IXTHE DEVILIf, as said, the devil can quote Scripture for his own purposes, it does not follow that said purposes are always fulfilled.Molyneux had better have followed his intuition and "gone slowly." But if, in brains and capacity, he towered above the average of his remittance-fellows, the taint of his ancient blood yet showed in a pliability to suggestion, a childish eagerness to snatch unripe fruit. Whereas, by a quiet apology, he had long ago repaired his error in the Christmas games, he must now commit greater foolishness.Consciously and unconsciously, in varying degrees, Helen aided his blundering. She could not help looking her prettiest. But her delicacies of cream and rose, the tender mouth, the bosom heaving under its lace, did not require the accentuation of coquetry. It was the healthy coquetry of the young animal, to be sure, unconscious, as much as can be. She need not, however, have authorized his gallantries with laugh and smile—would not, had she realized his limitations, his confused morality, subordinance to passion, emotional irresponsibility.Afterwards she had but a confused notion how the thing came to pass. They laughed, chatted, jested, while the tenderness in his manner bordered more and more on the familiar. He had been telling her of the strange marriage custom of an Afghan tribe and had asked how she would like such a forceful wooing."I think," she answered, "that a strain of the primitive inheres in our most cultured women. I'm sure I could never love a man who was not my master."She spoke thoughtfully, considering the proposition in the abstract; but he, in his blind folly, interpreted concretely. In the sudden lighting of his face she read her mistake. But before she could put out a hand in protest, his arms were about her, his searching lips smothered her cry. She fought wildly, spent her strength in a desperate effort, then capitulated—lay, panting, while he fed on her face, neck, hair, her lips. And it was well she did. Prolonged resistance would only have provoked him to freer license. As it was, mistaking quiescence for acquiescence, he presently held her off that his hot eyes might share the spoil.She now fully realized her danger. His expression, the glassy look of his eyes filled her with repulsion, but she summoned to her aid all the craft that centuries of dire need have bred in her race. She smiled up in his face, rather a pallid smile, but sufficient for his fooling. A playful hand held him back from another kiss."You are very rough," she whispered."Consider the provocation," he answered, dodging the hand.She tried not to shrink. "You upset me," she murmured. "I am quite faint. Is there any water near by?"She had noticed a slough ahead. Driving into it, he bent over and wet her handkerchief."Now if I could only drink."He stepped ankle-deep into the water. "Out of my hands." But as he stooped, with concave palms, there came a rattle behind him.Uttering an oath, he sprang—too late. As he waded to dry land she swung the ponies in a wide circle and reined in about fifty yards away. While he looked sheepishly on, she wiped her face with the kerchief, rubbed and scrubbed till the skin shone red where his lips had touched, then tossed the kerchief towards him and drove on.A prey to remorse, shame, he stood gazing after. All said, a man's ideals are formed by the people about him. A virtuous woman, a leal friend, raise his standard for the race; and just then Molyneux would have given his life to place himself in the friendly relation that obtained between them a half-hour ago.But he could not. Nor could all of Helen's vigorous rubbing remove the memory of those shameful kisses. Her bitten lips were scarlet when, a quarter-hour later, she rattled up to Carter's shanty; her eyes were heavy with unshed tears.Now here was a first-class opportunity for him to play the fool. An untimely question, a little idiotic sympathy would have put him in a worse case with her than Molyneux. But though inwardly perturbed, shaking with anxiety, he kept a grip on himself."Such reckless driving!" he exclaimed, harking back to her own words on that first drive from Lone Tree. Then solemnly surveying Molyneux's hat, which was perched funnily on the seat beside her, he went on, "Looks like you've lost a passenger."His twinkle removed the tension. Looking down on the hat, she laughed; and if, a minute later, she cried, the tears that wet his shoulder were not cast against him."If you will return the ponies," she said, when her cry was out—she had already told him enough to explain the situation—"I'll stay here till you come back and then you may drive me home—if you will?""And I'll find him?" She laughed at his comical accent as he intended she should."About three miles back.""Any message?"She sensed the menace. "Oh no! If you quarrel, I'll never, never forgive you. Now, please!" She placed her hand on his arm."All right," he agreed, and, five minutes later drove off with the Devil pony in leash behind.From afar Molyneux saw him coming and braced for the encounter, but Carter had gotten himself well in hand. "Miss Morrill," he said, "is real sorry she couldn't hold the ponies. But, Lordy, man, you oughtn't to have gone picking flowers.""He's lying!" Molyneux thought, but followed the lead. "Yes, it was careless. But, you know, it is always the unexpected that happens.""You're dead right there."The significance caused Molyneux to redden; but he tried to carry it off easily. "And I'm much obliged to you, Mr. Carter. Can't I drive you home?"Turning from cinching his saddle, Carter regarded him steadily. "Obliged to you, sir. I'm a bit particular in my choice of company."The contempt stung Molyneux to retort: "You are plain-spoken, but I'm told the trait is common in Americans. Fortunately for us outsiders, your women are more complaisant."It only led him deeper. Giving a last vicious tug at the cinch, Carter vaulted into the saddle. "Yes," he shot back, as he arranged his bridle, "they make a mistake now and then, but it don't take 'em long to find it out." And he galloped away with easy honors.Reining in at his own door half an hour later, he regarded with astonishment a transformation which had occurred in his absence. Instead of the woman, beautiful in her angry tears, a demure girl came out to meet him. While he was gone she had bathed her red eyes, then, to relieve a headache, had let down her hair and braided it into a plait of solid gold. Thick as Carter's wrist, it hung so low that, obedient to his admiring suggestion, she easily knitted it about her waist."You look," he said, "more like school-girl than school-marm."With that simple coiffure displaying the girlish line of her head and neck, she might, indeed, have easily passed for eighteen. It accentuated a wee tip-tilt of her pretty nose, a leaning to theretrousséthat had been the greatest trial of her youth and still caused her occasional qualms. Could she have realized the piquancy it lent to features that, otherwise, had been too regular or have known the sensation it caused her companion as he looked down on it and her eyelashes fluttering up from eyes that were wide and grave with question.One glance reassured her. His unruffled calm, the ironic humor of his mouth, all expressed his mastership of the late situation. Satisfied, she mounted beside him when he had hitched the ponies and settled in against him with a sigh of relief. Not that she had so easily forgotten her late trouble. The injured droop of her mouth, the serious face moved him to vast sympathy and anger. He longed to smooth the knit brow with kisses, to take her in his arms and soothe her as a little child. For a second time that day her mouth stood in hazard, but, bracing himself against temptation, he tried to wean her from her brooding by ways that were safer if less sweet."Any one," he said, twinkling down upon her, "would think you'd lost your best friend—""Instead of my worst," she anticipated."Glad you put it that way." He nodded his satisfaction. "And since you do, why waste regrets? Jest wipe him clean off your books.""It is bitter to learn that you have been deceived," she answered. "More bitter to feel yourself misread. Most bitter"—her voice dropped to a whisper—"to learn it in such a shameful way."He did not say, "I warned you." Only his big brown hand closed on hers with a sympathetic squeeze that almost expelled the pain in her heart. She did not withdraw it; rather she drew in closer, and thus, hand in hand, they rattled south over the vast green prairies which now were all shotten with the iridescence of myriad flowers. The trail wound through seas of daisies, bluebells, white tuft. Slender golden-rod trembled in the breeze; dandelions and tiger-lilies flaunted their golden beauty under turquoise skies. It was, indeed, difficult to remain sad with such company in such surroundings; for not content with mute sympathy, he strove to divert her thought by talk of the animals or plants which they saw or passed, astonished her with his wide knowledge of curious traits in their nature or history. So, gliding from subject to subject, he weaned her from her trouble, and so, by easy stages, came to speaking of himself, modestly introducing the subject with a letter.It was from the office of the traffic manager of the trunk line acknowledging a bid for tie and trestle contracts for the projected branch through Silver Creek. While Cummings, Hines, and their confrères were fulminating against the railroad pantheon, Carter had ridden over the spruce ranges of the Riding Mountains, had secured options on cutting permits from the provincial government, had driven down the old survey, and then submitted an estimate which caused the construction department of the railway to gasp its astonishment.The chief engineer even carried the estimate to the traffic manager. "Ties and timbers, this fellow Carter comes within a few thousand feet of old Sawyer's estimate," he said. "Moreover, he is ready to deliver the goods. Gives references to the Bank of America, which is to finance his enterprise. Who is he?"One would hardly expect the traffic manager to have remembered, but he had; and thus it came about that the postscript of the letter was in his own big sprawl. He regretted the fact that construction had been put off for another year, "but," he added, "I have placed your bid on my own files and shall see that it receives the earliest consideration when we are ready for construction."Helen exclaimed her satisfaction. "I'm so glad. I never knew that—you could do this kind of work. Why didn't you tell me? I'm so interested. Will it be a large contract?"Her eyes testified to her words, and as, obedient to her wish, he ran on giving details, they grew larger and more luminous. A touch of awe dwelt in their hazel depths. Feeling always the attraction of his fine physique, respecting his strength of will, clean character, he now commanded her admiration on another score. Was he not proving himself "fit" in the iron struggle of an economic age? And she, delicate bloom, crowning bud of the tree of evolution, being yet subject to the law that, of old, governed the cave maiden in her choice of a mate, felt the full force of this last expression of his power.As never before, she responded to his thought and feeling. When, after a sudden lurch, he left his supporting arm on the rail across her waist, she did not draw away; nay, she yielded to a luxurious sense of protection and power, leaning in against his shoulder. That day all things had conspired in his favor—even her pique at Molyneux—and now the rapid movement, caressing sweep of the wind, riot of color and sunlight, all helped to influence her judgment in a situation that was rapidly approaching.It lay, the situation, in a deep pool, ten feet below the bank of Silver Creek. As before noted, Death and the Devil, those lively ponies, were, as Carter put it, "worth watching" any and all the time on the dead level, and the fact that he held a loose line on them running down trail into the valley proved how very, very far he had departed from his usual imperturbable mood. Small wonder, for the hazel glances he had sustained this last hour would have upset the coolest head. But if his condition was perfectly natural, so also was the innate deviltry that caused the ponies to bolt the trail and plunge over the aforesaid bank.Helen could never tell just how it happened. After two seconds' furious bumping, she felt herself lifted bodily. Followed a crash as they fell. That was the impact of the buggy wheel with Carter's head. The arms loosened as she took the icy plunge, then came a half-minute's suffocating struggle while the current was carrying her out to the shallows. Wet, draggled, she stumbled shoreward; then, as the water cleared out of her eyes, she turned and plunged wildly back. Face downward, Carter was floating over a two-foot shallow and another second would have carried him into a longer and deeper pool.As for him, returning consciousness brought him sensations of something soft under his splitting head—that was Helen's bosom; of arms about his neck; lips that wildly kissed his and which opened with a glad cry when he moved."Oh, I thought you were dead!"For one blissful moment she allowed him to gaze in at the clear windows of her soul; then remembering the unusual but effective restorative she had used in the case, she flamed out in sudden colors, the banners of discovered love. Never was maid in such a predicament! Was it fair to expect that she would let fall a head that had been damaged in her cause? She could only wait until, having fed his eyes full on her sweet distress, he reached up and pulled her blushing face down upon his own. The sun, the wind, the rippling water alone witnessed her surrender. After a while a grizzled badger peered at them from his hole, pronounced them harmless, and so came forth upon his errands. A colony of gophers laid aside serious business to note, heads askew, loves that differed so little from their own. A robin cried shame upon them from a willow near by. But they were not ashamed. An hour slid by without either thinking of such sub-lunary matters as damaged heads or wet clothing; at the end of which Death and the Devil, having accomplished the complete destruction of the buck-board, came back to look for their master—probably associating him with the evening feed of oats—and fell to cropping the grass along the creek.Then she spoke, softly, blushing again. "You must think me shameless, but—I did—I