess she’s the brightest jewel of a waterman I’ve seen in years.”
“My!” Hesther’s exclamation was almost a gasp as she watched their hands fall apart. Then with the mildest shadow of reproach: “An’ you never told me, Kid, You never said a word.”