really thought you were dead.""Ain't you glad I'm not?" She never noticed the "ain't," this young lady who had originally sized him as an underbred person.She did not answer, but he mightily appreciated the sudden tightening of her arms. "But what must you think of me?"He told all—of his resolution the moment he saw her on the Lone Tree platform; of his hope, fears, dark despair, the hell he had suffered on Molyneux's account. A soft hand cut short this last revelation, and immediately they fell again into one of love's deep silences, an eloquent pause that endured until the westering sun threw long shadows across the creek. Then, rising, he caught the ponies and arranged saddles with blankets and straps from the broken harness, while she looked on with soft attention.Mounted, they paused and looked back at the stream, ruby red under the dying sun, the clay bank, the bordering willows, then they kissed each other soberly and rode on. Dusk was blanketing the prairies when they drew up at Flynn's cabin, yet it was not too dark for Mrs. Flynn's sharp eyes to pick their secret."It's the new school-ma'am ye'll need to be looking for," she told Flynn. "Why? Man, didn't ye see him look at her, an' her that lovely red, her eyes pretty as a mother deer's, an' her voice soft an' cooing as a dove's. Flynn, Flynn! ye've forgotten your own courting."One fine morning, two months later, Molyneux's drivers spun out of his stable enclosure and rattled south at a pace that did not keep up with their driver's impatience.These two months had certainly been the unhappiest of his life. A man's opinions, philosophy, must, if they have vitality at all, be formed upon the actions of those about him, upon the phenomena which life presents to his reason. This, however, does not altogether annul the force of those ideals of conduct for himself and others which were learned at his mother's knee. Always they persist. Granted that loose life may smother the plant so that it produces neither fruit nor leafage, yet the germ is there—the assurety that beyond the rotten pale of fast society lies a fair land where purity, chastity, goodness, the virtues one firmly incarnates in the person of mother, sister, or girl friend, do grow and flourish. Under the foulness of the most determined roué lies the ineradicable belief that had Lot sought righteousness among the women of Sodom that wicked city had never been destroyed. One clean, wholesome girl will shake a man's faith in baseness, torture him with a vivid sense of his own backslidings, and now that passion's scales were fallen from his eyes, Molyneux appreciated at their full worth the naïve mixture of innocence and womanly wisdom, the health, strength, and wholesomeness of character that set Helen apart from his light acquaintance."Fool! fool!" he had told himself again and again. "She is worthy of a king—if one could be found worthy of her. And you had a fair chance! Oh, you fool!"Nor had he failed to write her a letter of apology. He had done that in the first agonies of repentance, six weeks ago, and, receiving no answer, had taken the ensuing weeks to screw his courage to the point of asking pardon in person. But now that it was there he was possessed of a wild exhilaration that took no thought of refusal. She could hardly fail to pardon a suppliant for crimes that were instigated by her own beauty, and one so becomingly repentant! Full of the consciousness of his own virtuous intention, it was quite easy for him to credit Helen with the magnanimity that would be its reciprocal feeling; and this once established, himself pardoned in thought, he passed to day-dreams. Her smile, the sweet tilt of her pretty nose, her glory of golden hair, her every physical and mental charm, passed in mental review, beguiling the tedium of the trail till the school-house thrust up over the horizon.Then his mood changed. Its squat, obtrusive materiality thrust into his consciousness, shattering the filmy substance of his dreams, and as he noticed the closed windows, shut door, doubt replaced elation, depression, the black antithesis of his late mood, settled down upon him.As he sat staring a voice hailed him. "Been riding ahint of you this half-hour, but you never looked back. Fine haying weather, ain't it?"Startled, Molyneux turned to find Jed Hines surveying him with an irritating smile. His expression plainly revealed that not only did he know Molyneux's errand, but that he was viewing it under the light of humorous secret knowledge. Restraining an impulse to remodel the expression, he said, nonchalantly as he could: "What is the matter here? School closed?"Hines nodded. He had all the Canadian's traditional hate of the remittance-man; Molyneux, in especial, he detested, because, perhaps by his superior shrewdness, he gave less cause for contempt than the race in general. That he had paused to speak was proof sufficient that he had unpleasant news. He would, however, take his own time in delivering it—prolong the torture to the limit."Midsummer holidays," he laconically answered.Molyneux ignored his curtness. "Miss Morrill at Glaves's place, do you know?"Jed's grin widened. "You hain't heard, then?""Heard what?"Jed gazed off and away over the prairies. "No, you won't find her at Glaves's."How Molyneux longed to spoil the grin. But a deadly anxiety constrained him. "Where is she, then?""Nowheres around here.""Do you know?""You bet!" The grin gave place to malignant satisfaction. "Yes, I know—that is, I kin guess, though I wouldn't if I thought it would do you any good. As it won't—Let me see—she was married a week ago by the Roman priest. Jedging by averages, I reckon as you orter find her in Carter's arms."If he had expected his news to produce a disagreeable impression he was not disappointed, for its visible manifestation landed full in his face, and he dropped flat on his shoulders. Not lacking a certain wolf courage, primitive ferocity of the cornered rat, he sprang up, lunged at Molyneux, and went down a second time. Then he stayed, watching until the other had jumped into his buggy and driven away."I never saw the devil!" he muttered, shaking his fist, "but your face, jes' then, came mighty near the preacher's description."XFRICTIONOnce upon a time a man wrote a book that proved how easily a cultured Eastern girl might fall in love with and marry a Western cow-boy. It was a beautiful story, about people who were beautiful or picturesque according as they were good or bad, but it ended just where, in real life, stories begin. After the manner of fairy tales, the author assured us that the girl and the cow-boy lived happily ever after. Now I wonder if they did?A year later a big bull-fly thudded at the screen door of Carter's cabin in vain efforts to enter and take toll of Helen's white flesh. By the gentlemen who ordain the calendar, a year is given as a space of time between points that are fixed, immutable as the stars. Sensible folk know better. Years vary—are long or short according to the number, breadth, and depth of the experiences their space covers. This year had marked Helen. She was fuller lipped, rounder, enveloped by the sensuous softness of young wifehood. Sitting at table with her white blouse tucked in at the neck for coolness, she had never looked prettier. But granting these attributes of her changed condition, a keen observer would have missed that gentle brooding, ripe fruit of content which exhales from the perfectly mated woman. As, time and again, her glance touched Carter, sitting opposite, she would sigh, ever so gently, yet sigh; the direction of her glance told also that her discontent was associated in some way with his shirt-sleeves, rolled to the elbow, and his original methods in the use of his knife and fork. Grasping these implements within an inch of their points, he certainly secured a mighty leverage, yet undoubtedly lost in grace what he secured in power, besides pre-empting more elbow-room than could be accorded to one person at a dinner-party."Tut! tut!" she observed, timidly, after tentative observation."Oh, shore! There I go again!" His quick answer and the celerity with which his hands crawfished back to the handles told of many corrections; yet five minutes later they had stolen out once more to the old familiar grip.She sighed again. It was not that she had wished to hobble her frontiersman, to harness him to the conventions. Her feeling flowed from a larger source. Believing him big of brain and soul as of body, she would have had him perfect in small things as he was great in large, that her ideal should be so filled and rounded out as to leave no room for sighs. To this end she had, from the first, attempted small polishments, which he had received with whimsical good-humor that took no thought of how vital the matter was with her. Had he realized this he might have made a determined effort instead of a slack practice which flows from easy complaisance; but, not realizing it, he made no headway. In these last months she had gained insight into that philosophical axiom: It is easier to make over a dozen lovers than one husband. Unlike the girl in the aforesaid beautiful story, she had begun reconstruction at the wrong side of the knot.Not that this unwelcome truth would or could, of itself, have affected her love in quality or quantity. At times she agonized remorsefully over her tendency to criticism, tutoring herself to look only for the large things of character. Again, when, of nights, she would slip to his arms for a delightful hour before retiring, she would wonder at herself: every last vestige of discontent evaporated with her murmured sigh of perfect happiness. These were great moments for both. Lying so, she would look up in his bronzed face and listen while, in his big way, he talked and planned, unrolling the scroll of their future—listen patiently until he became too absorbed, when she would interrupt with some kittenish trick to draw him back into the delightful present. Pretty little tricks, loving little tricks, that one would never have dreamed lay hidden under the exterior of the staid young school-ma'am.But these, after all, were moods, and there had been other and real cause of discontent. First, the railway gods had again broken faith with the settlers; and every cent that Carter could raise or borrow had been required to meet rents on his timber concessions. Though not in actual want, they had had to trim expenses, reduce their living to the settler scale. Having all of a pretty woman's natural love of finery, Helen could see no way of restoring her depleted wardrobe. Moreover, there was the choring, washing, milking of cows, feeding of calves, inseparable from pioneer settler life—a burden that was not a whit the less toilsome because self-assumed.Carter would have spared her all that—was, indeed, angry when, coming in late one night, he caught her toiling at the milking. "I didn't know it was so hard," she pleaded, holding up her swollen wrists. "But I couldn't bear to see you come in, tired, at dark, then go on with the chores while I sat in the house."He had made her promise not to do it again. But she did, and his protests, vigorous at first, slackened, until, finally, the choring had come to be regarded as hers as a matter of course.Even the climate was against her, conspiring against her peace of body if not of mind. The previous winter had been the bitterest in a score of years, temperatures ranging from forty below zero, with a yard of snow on the level, fifty-foot drifts in the bluffs, and hundred-mile winds to drive cold and snow through the thickest of log walls. For days she had sat in her furs by the red-hot stove, while the blizzard roared about the cabin, walling it in fleecy snows—sat listening to the agonized shout of wind-blown trees, the squeal of poplar brake, the smash of rent branches, the thunderous storm voice that was spaced only by distant crashes as the lords of the forest went down to stiff ends. North, south, east, west had veered these terrible winds, freighting always their inexhaustible snows. The trails were blown from earth's face; solitary blotch, their cabin rose like a reef from an ocean of whiteness; and they, castaways, were practically divorced for days, and sometimes weeks, from all communication with their kind. Hardly less terrible had been the calms, the vast frozen silences as of interplanetary space that followed the blizzard, ruling the snowy steppes. They filled her with a terrifying sense of the illimitable, those silences, vivid as though she, a lonely soul, were travelling through vast voids of time and space. She shrank under them, afraid.Followed a mosquito year in a mosquito country. Fattened by the heavy snows, stagnant sloughs held water till late in the summer and so bred the pests by myriads of myriads. Of nights the tortured air whined of them. By day their cattle hung about the corrals, cropping the grass down to the dust, or if they did wander farther afield, came galloping madly back to the smudges. For two months any kind of travel had been impossible; clouds of the pests would settle on hands, face, neck quicker than one could wipe them off. Milking and choring had to be done under cover of a thick reek to an accompaniment of lashing tails, with frequent and irritating catastrophes in the way of overturned pails. The acrid odor of smoke clung to everything—hair, clothing, flesh; the cabin was little better than a smoke-house until the heat had mitigated the pests while adding its own discomforts.It was a dull life enough for men whose tasks were broken by periodical trips to market; it was martyrdom for housefast women. Always around the shanty mourned the eternal winds of the plains. Wind! Wind! Wind in varying quantity, from a breeze to a blizzard, but always wind. Its melancholy dirge left a haunting in the eyes of men. Its ceaseless moan prepared many a plainswoman for the madhouse.With bright hope at heart to gild the future, she might have endured both discomfort and drudgery, but the postponement of construction work on the branch line had killed immediate hope. With dismay she realized a certain coarsening of body and mind, a thickening of finger-joints, roughness of skin, an attenuation where milking had turned the plump flesh of her arms into gaunt muscle. And to her the thought of that far-off summer day recurred with increasing frequency—would this equilibration with environment end by leaving her peer to the scrawny, flat-chested women of the settlements? She who had excelled in the small arts—music, painting, modelling in wax and clay? Her past, in such seasons of depression, seemed now as that of some other girl—a girl who had worn pretty dresses and been admired and petted by father, brother, and friends. Of all her gifts, her voice, a sweet contralto, was only left her; and of late it had naturally attuned itself to her sadder moods. So she had felt her life shrink and grow narrow, until looking down the vista of frozen winters, baking summers, they seemed, those weary years, to draw to a dull, hard point, the wind-swept acre with its solitary grave. Conditions had certainly combined to produce in her a subconscious discontent that might develop into open revolt against her lot at the touch of obscure and apparently insignificant cause; they reinforced and made dangerous the irritation caused by his little gaucheries.As aforesaid, her dark moods alternated with spasms of remorse—fits of melting tenderness in which she condemned herself for her secret criticism of him. Peeping through their bedroom window only the preceding night, the moon had caught her bending over his sleep. The tender light absorbed his tan, softened the strong features without taking from their mobility; deeply shading the hollows, it gave his whole face an air of clear-cut refinement. Its wonderful alchemy foreshadowed the possibilities of this life, lying so quiescent beneath her eyes. For a long hour she held the vigil, while thought threw flitting shadows athwart her face; then, stooping, she softly kissed him under cover of her clouding hair.It was a momentous caress, registering as it did her acceptance of a lowered ideal, marking her realization of the friction which follows all marriages and is inevitable to such as hers. Yet it had not removed the cause; that remained. It is easier far to overlook a great sin than a daily gaucherie, to rise to vast calamity than to brook the petty irritations which mar and make life ugly. The cause remained, surely! To see her quiet and pensive at table this day, who would have dreamed that the morrow would see the thin edge of the wedge driven in between them?"There's to be a picnic in the grove by Flynn's lake to-morrow, Nell," he said, as he rose from dinner. "Let's take a day off?""All right!" she agreed; and the kiss with which she rewarded the prospect of even such a slight break in the dulness of life may easily be regarded as the first tap on the wedge.How quickly personality responds to atmosphere! When, next morning, Helen climbed into the buck-board beside Carter, she was frankly happy as a woman can be in the knowledge that she is looking fit for the occasion. Cool, clean, and fresh in a billowy white dress of her own laundering, excitement and Carter's admiring glances intensified her naturally delicate color. As they rattled over the yellow miles, doubt and misgiving vanished under the spell of present happiness. She returned him eyes that were lovingly shy as those of their honeymoon; was subdued, sedate, sober, or burst out in small trills of song as the mood seized her. Not until she was actually upon the picnic-ground did she realize the real nature of this, her first appearance at a public function since her marriage.A clear sky and a breeze that set yellow waves chasing one another over the far horizon had brought out the settlers in a fifty-mile circle—even the remittance-men, who had been wont to spell amusement in the red letters of the London alphabet, were there. Like most country picnics, it was pseudo-religious in character, with a humorous speech from the minister figuring as the greatest attraction. Amusements ran from baseball and children's games for youth to love-making in corners by shamefaced couples.Leaving Carter to put up his team, Helen carried their basket over to where a crowd of officious matrons were arranging tables under the trees, and so gained first knowledge of what was in store for her. The latest bride, she was the centre of attraction, target for glances. Approaching a group of loutish youths, she felt their stares, flushed under the smothered laugh which greeted her sudden change of direction. Girls were just as unmannerly. Ceasing their own rough flirtations, they gathered in giggling groups to observe and comment on one who had already achieved that which they contemplated.Nor was she more comfortable among the matrons. While she was teaching school, the halo of education had set her apart and above them, but now they wished her to understand that her marriage had brought her down to their level. They plied her with coarse congratulations, embarrassed her with jokes and prophecies that were broader than suggestive. Time and again she looked, for rescue, at Carter, but he was talking railroad politics in an interested group, did not join her till lunch was served, and afterwards was hauled away to play in a baseball game—married menversussingle.So she had but a small respite. With his departure the women renewed their onslaughts, as though determined to beat down her personal reserve and reave her nature of its inmost secrets. No subject was too sacred for their joking—herself, her husband, the intimacies of their lives. There was no satiating their burning curiosity; her timid cheeks, monosyllabic answers, served only to whet their sharp tongues. Shocked, weary, cheeks burning with shame, she sat on, not daring to go in search of Carter and so brave again the fire of eyes, until, midway of the afternoon, she looked up to see Molyneux and Mrs. Leslie approaching.It was the crowning of her humiliation. With the exception of a duty-call on her return to Silver Creek, and which she had not returned, it was the first time that Helen had seen Mrs. Leslie for more than a year. "As you think best," Carter had said, when she had debated the advisability of renewing the friendship. "You wouldn't care to meet Molyneux again, would you? He's sure to be there." And, departing from his usual sane judgment, he made no further explanations, said nothing of his drive in the dusk with the love-sick woman, knowledge of which would surely have killed Helen's friendly feeling. Lacking that knowledge, she had pined for the one woman who could give her the social and intellectual companionship her nature craved, pined with an intensity of feeling that was only equalled by her present desire to avoid a meeting.If they wouldonlypass without seeing her, she prayed, bowing her head in shame. But Mrs. Leslie had been watching from afar. "Poor little thing!" she had exclaimed to Molyneux. "Alone among those harpies! Come, let's rescue her!" And whatever her motive, the kiss she bestowed on the blushing girl was warm and natural. "Why, Helen," she said, "whatever are you doing here? Come along with us.""We are going to organize a race for three-year-old tots, Mrs. Carter," Molyneux explained. "We really need your assistance."His deferential air as he stood bareheaded before her, the languid correctness of his manner, even the aristocratic English drawl, pierced that atmosphere of vulgarity like a breath of clean air. The easy insolence with which he ignored the settler women was as balm to her wounded pride. She recovered her poise; her drooping personality revived."I should like to—very much," she answered, adding, a little timidly, "But I was waiting for my husband.""Dutiful child," Mrs. Leslie laughed. "Well, he is so busy running up the batting average for the Benedicts that he has forgotten you. Come along!""We might go round—" Helen began, tentatively,She would have finished "his way," but, glancing over at the game, she saw that in his interest he really had forgotten her. "Very well!" she substituted; and, rising, she strolled off between the two, passing within a few yards of Carter. Busy with his game, he did not see her, nor would have known what company she was keeping but for Shinn, a near neighbor of Jed Hines and fellow of his kidney."Your wife," he remarked, "seems to be enjy-ing herself." His sneer caused a titter among both players and spectators, but before it subsided Carter came quickly back. Throwing a careless glance after Helen, "That's more'n I can say for yourn."The titter swelled to a roar that caused Helen to look back. Mrs. Shinn, poor drudge, had not strayed twenty feet from her cook-stove in as many squalid years, as every one knew well. Grinning evilly, Shinn subsided, while, after carelessly waving his hand at Helen, Carter returned to his batting. If he disapproved of her escort, not a lift of a line betrayed the fact to curious eyes—not even when he drove around and found her still with Molyneux and Mrs. Leslie.They were both silent on the homeward drive. In Helen's mind Carter was associated with the coarse and sickening humiliations of the day. As never before, she felt the enormous suction from below; she battled against the feeling with the desperation of the swimmer who feels the whirlpool clutching at his heels.Her mood was defiant, and if, just then, he had taken her to task for her truancy, she would have flamed up in open revolt. But he did not."You are tired," he said, very gently, when the ponies had run them far out from the press of teams and rigs. She appreciated that; yet when he slipped an arm about her waist she moved restlessly within its circle.The wedge was well entered.XITHE FROSTOne noon, a week after the picnic, Carter stood and looked out over his hundred-acre field of wheat from his doorway. A golden carpet, sprigged with the dark green of willow bluffs, it ran back into a black, environing circle of distant woodland. As a vagrant zephyr touched it into life, Helen remarked, looking over his shoulder:"The serrated ears in restless movement give it the exact appearance of woven gold. Isn't it beautiful!"The dramatist loves to make great events follow in rapid sequence. It is the need of his art. But in life the tragic mixes with the commonplace. Even Lady Macbeth must have, on occasion, joked or talked scandal with her handmaidens. And as these two looked out over the wheat, there was naught to indicate the shadow which lay between them."Finest stand I ever saw," Carter answered. "Five-foot straw, well headed, plump in the grain; ought to grade Number One Extra Hard. We'll make on that wheat, little girl.""Do you really think so?"He turned quickly."Those women at the picnic—-" She explained her dubious tone. "They said you were foolish to put in so much wheat. 'What kind of a darn fool is your husband, anyway?' that Mrs. MacCloud asked me. 'He kain't never draw all that wheat to Lone Tree. Take him a month to make two trips. 'Tain't no use to raise grain without a railroad. We folks hain't put in more'n enough for bread an' seed.'"He laughed, as much at her clever mimicry as at Mrs. MacCloud's frankness. "If they had put in more I wouldn't have sown any. Could have bought it cheaper from them. But as they didn't— Do you know that every man in this settlement makes at least one trip a month to Lone Tree during the winter? Well, they do, and they'll be glad to make expenses freighting in my wheat. With grain at seventy a bushel, a load will bring thirty dollars at the cars, and I can hire all the teams I want at three a trip.""Why"—his foresight caused her a little gasp—"how clever! I should never have thought of that."His eyes twinkled his appreciation of her wifely admiration, and, taking her chin between his hands, he looked down into her eyes. "What's more, when that wheat money comes in, you an' me 'll jest run down to Winnipeg an' turn loose on the dry-goods stores."It was the first hint of his knowledge of the turning, dyeing, the shifts she had made with her wardrobe, and he made a winning. The knowledge that he had seen and understood caused the wedge to tremble and almost fall out."Can we—afford it?" she asked, willing now to go without a thing."Don't have to afford necessities. Breaks me up to see you going shy of things."For the last three days he had bestowed the parting kiss. This morning he received it—a warm one at that—and as he strode off stableward, her burst of singing echoed his cheerful whistle. She was quite happy the next few days planning for their descent on the shops. She sang at her work—warbling that was natural as that of the little bird which prinks and plumes for its mate in the morning sunlight. Reflecting her happy mood, Carter was humorously cheerful—so pleased and satisfied that she stared when, one evening, he came in, gloomy and depressed.His black mood had come out of the east with a moaning wind that now herded leaden clouds over dun prairies. For one day rain pelted down, then, veering north, the bitter wind blew hard for a second day. That evening it died, and a pale sun swung down a cloudless sky to a colorless horizon. Under its cold light the wheat stood erect, motionless, devoid of its usual sighing life. A hush, portentous of change, brooded over all.From their doorway Helen heard Hines, three miles away, rating his dog. "Hain't no more gumption than an Englishman, durn you! Sick 'em, now!" followed the maligned animal's bark and the thunder of scurrying hoofs."How clear and calm it is!" she commented, as Carter came up from the stables.He glanced at the thermometer beside the door. "Too clear. I'm afraid it is all off with the wheat.""Why? What do you mean?"He turned from her astonished eyes. "Frost.""Frost? You are surely mistaken? See how sunny it is!"Shaking his head, he laid a forefinger on the thermometer. "Six o'clock, and the silver is down to thirty-five."At dusk it had lowered another degree, and throughout the northland a hundred thousand farmers were watching, with Carter, its slow recession. On the fertile wheat plains of southern Manitoba, through the vast gloom of the Dakotas, to the uttermost limits of Minnesota, the mercury focussed the interest of half a million trembling souls whose fire-fly lanterns dusted the continental gloom. Prayers, women's tears, men's agonized curses marked its decline, that, like an etching tool, graved deep lines on haggard faces in Chicago, Liverpool, and London far away.At thirty-two Carter lit the smudges of wet straw, and simultaneously the vast spread of night flamed out in smoke and fire. "I don't go much on it," he told Helen. "But some believe in it, and I ain't agoing to miss a chance."He was right. Pale thief, the frost stole in under the reek and breathed his cold breath on the wheat. Holding his instrument, at ten o'clock, in the thickest smoke, Carter saw that it registered twenty-seven. Five degrees of frost and the cold of dawn still to come! Raising the glass, he dashed it to pieces at his feet.It was done. Reverberating through the land, the smash of his glass typified the shattering of innumerable fortunes, the crash of business houses. The pistol-shot that wound up the affairs of some desperate gambler was but one echo. Surging wildly, the calamity would affect far more than the growers of wheat. Iron-workers, miners, operatives in a hundred branches of industry would shiver under the cold breath of the frost. For now the farmer would buy less cotton, the operative pay more for his flour, the miner earn a scantier wage.True, the balance swings ever even. This year ryots of India, Argentine peons, Egyptian fellaheen would reap where they had not sown, gather where they had not strawed. Another year a Russian blight, Nile drouth, hot wind of Argentine would swing prices in favor of the northland. But in this was small comfort for the stricken people."All gone!" Carter exclaimed at midnight. "The feathers are frozen offen them bonnets."Helen sensed the bitterness under his lightness. "Never mind, dear," she comforted. "I really don't care. You did your best."He had done his best! To a strong man the phrase stabs, signifying the victory of conditions. He winced, as from an offered blow. It was the last drop in his cup, the signal of his defeat. It marked the destruction of this his last plan for her. He had not, in the beginning, intended that she should ever set her hand to drudgery. His love was to come between her and all that was sordid, squalid. If the railroad contract had materialized, she should have had a little home in Winnipeg where she might enjoy the advantages of her early life. He had planned for a servant—two, if she could use them—and all that he asked in return was that she should bring beauty into his life, adorn his home, sweeten his days with the aroma of her delicate presence. In this small castle of Spain he had installed his beauty of the sweet mouth, golden hair, pretty profile; and now, out of his own disappointment, he read reproach in the hazel eyes that looked out from the ruins.Long after her sleep-breathing freighted the dusk of their bedroom, he lay gazing wide-eyed into the black future. A sudden light would have shown his eyes blank, expressionless, for his spirit was afar, questing for other material with which to rebuild his castle. In thought he was travelling Silver Creek, from its headwaters in the timber limits to its source where it flowed into the mighty Assiniboin. It was a small stream—too small to drive logs except for a month on the snow waters. But with a dam here—another there—a third on the flats—rough structures of logs with a stone and gravel filling, yet sufficient to conserve the falling waters! The drive could then be sent down from dam to dam! During the night he travelled every yard of the stream, placing his dams, and at dawn rose, content in his eyes.Slipping quietly from the house, he saddled the Devil and led him quietly by while Helen still slept, and an hour later rode up to Bender's cabin. The Cougar was also there, and from dubious head-waggings the two relapsed into thoughtful acquiescence as Carter unfolded his plans."She'll go down like an eel on ice!" Bender enthusiastically agreed. "All you want now is backing. Funny, ain't it, that nobody ever thought o' that before? Say"—he regarded Carter with open admiration—"you're particular hell when it comes to thinking. If I'd a headpiece like yourn—""You hain't," the Cougar coldly interrupted, "so don't waste no time telling us what you might ha' done. Get down to business. I know a man"—he thoughtfully surveyed Carter—"that financed half a dozen big lumbering contrac's on the Superior construction work. He'll sire anything that looks like ten per cent. an' this of yourn will sure turn fifty. Come inside an' I'll write you a letter."What of the Cougar's inexperience with the pen, the morning was well on when Carter rode back to his cabin. If Helen had looked closely she might have seen the new resolution that inhered in his smile, but she had been concerned with her own reflections. Somehow, things had not appeared this morning as they did last night. Crude daylight shows events, like tired faces, in all their haggardness, and their complexion was not improved by the steam from her wash-tub. Time and again she had paused to survey her hands, creased and wrinkled by cooking in hot water. Her bare arms recalled her first party-dress, and set her again in the sweet past. Beside it the present seemed infinitely hopeless, squalid, dreary. As she rubbed and scrubbed on her wash-board, life resolved itself into an endless procession of wash-days, and tears had mingled with the sweat that fell from her face to her bosom.Noting her red eyes, Carter was tempted to disclose his new hope, but remembered the failure of previous plans and refrained. As yet nothing was certain. He would not expose her to the risk of another disappointment. He rightly interpreted her sigh when he told her that he would have to go down to Winnipeg on business about the timber limits, and his heart smote him when, looking back, he saw her standing in the door. Dejection resided in the parting wave of her hand, utter hopelessness.That lonely figure in the log doorway stuck in his consciousness throughout his negotiations, causing him to hustle matters in a way that simply scandalized the Cougar's man, a banker of the old school. Yet his hurry served rather than hurt his cause. While the very novelty of it made him gasp, the banker was impressed. In private he informed his moneyed partners that such a chance and such a man rarely came together. "He's a hustler, and the profit is there," he said, in consultation. "A big profit. We can cut lumber ten per cent under the railroad price and yet clear twenty-five cents on the dollar."That settled it. Half a day later Carter was on his homeward way, bearing with him the power to draw on Winnipeg or Montreal for moneys necessary for supplies, men, and teams. Running home from Lone Tree, he whiled away the miles with thoughts of Helen's joy. He pictured her, radiant, flushed, listening to his news, and, quickening to the thought, he raced, full gallop, the last mile up to his door.His face burst into sunshine as, in response to his call, he heard her cross the floor. Then his smile died, and he stared at Mrs. Leslie. With the exception of an occasional glimpse as they met and passed on trail, it was the first he had seen of her since the soft summer evening when she laid illicit love at his feet. But no hint of that bitter memory inhered in her greeting."How are you, Mr. Carter?" she cried, in her old, gay way. "I think you are the meanest man in Silver Creek. Married a year, and neither you nor Helen have set foot in our house. You are a regular Blue beard. But you needn't think that you can hide from us forever. I just pocketed my pride, ignored your snub, and made my third call. Yes"—she emphatically nodded her pretty head—"thethird, sir. But I forgive you; come in and have some tea. Helen is down at the stables hunting eggs to beat up a cake."Covering his vexation with some light answer, he drove on to the stables, the life and light gone out of him, his face the heaviest that Helen had ever seen. "She called," she answered his abrupt question, "and I have to entertain her." Then, piqued by his coldness, she went on: "For matter of that, I do not see why you should try to cut me off from her companionship! She is the only woman I care for in the settlements!"If he had only told her! But causes light as the falling of a leaf are sufficient to deflect the entire current of a life, and it was perfectly natural that, in his bitter disappointment, he also should give way to a feeling of pique. The reason trembled to his lips, and there paused, stayed by the resentment in her eyes."As you see fit," he answered. "Now I have to drive over to see Bender, on business.""Won't you wait for some tea?""No. And don't wait supper. I may be late."Hurt, she watched him drive away; then, as he suddenly reined in, she dashed the tears from her eyes. "Here's a letter for you," he called. "Got it from the office as I came by."He nodded in answer to Mrs. Leslie's cheery wave as he rolled by the cabin. It was more than cold, yet, sitting chin on hands, that lady smiled cheerfully when Helen came up from the stable. "Don't apologize, my dear," she laughed. "Men aresuchfools. Always doing something to hurt their own happiness. Just banish that rueful expression and read your letter.""What's the matter?" The question was called forth by Helen's sudden cry of dismay. She glanced at the wedding-cards that Helen offered. "Hum! Old flame of yours, eh? These regrets will assail one."However, she knit her straight brows over the enclosure. In part, it ran: "We were so pleased to hear of your wonderful marriage from your auntie Crandall. It was just like you to announce the bare fact, but she told us all about it. A railroad king! Just fancy! He must be nice or our delicate Helen would never consent to bury herself in the wilderness. Do you know I have been justdyingto see him, and now I shall, for we are passing through your country on our way to the Orient. Which is your station?" Followed sixteen pages of questions, description of trousseau, and other feminine matters which Helen reserved for future consumption.Could she have laid tongue, just then, on Auntie Crandall, that lady had surely regretted her enlargements on Helen's modest statement of her husband's prospects. Lacking that easement of feeling, she cried. This visit capped her misery, brought the long record of misfortune, discomfort, disaster to a fitting climax."Poor child!" Mrs. Leslie patted her shoulder. "But why did you tell her such crammers? It was the good auntie?" She tilted her nose. "For the honor of the family, we lie, eh? Heaven help us! Your friend—what's her name?—Mrs. Ravell—she's rich, of course? Thought so—couldn't be otherwise—trust the malignant fates for that. Well—" She glanced meditatively about the cabin. Instead of lime-washing the logs, settler fashion, Helen had left them to darken with age, ornamenting them with a pair of magnificent moose horns and other woodland trophies. Tanned bear-skins covered a big lounge that ran across one end; buffalo robes and other skins took the place of mats on the floor. Mrs. Leslie nodded approval. "Not bad. Quite wild-westy, in fact. You will simply have to live up to it. You have given up your town-house for the present and are rusticating while your hubby directs some of his splendid schemes for the regeneration of this section—""Oh!" Helen burst in. "I couldn't say that. It would be—""Lying? Nonsense, child! Have you a town-house? No! Well, what are you kicking about?" Mrs. Leslie's descent to the vernacular was as forcible as confusing. Before Helen had time to differentiate between the status involved by "not having a town-house" and giving one up her temptress ran on. "That is it. You are rusticating. Now, I can lend you some of my things—glass, china, and so on. When do they arrive?" She consulted the letter. "Hooray! Your husband will be gone all next week, and they come—let me see: one, two, three—next Friday. Couldn't be better."Helen blushed under her meaning glance. "No, no! It would be wicked.""Why not?" Mrs. Leslie laughed merrily. "They just dropped in and there's no time to send for him. Quite simple.""Do you think I'm ashamed of him?" Helen asked, flushing.Mrs. Leslie trimmed her sails to the squall. "Certainly not. He's a dear. You know I always liked him. But—if your friends were to make a long stay it would be different. You couldn't hide his light under a bushel. But a two days' visit? What could they learn of him in that time? The real him? They would no more than gather his departures from the conventional. I wouldn't expose him to unfriendly criticism. Frankly, I wouldn't, dear, at the cost of a little fib!"The flush faded, yet Helen shook her head."As you will." Rising, the little cynic shrugged as she drew on her riding-gloves. "But at least take a day to think it over.""No!" Helen shook vigorous denial. "I shall tell him to-night."She was perfectly sincere in her intention, and if Carter had returned his usual good-natured self she would certainly have told him. But Mrs. Leslie's presence had angered him and destroyed his native judgment. He remembered that this was the outcome of Helen's invitation to Mrs. Leslie at the picnic, and his heart swelled at the thought that she should, of her own volition, go back to friends whom she knew that he despised. He felt the folly of his brooding, even applied strong language to himself for being many kinds of a fool. But his reasonable intention to open his budget of good news on his return was never carried out because of the coldness of her reception. Nervous from her own news, piqued by his curt leave-taking, she served his supper in silence or answered his few remarks in monosyllables. Nothing was said that night, and he retired without offering the usual kiss.There he offended greatly. Her woman's unreason would, for that, accept no excuse. So when, after working off his own mood next morning, he came in to breakfast, he found her still the same. Really offended, she served him, as at the previous meal, in silence, and as, afterwards, she went about her work, her lashes veiled her eyes, her lips pouting.It was their first real quarrel, and the very strangeness, novelty of her mood made it charming. But when, under urge of sudden tenderness, he tried to encircle her waist, she drew away, and, afflicted with a sense of injustice, he did not try again. There again he made a mistake. Justice has no concern with love. It is empirical, knows no law but its own. She wanted to be taken and kissed in spite of herself, as have all women on similar occasions, from the cave maidens down.It so happened that she was in the bedroom when he left the house, and she did not see that he had taken with him the bundle she had packed the preceding night. She still intended to mention the letter. Indeed, as she heard his step on the threshold, she thought, "He'll stop at the door for his clothes."But he did not; and hurrying out at the sound of scurrying hoofs, she was just in time to see him vanish behind a poplar bluff. She called, called, and called, then sat down and wept, the more miserable because of a secret, guilty feeling of relief.
IX
THE DEVIL
If, as said, the devil can quote Scripture for his own purposes, it does not follow that said purposes are always fulfilled.
Molyneux had better have followed his intuition and "gone slowly." But if, in brains and capacity, he towered above the average of his remittance-fellows, the taint of his ancient blood yet showed in a pliability to suggestion, a childish eagerness to snatch unripe fruit. Whereas, by a quiet apology, he had long ago repaired his error in the Christmas games, he must now commit greater foolishness.
Consciously and unconsciously, in varying degrees, Helen aided his blundering. She could not help looking her prettiest. But her delicacies of cream and rose, the tender mouth, the bosom heaving under its lace, did not require the accentuation of coquetry. It was the healthy coquetry of the young animal, to be sure, unconscious, as much as can be. She need not, however, have authorized his gallantries with laugh and smile—would not, had she realized his limitations, his confused morality, subordinance to passion, emotional irresponsibility.
Afterwards she had but a confused notion how the thing came to pass. They laughed, chatted, jested, while the tenderness in his manner bordered more and more on the familiar. He had been telling her of the strange marriage custom of an Afghan tribe and had asked how she would like such a forceful wooing.
"I think," she answered, "that a strain of the primitive inheres in our most cultured women. I'm sure I could never love a man who was not my master."
She spoke thoughtfully, considering the proposition in the abstract; but he, in his blind folly, interpreted concretely. In the sudden lighting of his face she read her mistake. But before she could put out a hand in protest, his arms were about her, his searching lips smothered her cry. She fought wildly, spent her strength in a desperate effort, then capitulated—lay, panting, while he fed on her face, neck, hair, her lips. And it was well she did. Prolonged resistance would only have provoked him to freer license. As it was, mistaking quiescence for acquiescence, he presently held her off that his hot eyes might share the spoil.
She now fully realized her danger. His expression, the glassy look of his eyes filled her with repulsion, but she summoned to her aid all the craft that centuries of dire need have bred in her race. She smiled up in his face, rather a pallid smile, but sufficient for his fooling. A playful hand held him back from another kiss.
"You are very rough," she whispered.
"Consider the provocation," he answered, dodging the hand.
She tried not to shrink. "You upset me," she murmured. "I am quite faint. Is there any water near by?"
She had noticed a slough ahead. Driving into it, he bent over and wet her handkerchief.
"Now if I could only drink."
He stepped ankle-deep into the water. "Out of my hands." But as he stooped, with concave palms, there came a rattle behind him.
Uttering an oath, he sprang—too late. As he waded to dry land she swung the ponies in a wide circle and reined in about fifty yards away. While he looked sheepishly on, she wiped her face with the kerchief, rubbed and scrubbed till the skin shone red where his lips had touched, then tossed the kerchief towards him and drove on.
A prey to remorse, shame, he stood gazing after. All said, a man's ideals are formed by the people about him. A virtuous woman, a leal friend, raise his standard for the race; and just then Molyneux would have given his life to place himself in the friendly relation that obtained between them a half-hour ago.
But he could not. Nor could all of Helen's vigorous rubbing remove the memory of those shameful kisses. Her bitten lips were scarlet when, a quarter-hour later, she rattled up to Carter's shanty; her eyes were heavy with unshed tears.
Now here was a first-class opportunity for him to play the fool. An untimely question, a little idiotic sympathy would have put him in a worse case with her than Molyneux. But though inwardly perturbed, shaking with anxiety, he kept a grip on himself.
"Such reckless driving!" he exclaimed, harking back to her own words on that first drive from Lone Tree. Then solemnly surveying Molyneux's hat, which was perched funnily on the seat beside her, he went on, "Looks like you've lost a passenger."
His twinkle removed the tension. Looking down on the hat, she laughed; and if, a minute later, she cried, the tears that wet his shoulder were not cast against him.
"If you will return the ponies," she said, when her cry was out—she had already told him enough to explain the situation—"I'll stay here till you come back and then you may drive me home—if you will?"
"And I'll find him?" She laughed at his comical accent as he intended she should.
"About three miles back."
"Any message?"
She sensed the menace. "Oh no! If you quarrel, I'll never, never forgive you. Now, please!" She placed her hand on his arm.
"All right," he agreed, and, five minutes later drove off with the Devil pony in leash behind.
From afar Molyneux saw him coming and braced for the encounter, but Carter had gotten himself well in hand. "Miss Morrill," he said, "is real sorry she couldn't hold the ponies. But, Lordy, man, you oughtn't to have gone picking flowers."
"He's lying!" Molyneux thought, but followed the lead. "Yes, it was careless. But, you know, it is always the unexpected that happens."
"You're dead right there."
The significance caused Molyneux to redden; but he tried to carry it off easily. "And I'm much obliged to you, Mr. Carter. Can't I drive you home?"
Turning from cinching his saddle, Carter regarded him steadily. "Obliged to you, sir. I'm a bit particular in my choice of company."
The contempt stung Molyneux to retort: "You are plain-spoken, but I'm told the trait is common in Americans. Fortunately for us outsiders, your women are more complaisant."
It only led him deeper. Giving a last vicious tug at the cinch, Carter vaulted into the saddle. "Yes," he shot back, as he arranged his bridle, "they make a mistake now and then, but it don't take 'em long to find it out." And he galloped away with easy honors.
Reining in at his own door half an hour later, he regarded with astonishment a transformation which had occurred in his absence. Instead of the woman, beautiful in her angry tears, a demure girl came out to meet him. While he was gone she had bathed her red eyes, then, to relieve a headache, had let down her hair and braided it into a plait of solid gold. Thick as Carter's wrist, it hung so low that, obedient to his admiring suggestion, she easily knitted it about her waist.
"You look," he said, "more like school-girl than school-marm."
With that simple coiffure displaying the girlish line of her head and neck, she might, indeed, have easily passed for eighteen. It accentuated a wee tip-tilt of her pretty nose, a leaning to theretrousséthat had been the greatest trial of her youth and still caused her occasional qualms. Could she have realized the piquancy it lent to features that, otherwise, had been too regular or have known the sensation it caused her companion as he looked down on it and her eyelashes fluttering up from eyes that were wide and grave with question.
One glance reassured her. His unruffled calm, the ironic humor of his mouth, all expressed his mastership of the late situation. Satisfied, she mounted beside him when he had hitched the ponies and settled in against him with a sigh of relief. Not that she had so easily forgotten her late trouble. The injured droop of her mouth, the serious face moved him to vast sympathy and anger. He longed to smooth the knit brow with kisses, to take her in his arms and soothe her as a little child. For a second time that day her mouth stood in hazard, but, bracing himself against temptation, he tried to wean her from her brooding by ways that were safer if less sweet.
"Any one," he said, twinkling down upon her, "would think you'd lost your best friend—"
"Instead of my worst," she anticipated.
"Glad you put it that way." He nodded his satisfaction. "And since you do, why waste regrets? Jest wipe him clean off your books."
"It is bitter to learn that you have been deceived," she answered. "More bitter to feel yourself misread. Most bitter"—her voice dropped to a whisper—"to learn it in such a shameful way."
He did not say, "I warned you." Only his big brown hand closed on hers with a sympathetic squeeze that almost expelled the pain in her heart. She did not withdraw it; rather she drew in closer, and thus, hand in hand, they rattled south over the vast green prairies which now were all shotten with the iridescence of myriad flowers. The trail wound through seas of daisies, bluebells, white tuft. Slender golden-rod trembled in the breeze; dandelions and tiger-lilies flaunted their golden beauty under turquoise skies. It was, indeed, difficult to remain sad with such company in such surroundings; for not content with mute sympathy, he strove to divert her thought by talk of the animals or plants which they saw or passed, astonished her with his wide knowledge of curious traits in their nature or history. So, gliding from subject to subject, he weaned her from her trouble, and so, by easy stages, came to speaking of himself, modestly introducing the subject with a letter.
It was from the office of the traffic manager of the trunk line acknowledging a bid for tie and trestle contracts for the projected branch through Silver Creek. While Cummings, Hines, and their confrères were fulminating against the railroad pantheon, Carter had ridden over the spruce ranges of the Riding Mountains, had secured options on cutting permits from the provincial government, had driven down the old survey, and then submitted an estimate which caused the construction department of the railway to gasp its astonishment.
The chief engineer even carried the estimate to the traffic manager. "Ties and timbers, this fellow Carter comes within a few thousand feet of old Sawyer's estimate," he said. "Moreover, he is ready to deliver the goods. Gives references to the Bank of America, which is to finance his enterprise. Who is he?"
One would hardly expect the traffic manager to have remembered, but he had; and thus it came about that the postscript of the letter was in his own big sprawl. He regretted the fact that construction had been put off for another year, "but," he added, "I have placed your bid on my own files and shall see that it receives the earliest consideration when we are ready for construction."
Helen exclaimed her satisfaction. "I'm so glad. I never knew that—you could do this kind of work. Why didn't you tell me? I'm so interested. Will it be a large contract?"
Her eyes testified to her words, and as, obedient to her wish, he ran on giving details, they grew larger and more luminous. A touch of awe dwelt in their hazel depths. Feeling always the attraction of his fine physique, respecting his strength of will, clean character, he now commanded her admiration on another score. Was he not proving himself "fit" in the iron struggle of an economic age? And she, delicate bloom, crowning bud of the tree of evolution, being yet subject to the law that, of old, governed the cave maiden in her choice of a mate, felt the full force of this last expression of his power.
As never before, she responded to his thought and feeling. When, after a sudden lurch, he left his supporting arm on the rail across her waist, she did not draw away; nay, she yielded to a luxurious sense of protection and power, leaning in against his shoulder. That day all things had conspired in his favor—even her pique at Molyneux—and now the rapid movement, caressing sweep of the wind, riot of color and sunlight, all helped to influence her judgment in a situation that was rapidly approaching.
It lay, the situation, in a deep pool, ten feet below the bank of Silver Creek. As before noted, Death and the Devil, those lively ponies, were, as Carter put it, "worth watching" any and all the time on the dead level, and the fact that he held a loose line on them running down trail into the valley proved how very, very far he had departed from his usual imperturbable mood. Small wonder, for the hazel glances he had sustained this last hour would have upset the coolest head. But if his condition was perfectly natural, so also was the innate deviltry that caused the ponies to bolt the trail and plunge over the aforesaid bank.
Helen could never tell just how it happened. After two seconds' furious bumping, she felt herself lifted bodily. Followed a crash as they fell. That was the impact of the buggy wheel with Carter's head. The arms loosened as she took the icy plunge, then came a half-minute's suffocating struggle while the current was carrying her out to the shallows. Wet, draggled, she stumbled shoreward; then, as the water cleared out of her eyes, she turned and plunged wildly back. Face downward, Carter was floating over a two-foot shallow and another second would have carried him into a longer and deeper pool.
As for him, returning consciousness brought him sensations of something soft under his splitting head—that was Helen's bosom; of arms about his neck; lips that wildly kissed his and which opened with a glad cry when he moved.
"Oh, I thought you were dead!"
For one blissful moment she allowed him to gaze in at the clear windows of her soul; then remembering the unusual but effective restorative she had used in the case, she flamed out in sudden colors, the banners of discovered love. Never was maid in such a predicament! Was it fair to expect that she would let fall a head that had been damaged in her cause? She could only wait until, having fed his eyes full on her sweet distress, he reached up and pulled her blushing face down upon his own. The sun, the wind, the rippling water alone witnessed her surrender. After a while a grizzled badger peered at them from his hole, pronounced them harmless, and so came forth upon his errands. A colony of gophers laid aside serious business to note, heads askew, loves that differed so little from their own. A robin cried shame upon them from a willow near by. But they were not ashamed. An hour slid by without either thinking of such sub-lunary matters as damaged heads or wet clothing; at the end of which Death and the Devil, having accomplished the complete destruction of the buck-board, came back to look for their master—probably associating him with the evening feed of oats—and fell to cropping the grass along the creek.
Then she spoke, softly, blushing again. "You must think me shameless, but—I did—I really thought you were dead."
"Ain't you glad I'm not?" She never noticed the "ain't," this young lady who had originally sized him as an underbred person.
She did not answer, but he mightily appreciated the sudden tightening of her arms. "But what must you think of me?"
He told all—of his resolution the moment he saw her on the Lone Tree platform; of his hope, fears, dark despair, the hell he had suffered on Molyneux's account. A soft hand cut short this last revelation, and immediately they fell again into one of love's deep silences, an eloquent pause that endured until the westering sun threw long shadows across the creek. Then, rising, he caught the ponies and arranged saddles with blankets and straps from the broken harness, while she looked on with soft attention.
Mounted, they paused and looked back at the stream, ruby red under the dying sun, the clay bank, the bordering willows, then they kissed each other soberly and rode on. Dusk was blanketing the prairies when they drew up at Flynn's cabin, yet it was not too dark for Mrs. Flynn's sharp eyes to pick their secret.
"It's the new school-ma'am ye'll need to be looking for," she told Flynn. "Why? Man, didn't ye see him look at her, an' her that lovely red, her eyes pretty as a mother deer's, an' her voice soft an' cooing as a dove's. Flynn, Flynn! ye've forgotten your own courting."
One fine morning, two months later, Molyneux's drivers spun out of his stable enclosure and rattled south at a pace that did not keep up with their driver's impatience.
These two months had certainly been the unhappiest of his life. A man's opinions, philosophy, must, if they have vitality at all, be formed upon the actions of those about him, upon the phenomena which life presents to his reason. This, however, does not altogether annul the force of those ideals of conduct for himself and others which were learned at his mother's knee. Always they persist. Granted that loose life may smother the plant so that it produces neither fruit nor leafage, yet the germ is there—the assurety that beyond the rotten pale of fast society lies a fair land where purity, chastity, goodness, the virtues one firmly incarnates in the person of mother, sister, or girl friend, do grow and flourish. Under the foulness of the most determined roué lies the ineradicable belief that had Lot sought righteousness among the women of Sodom that wicked city had never been destroyed. One clean, wholesome girl will shake a man's faith in baseness, torture him with a vivid sense of his own backslidings, and now that passion's scales were fallen from his eyes, Molyneux appreciated at their full worth the naïve mixture of innocence and womanly wisdom, the health, strength, and wholesomeness of character that set Helen apart from his light acquaintance.
"Fool! fool!" he had told himself again and again. "She is worthy of a king—if one could be found worthy of her. And you had a fair chance! Oh, you fool!"
Nor had he failed to write her a letter of apology. He had done that in the first agonies of repentance, six weeks ago, and, receiving no answer, had taken the ensuing weeks to screw his courage to the point of asking pardon in person. But now that it was there he was possessed of a wild exhilaration that took no thought of refusal. She could hardly fail to pardon a suppliant for crimes that were instigated by her own beauty, and one so becomingly repentant! Full of the consciousness of his own virtuous intention, it was quite easy for him to credit Helen with the magnanimity that would be its reciprocal feeling; and this once established, himself pardoned in thought, he passed to day-dreams. Her smile, the sweet tilt of her pretty nose, her glory of golden hair, her every physical and mental charm, passed in mental review, beguiling the tedium of the trail till the school-house thrust up over the horizon.
Then his mood changed. Its squat, obtrusive materiality thrust into his consciousness, shattering the filmy substance of his dreams, and as he noticed the closed windows, shut door, doubt replaced elation, depression, the black antithesis of his late mood, settled down upon him.
As he sat staring a voice hailed him. "Been riding ahint of you this half-hour, but you never looked back. Fine haying weather, ain't it?"
Startled, Molyneux turned to find Jed Hines surveying him with an irritating smile. His expression plainly revealed that not only did he know Molyneux's errand, but that he was viewing it under the light of humorous secret knowledge. Restraining an impulse to remodel the expression, he said, nonchalantly as he could: "What is the matter here? School closed?"
Hines nodded. He had all the Canadian's traditional hate of the remittance-man; Molyneux, in especial, he detested, because, perhaps by his superior shrewdness, he gave less cause for contempt than the race in general. That he had paused to speak was proof sufficient that he had unpleasant news. He would, however, take his own time in delivering it—prolong the torture to the limit.
"Midsummer holidays," he laconically answered.
Molyneux ignored his curtness. "Miss Morrill at Glaves's place, do you know?"
Jed's grin widened. "You hain't heard, then?"
"Heard what?"
Jed gazed off and away over the prairies. "No, you won't find her at Glaves's."
How Molyneux longed to spoil the grin. But a deadly anxiety constrained him. "Where is she, then?"
"Nowheres around here."
"Do you know?"
"You bet!" The grin gave place to malignant satisfaction. "Yes, I know—that is, I kin guess, though I wouldn't if I thought it would do you any good. As it won't—Let me see—she was married a week ago by the Roman priest. Jedging by averages, I reckon as you orter find her in Carter's arms."
If he had expected his news to produce a disagreeable impression he was not disappointed, for its visible manifestation landed full in his face, and he dropped flat on his shoulders. Not lacking a certain wolf courage, primitive ferocity of the cornered rat, he sprang up, lunged at Molyneux, and went down a second time. Then he stayed, watching until the other had jumped into his buggy and driven away.
"I never saw the devil!" he muttered, shaking his fist, "but your face, jes' then, came mighty near the preacher's description."
X
FRICTION
Once upon a time a man wrote a book that proved how easily a cultured Eastern girl might fall in love with and marry a Western cow-boy. It was a beautiful story, about people who were beautiful or picturesque according as they were good or bad, but it ended just where, in real life, stories begin. After the manner of fairy tales, the author assured us that the girl and the cow-boy lived happily ever after. Now I wonder if they did?
A year later a big bull-fly thudded at the screen door of Carter's cabin in vain efforts to enter and take toll of Helen's white flesh. By the gentlemen who ordain the calendar, a year is given as a space of time between points that are fixed, immutable as the stars. Sensible folk know better. Years vary—are long or short according to the number, breadth, and depth of the experiences their space covers. This year had marked Helen. She was fuller lipped, rounder, enveloped by the sensuous softness of young wifehood. Sitting at table with her white blouse tucked in at the neck for coolness, she had never looked prettier. But granting these attributes of her changed condition, a keen observer would have missed that gentle brooding, ripe fruit of content which exhales from the perfectly mated woman. As, time and again, her glance touched Carter, sitting opposite, she would sigh, ever so gently, yet sigh; the direction of her glance told also that her discontent was associated in some way with his shirt-sleeves, rolled to the elbow, and his original methods in the use of his knife and fork. Grasping these implements within an inch of their points, he certainly secured a mighty leverage, yet undoubtedly lost in grace what he secured in power, besides pre-empting more elbow-room than could be accorded to one person at a dinner-party.
"Tut! tut!" she observed, timidly, after tentative observation.
"Oh, shore! There I go again!" His quick answer and the celerity with which his hands crawfished back to the handles told of many corrections; yet five minutes later they had stolen out once more to the old familiar grip.
She sighed again. It was not that she had wished to hobble her frontiersman, to harness him to the conventions. Her feeling flowed from a larger source. Believing him big of brain and soul as of body, she would have had him perfect in small things as he was great in large, that her ideal should be so filled and rounded out as to leave no room for sighs. To this end she had, from the first, attempted small polishments, which he had received with whimsical good-humor that took no thought of how vital the matter was with her. Had he realized this he might have made a determined effort instead of a slack practice which flows from easy complaisance; but, not realizing it, he made no headway. In these last months she had gained insight into that philosophical axiom: It is easier to make over a dozen lovers than one husband. Unlike the girl in the aforesaid beautiful story, she had begun reconstruction at the wrong side of the knot.
Not that this unwelcome truth would or could, of itself, have affected her love in quality or quantity. At times she agonized remorsefully over her tendency to criticism, tutoring herself to look only for the large things of character. Again, when, of nights, she would slip to his arms for a delightful hour before retiring, she would wonder at herself: every last vestige of discontent evaporated with her murmured sigh of perfect happiness. These were great moments for both. Lying so, she would look up in his bronzed face and listen while, in his big way, he talked and planned, unrolling the scroll of their future—listen patiently until he became too absorbed, when she would interrupt with some kittenish trick to draw him back into the delightful present. Pretty little tricks, loving little tricks, that one would never have dreamed lay hidden under the exterior of the staid young school-ma'am.
But these, after all, were moods, and there had been other and real cause of discontent. First, the railway gods had again broken faith with the settlers; and every cent that Carter could raise or borrow had been required to meet rents on his timber concessions. Though not in actual want, they had had to trim expenses, reduce their living to the settler scale. Having all of a pretty woman's natural love of finery, Helen could see no way of restoring her depleted wardrobe. Moreover, there was the choring, washing, milking of cows, feeding of calves, inseparable from pioneer settler life—a burden that was not a whit the less toilsome because self-assumed.
Carter would have spared her all that—was, indeed, angry when, coming in late one night, he caught her toiling at the milking. "I didn't know it was so hard," she pleaded, holding up her swollen wrists. "But I couldn't bear to see you come in, tired, at dark, then go on with the chores while I sat in the house."
He had made her promise not to do it again. But she did, and his protests, vigorous at first, slackened, until, finally, the choring had come to be regarded as hers as a matter of course.
Even the climate was against her, conspiring against her peace of body if not of mind. The previous winter had been the bitterest in a score of years, temperatures ranging from forty below zero, with a yard of snow on the level, fifty-foot drifts in the bluffs, and hundred-mile winds to drive cold and snow through the thickest of log walls. For days she had sat in her furs by the red-hot stove, while the blizzard roared about the cabin, walling it in fleecy snows—sat listening to the agonized shout of wind-blown trees, the squeal of poplar brake, the smash of rent branches, the thunderous storm voice that was spaced only by distant crashes as the lords of the forest went down to stiff ends. North, south, east, west had veered these terrible winds, freighting always their inexhaustible snows. The trails were blown from earth's face; solitary blotch, their cabin rose like a reef from an ocean of whiteness; and they, castaways, were practically divorced for days, and sometimes weeks, from all communication with their kind. Hardly less terrible had been the calms, the vast frozen silences as of interplanetary space that followed the blizzard, ruling the snowy steppes. They filled her with a terrifying sense of the illimitable, those silences, vivid as though she, a lonely soul, were travelling through vast voids of time and space. She shrank under them, afraid.
Followed a mosquito year in a mosquito country. Fattened by the heavy snows, stagnant sloughs held water till late in the summer and so bred the pests by myriads of myriads. Of nights the tortured air whined of them. By day their cattle hung about the corrals, cropping the grass down to the dust, or if they did wander farther afield, came galloping madly back to the smudges. For two months any kind of travel had been impossible; clouds of the pests would settle on hands, face, neck quicker than one could wipe them off. Milking and choring had to be done under cover of a thick reek to an accompaniment of lashing tails, with frequent and irritating catastrophes in the way of overturned pails. The acrid odor of smoke clung to everything—hair, clothing, flesh; the cabin was little better than a smoke-house until the heat had mitigated the pests while adding its own discomforts.
It was a dull life enough for men whose tasks were broken by periodical trips to market; it was martyrdom for housefast women. Always around the shanty mourned the eternal winds of the plains. Wind! Wind! Wind in varying quantity, from a breeze to a blizzard, but always wind. Its melancholy dirge left a haunting in the eyes of men. Its ceaseless moan prepared many a plainswoman for the madhouse.
With bright hope at heart to gild the future, she might have endured both discomfort and drudgery, but the postponement of construction work on the branch line had killed immediate hope. With dismay she realized a certain coarsening of body and mind, a thickening of finger-joints, roughness of skin, an attenuation where milking had turned the plump flesh of her arms into gaunt muscle. And to her the thought of that far-off summer day recurred with increasing frequency—would this equilibration with environment end by leaving her peer to the scrawny, flat-chested women of the settlements? She who had excelled in the small arts—music, painting, modelling in wax and clay? Her past, in such seasons of depression, seemed now as that of some other girl—a girl who had worn pretty dresses and been admired and petted by father, brother, and friends. Of all her gifts, her voice, a sweet contralto, was only left her; and of late it had naturally attuned itself to her sadder moods. So she had felt her life shrink and grow narrow, until looking down the vista of frozen winters, baking summers, they seemed, those weary years, to draw to a dull, hard point, the wind-swept acre with its solitary grave. Conditions had certainly combined to produce in her a subconscious discontent that might develop into open revolt against her lot at the touch of obscure and apparently insignificant cause; they reinforced and made dangerous the irritation caused by his little gaucheries.
As aforesaid, her dark moods alternated with spasms of remorse—fits of melting tenderness in which she condemned herself for her secret criticism of him. Peeping through their bedroom window only the preceding night, the moon had caught her bending over his sleep. The tender light absorbed his tan, softened the strong features without taking from their mobility; deeply shading the hollows, it gave his whole face an air of clear-cut refinement. Its wonderful alchemy foreshadowed the possibilities of this life, lying so quiescent beneath her eyes. For a long hour she held the vigil, while thought threw flitting shadows athwart her face; then, stooping, she softly kissed him under cover of her clouding hair.
It was a momentous caress, registering as it did her acceptance of a lowered ideal, marking her realization of the friction which follows all marriages and is inevitable to such as hers. Yet it had not removed the cause; that remained. It is easier far to overlook a great sin than a daily gaucherie, to rise to vast calamity than to brook the petty irritations which mar and make life ugly. The cause remained, surely! To see her quiet and pensive at table this day, who would have dreamed that the morrow would see the thin edge of the wedge driven in between them?
"There's to be a picnic in the grove by Flynn's lake to-morrow, Nell," he said, as he rose from dinner. "Let's take a day off?"
"All right!" she agreed; and the kiss with which she rewarded the prospect of even such a slight break in the dulness of life may easily be regarded as the first tap on the wedge.
How quickly personality responds to atmosphere! When, next morning, Helen climbed into the buck-board beside Carter, she was frankly happy as a woman can be in the knowledge that she is looking fit for the occasion. Cool, clean, and fresh in a billowy white dress of her own laundering, excitement and Carter's admiring glances intensified her naturally delicate color. As they rattled over the yellow miles, doubt and misgiving vanished under the spell of present happiness. She returned him eyes that were lovingly shy as those of their honeymoon; was subdued, sedate, sober, or burst out in small trills of song as the mood seized her. Not until she was actually upon the picnic-ground did she realize the real nature of this, her first appearance at a public function since her marriage.
A clear sky and a breeze that set yellow waves chasing one another over the far horizon had brought out the settlers in a fifty-mile circle—even the remittance-men, who had been wont to spell amusement in the red letters of the London alphabet, were there. Like most country picnics, it was pseudo-religious in character, with a humorous speech from the minister figuring as the greatest attraction. Amusements ran from baseball and children's games for youth to love-making in corners by shamefaced couples.
Leaving Carter to put up his team, Helen carried their basket over to where a crowd of officious matrons were arranging tables under the trees, and so gained first knowledge of what was in store for her. The latest bride, she was the centre of attraction, target for glances. Approaching a group of loutish youths, she felt their stares, flushed under the smothered laugh which greeted her sudden change of direction. Girls were just as unmannerly. Ceasing their own rough flirtations, they gathered in giggling groups to observe and comment on one who had already achieved that which they contemplated.
Nor was she more comfortable among the matrons. While she was teaching school, the halo of education had set her apart and above them, but now they wished her to understand that her marriage had brought her down to their level. They plied her with coarse congratulations, embarrassed her with jokes and prophecies that were broader than suggestive. Time and again she looked, for rescue, at Carter, but he was talking railroad politics in an interested group, did not join her till lunch was served, and afterwards was hauled away to play in a baseball game—married menversussingle.
So she had but a small respite. With his departure the women renewed their onslaughts, as though determined to beat down her personal reserve and reave her nature of its inmost secrets. No subject was too sacred for their joking—herself, her husband, the intimacies of their lives. There was no satiating their burning curiosity; her timid cheeks, monosyllabic answers, served only to whet their sharp tongues. Shocked, weary, cheeks burning with shame, she sat on, not daring to go in search of Carter and so brave again the fire of eyes, until, midway of the afternoon, she looked up to see Molyneux and Mrs. Leslie approaching.
It was the crowning of her humiliation. With the exception of a duty-call on her return to Silver Creek, and which she had not returned, it was the first time that Helen had seen Mrs. Leslie for more than a year. "As you think best," Carter had said, when she had debated the advisability of renewing the friendship. "You wouldn't care to meet Molyneux again, would you? He's sure to be there." And, departing from his usual sane judgment, he made no further explanations, said nothing of his drive in the dusk with the love-sick woman, knowledge of which would surely have killed Helen's friendly feeling. Lacking that knowledge, she had pined for the one woman who could give her the social and intellectual companionship her nature craved, pined with an intensity of feeling that was only equalled by her present desire to avoid a meeting.
If they wouldonlypass without seeing her, she prayed, bowing her head in shame. But Mrs. Leslie had been watching from afar. "Poor little thing!" she had exclaimed to Molyneux. "Alone among those harpies! Come, let's rescue her!" And whatever her motive, the kiss she bestowed on the blushing girl was warm and natural. "Why, Helen," she said, "whatever are you doing here? Come along with us."
"We are going to organize a race for three-year-old tots, Mrs. Carter," Molyneux explained. "We really need your assistance."
His deferential air as he stood bareheaded before her, the languid correctness of his manner, even the aristocratic English drawl, pierced that atmosphere of vulgarity like a breath of clean air. The easy insolence with which he ignored the settler women was as balm to her wounded pride. She recovered her poise; her drooping personality revived.
"I should like to—very much," she answered, adding, a little timidly, "But I was waiting for my husband."
"Dutiful child," Mrs. Leslie laughed. "Well, he is so busy running up the batting average for the Benedicts that he has forgotten you. Come along!"
"We might go round—" Helen began, tentatively,
She would have finished "his way," but, glancing over at the game, she saw that in his interest he really had forgotten her. "Very well!" she substituted; and, rising, she strolled off between the two, passing within a few yards of Carter. Busy with his game, he did not see her, nor would have known what company she was keeping but for Shinn, a near neighbor of Jed Hines and fellow of his kidney.
"Your wife," he remarked, "seems to be enjy-ing herself." His sneer caused a titter among both players and spectators, but before it subsided Carter came quickly back. Throwing a careless glance after Helen, "That's more'n I can say for yourn."
The titter swelled to a roar that caused Helen to look back. Mrs. Shinn, poor drudge, had not strayed twenty feet from her cook-stove in as many squalid years, as every one knew well. Grinning evilly, Shinn subsided, while, after carelessly waving his hand at Helen, Carter returned to his batting. If he disapproved of her escort, not a lift of a line betrayed the fact to curious eyes—not even when he drove around and found her still with Molyneux and Mrs. Leslie.
They were both silent on the homeward drive. In Helen's mind Carter was associated with the coarse and sickening humiliations of the day. As never before, she felt the enormous suction from below; she battled against the feeling with the desperation of the swimmer who feels the whirlpool clutching at his heels.
Her mood was defiant, and if, just then, he had taken her to task for her truancy, she would have flamed up in open revolt. But he did not.
"You are tired," he said, very gently, when the ponies had run them far out from the press of teams and rigs. She appreciated that; yet when he slipped an arm about her waist she moved restlessly within its circle.
The wedge was well entered.
XI
THE FROST
One noon, a week after the picnic, Carter stood and looked out over his hundred-acre field of wheat from his doorway. A golden carpet, sprigged with the dark green of willow bluffs, it ran back into a black, environing circle of distant woodland. As a vagrant zephyr touched it into life, Helen remarked, looking over his shoulder:
"The serrated ears in restless movement give it the exact appearance of woven gold. Isn't it beautiful!"
The dramatist loves to make great events follow in rapid sequence. It is the need of his art. But in life the tragic mixes with the commonplace. Even Lady Macbeth must have, on occasion, joked or talked scandal with her handmaidens. And as these two looked out over the wheat, there was naught to indicate the shadow which lay between them.
"Finest stand I ever saw," Carter answered. "Five-foot straw, well headed, plump in the grain; ought to grade Number One Extra Hard. We'll make on that wheat, little girl."
"Do you really think so?"
He turned quickly.
"Those women at the picnic—-" She explained her dubious tone. "They said you were foolish to put in so much wheat. 'What kind of a darn fool is your husband, anyway?' that Mrs. MacCloud asked me. 'He kain't never draw all that wheat to Lone Tree. Take him a month to make two trips. 'Tain't no use to raise grain without a railroad. We folks hain't put in more'n enough for bread an' seed.'"
He laughed, as much at her clever mimicry as at Mrs. MacCloud's frankness. "If they had put in more I wouldn't have sown any. Could have bought it cheaper from them. But as they didn't— Do you know that every man in this settlement makes at least one trip a month to Lone Tree during the winter? Well, they do, and they'll be glad to make expenses freighting in my wheat. With grain at seventy a bushel, a load will bring thirty dollars at the cars, and I can hire all the teams I want at three a trip."
"Why"—his foresight caused her a little gasp—"how clever! I should never have thought of that."
His eyes twinkled his appreciation of her wifely admiration, and, taking her chin between his hands, he looked down into her eyes. "What's more, when that wheat money comes in, you an' me 'll jest run down to Winnipeg an' turn loose on the dry-goods stores."
It was the first hint of his knowledge of the turning, dyeing, the shifts she had made with her wardrobe, and he made a winning. The knowledge that he had seen and understood caused the wedge to tremble and almost fall out.
"Can we—afford it?" she asked, willing now to go without a thing.
"Don't have to afford necessities. Breaks me up to see you going shy of things."
For the last three days he had bestowed the parting kiss. This morning he received it—a warm one at that—and as he strode off stableward, her burst of singing echoed his cheerful whistle. She was quite happy the next few days planning for their descent on the shops. She sang at her work—warbling that was natural as that of the little bird which prinks and plumes for its mate in the morning sunlight. Reflecting her happy mood, Carter was humorously cheerful—so pleased and satisfied that she stared when, one evening, he came in, gloomy and depressed.
His black mood had come out of the east with a moaning wind that now herded leaden clouds over dun prairies. For one day rain pelted down, then, veering north, the bitter wind blew hard for a second day. That evening it died, and a pale sun swung down a cloudless sky to a colorless horizon. Under its cold light the wheat stood erect, motionless, devoid of its usual sighing life. A hush, portentous of change, brooded over all.
From their doorway Helen heard Hines, three miles away, rating his dog. "Hain't no more gumption than an Englishman, durn you! Sick 'em, now!" followed the maligned animal's bark and the thunder of scurrying hoofs.
"How clear and calm it is!" she commented, as Carter came up from the stables.
He glanced at the thermometer beside the door. "Too clear. I'm afraid it is all off with the wheat."
"Why? What do you mean?"
He turned from her astonished eyes. "Frost."
"Frost? You are surely mistaken? See how sunny it is!"
Shaking his head, he laid a forefinger on the thermometer. "Six o'clock, and the silver is down to thirty-five."
At dusk it had lowered another degree, and throughout the northland a hundred thousand farmers were watching, with Carter, its slow recession. On the fertile wheat plains of southern Manitoba, through the vast gloom of the Dakotas, to the uttermost limits of Minnesota, the mercury focussed the interest of half a million trembling souls whose fire-fly lanterns dusted the continental gloom. Prayers, women's tears, men's agonized curses marked its decline, that, like an etching tool, graved deep lines on haggard faces in Chicago, Liverpool, and London far away.
At thirty-two Carter lit the smudges of wet straw, and simultaneously the vast spread of night flamed out in smoke and fire. "I don't go much on it," he told Helen. "But some believe in it, and I ain't agoing to miss a chance."
He was right. Pale thief, the frost stole in under the reek and breathed his cold breath on the wheat. Holding his instrument, at ten o'clock, in the thickest smoke, Carter saw that it registered twenty-seven. Five degrees of frost and the cold of dawn still to come! Raising the glass, he dashed it to pieces at his feet.
It was done. Reverberating through the land, the smash of his glass typified the shattering of innumerable fortunes, the crash of business houses. The pistol-shot that wound up the affairs of some desperate gambler was but one echo. Surging wildly, the calamity would affect far more than the growers of wheat. Iron-workers, miners, operatives in a hundred branches of industry would shiver under the cold breath of the frost. For now the farmer would buy less cotton, the operative pay more for his flour, the miner earn a scantier wage.
True, the balance swings ever even. This year ryots of India, Argentine peons, Egyptian fellaheen would reap where they had not sown, gather where they had not strawed. Another year a Russian blight, Nile drouth, hot wind of Argentine would swing prices in favor of the northland. But in this was small comfort for the stricken people.
"All gone!" Carter exclaimed at midnight. "The feathers are frozen offen them bonnets."
Helen sensed the bitterness under his lightness. "Never mind, dear," she comforted. "I really don't care. You did your best."
He had done his best! To a strong man the phrase stabs, signifying the victory of conditions. He winced, as from an offered blow. It was the last drop in his cup, the signal of his defeat. It marked the destruction of this his last plan for her. He had not, in the beginning, intended that she should ever set her hand to drudgery. His love was to come between her and all that was sordid, squalid. If the railroad contract had materialized, she should have had a little home in Winnipeg where she might enjoy the advantages of her early life. He had planned for a servant—two, if she could use them—and all that he asked in return was that she should bring beauty into his life, adorn his home, sweeten his days with the aroma of her delicate presence. In this small castle of Spain he had installed his beauty of the sweet mouth, golden hair, pretty profile; and now, out of his own disappointment, he read reproach in the hazel eyes that looked out from the ruins.
Long after her sleep-breathing freighted the dusk of their bedroom, he lay gazing wide-eyed into the black future. A sudden light would have shown his eyes blank, expressionless, for his spirit was afar, questing for other material with which to rebuild his castle. In thought he was travelling Silver Creek, from its headwaters in the timber limits to its source where it flowed into the mighty Assiniboin. It was a small stream—too small to drive logs except for a month on the snow waters. But with a dam here—another there—a third on the flats—rough structures of logs with a stone and gravel filling, yet sufficient to conserve the falling waters! The drive could then be sent down from dam to dam! During the night he travelled every yard of the stream, placing his dams, and at dawn rose, content in his eyes.
Slipping quietly from the house, he saddled the Devil and led him quietly by while Helen still slept, and an hour later rode up to Bender's cabin. The Cougar was also there, and from dubious head-waggings the two relapsed into thoughtful acquiescence as Carter unfolded his plans.
"She'll go down like an eel on ice!" Bender enthusiastically agreed. "All you want now is backing. Funny, ain't it, that nobody ever thought o' that before? Say"—he regarded Carter with open admiration—"you're particular hell when it comes to thinking. If I'd a headpiece like yourn—"
"You hain't," the Cougar coldly interrupted, "so don't waste no time telling us what you might ha' done. Get down to business. I know a man"—he thoughtfully surveyed Carter—"that financed half a dozen big lumbering contrac's on the Superior construction work. He'll sire anything that looks like ten per cent. an' this of yourn will sure turn fifty. Come inside an' I'll write you a letter."
What of the Cougar's inexperience with the pen, the morning was well on when Carter rode back to his cabin. If Helen had looked closely she might have seen the new resolution that inhered in his smile, but she had been concerned with her own reflections. Somehow, things had not appeared this morning as they did last night. Crude daylight shows events, like tired faces, in all their haggardness, and their complexion was not improved by the steam from her wash-tub. Time and again she had paused to survey her hands, creased and wrinkled by cooking in hot water. Her bare arms recalled her first party-dress, and set her again in the sweet past. Beside it the present seemed infinitely hopeless, squalid, dreary. As she rubbed and scrubbed on her wash-board, life resolved itself into an endless procession of wash-days, and tears had mingled with the sweat that fell from her face to her bosom.
Noting her red eyes, Carter was tempted to disclose his new hope, but remembered the failure of previous plans and refrained. As yet nothing was certain. He would not expose her to the risk of another disappointment. He rightly interpreted her sigh when he told her that he would have to go down to Winnipeg on business about the timber limits, and his heart smote him when, looking back, he saw her standing in the door. Dejection resided in the parting wave of her hand, utter hopelessness.
That lonely figure in the log doorway stuck in his consciousness throughout his negotiations, causing him to hustle matters in a way that simply scandalized the Cougar's man, a banker of the old school. Yet his hurry served rather than hurt his cause. While the very novelty of it made him gasp, the banker was impressed. In private he informed his moneyed partners that such a chance and such a man rarely came together. "He's a hustler, and the profit is there," he said, in consultation. "A big profit. We can cut lumber ten per cent under the railroad price and yet clear twenty-five cents on the dollar."
That settled it. Half a day later Carter was on his homeward way, bearing with him the power to draw on Winnipeg or Montreal for moneys necessary for supplies, men, and teams. Running home from Lone Tree, he whiled away the miles with thoughts of Helen's joy. He pictured her, radiant, flushed, listening to his news, and, quickening to the thought, he raced, full gallop, the last mile up to his door.
His face burst into sunshine as, in response to his call, he heard her cross the floor. Then his smile died, and he stared at Mrs. Leslie. With the exception of an occasional glimpse as they met and passed on trail, it was the first he had seen of her since the soft summer evening when she laid illicit love at his feet. But no hint of that bitter memory inhered in her greeting.
"How are you, Mr. Carter?" she cried, in her old, gay way. "I think you are the meanest man in Silver Creek. Married a year, and neither you nor Helen have set foot in our house. You are a regular Blue beard. But you needn't think that you can hide from us forever. I just pocketed my pride, ignored your snub, and made my third call. Yes"—she emphatically nodded her pretty head—"thethird, sir. But I forgive you; come in and have some tea. Helen is down at the stables hunting eggs to beat up a cake."
Covering his vexation with some light answer, he drove on to the stables, the life and light gone out of him, his face the heaviest that Helen had ever seen. "She called," she answered his abrupt question, "and I have to entertain her." Then, piqued by his coldness, she went on: "For matter of that, I do not see why you should try to cut me off from her companionship! She is the only woman I care for in the settlements!"
If he had only told her! But causes light as the falling of a leaf are sufficient to deflect the entire current of a life, and it was perfectly natural that, in his bitter disappointment, he also should give way to a feeling of pique. The reason trembled to his lips, and there paused, stayed by the resentment in her eyes.
"As you see fit," he answered. "Now I have to drive over to see Bender, on business."
"Won't you wait for some tea?"
"No. And don't wait supper. I may be late."
Hurt, she watched him drive away; then, as he suddenly reined in, she dashed the tears from her eyes. "Here's a letter for you," he called. "Got it from the office as I came by."
He nodded in answer to Mrs. Leslie's cheery wave as he rolled by the cabin. It was more than cold, yet, sitting chin on hands, that lady smiled cheerfully when Helen came up from the stable. "Don't apologize, my dear," she laughed. "Men aresuchfools. Always doing something to hurt their own happiness. Just banish that rueful expression and read your letter."
"What's the matter?" The question was called forth by Helen's sudden cry of dismay. She glanced at the wedding-cards that Helen offered. "Hum! Old flame of yours, eh? These regrets will assail one."
However, she knit her straight brows over the enclosure. In part, it ran: "We were so pleased to hear of your wonderful marriage from your auntie Crandall. It was just like you to announce the bare fact, but she told us all about it. A railroad king! Just fancy! He must be nice or our delicate Helen would never consent to bury herself in the wilderness. Do you know I have been justdyingto see him, and now I shall, for we are passing through your country on our way to the Orient. Which is your station?" Followed sixteen pages of questions, description of trousseau, and other feminine matters which Helen reserved for future consumption.
Could she have laid tongue, just then, on Auntie Crandall, that lady had surely regretted her enlargements on Helen's modest statement of her husband's prospects. Lacking that easement of feeling, she cried. This visit capped her misery, brought the long record of misfortune, discomfort, disaster to a fitting climax.
"Poor child!" Mrs. Leslie patted her shoulder. "But why did you tell her such crammers? It was the good auntie?" She tilted her nose. "For the honor of the family, we lie, eh? Heaven help us! Your friend—what's her name?—Mrs. Ravell—she's rich, of course? Thought so—couldn't be otherwise—trust the malignant fates for that. Well—" She glanced meditatively about the cabin. Instead of lime-washing the logs, settler fashion, Helen had left them to darken with age, ornamenting them with a pair of magnificent moose horns and other woodland trophies. Tanned bear-skins covered a big lounge that ran across one end; buffalo robes and other skins took the place of mats on the floor. Mrs. Leslie nodded approval. "Not bad. Quite wild-westy, in fact. You will simply have to live up to it. You have given up your town-house for the present and are rusticating while your hubby directs some of his splendid schemes for the regeneration of this section—"
"Oh!" Helen burst in. "I couldn't say that. It would be—"
"Lying? Nonsense, child! Have you a town-house? No! Well, what are you kicking about?" Mrs. Leslie's descent to the vernacular was as forcible as confusing. Before Helen had time to differentiate between the status involved by "not having a town-house" and giving one up her temptress ran on. "That is it. You are rusticating. Now, I can lend you some of my things—glass, china, and so on. When do they arrive?" She consulted the letter. "Hooray! Your husband will be gone all next week, and they come—let me see: one, two, three—next Friday. Couldn't be better."
Helen blushed under her meaning glance. "No, no! It would be wicked."
"Why not?" Mrs. Leslie laughed merrily. "They just dropped in and there's no time to send for him. Quite simple."
"Do you think I'm ashamed of him?" Helen asked, flushing.
Mrs. Leslie trimmed her sails to the squall. "Certainly not. He's a dear. You know I always liked him. But—if your friends were to make a long stay it would be different. You couldn't hide his light under a bushel. But a two days' visit? What could they learn of him in that time? The real him? They would no more than gather his departures from the conventional. I wouldn't expose him to unfriendly criticism. Frankly, I wouldn't, dear, at the cost of a little fib!"
The flush faded, yet Helen shook her head.
"As you will." Rising, the little cynic shrugged as she drew on her riding-gloves. "But at least take a day to think it over."
"No!" Helen shook vigorous denial. "I shall tell him to-night."
She was perfectly sincere in her intention, and if Carter had returned his usual good-natured self she would certainly have told him. But Mrs. Leslie's presence had angered him and destroyed his native judgment. He remembered that this was the outcome of Helen's invitation to Mrs. Leslie at the picnic, and his heart swelled at the thought that she should, of her own volition, go back to friends whom she knew that he despised. He felt the folly of his brooding, even applied strong language to himself for being many kinds of a fool. But his reasonable intention to open his budget of good news on his return was never carried out because of the coldness of her reception. Nervous from her own news, piqued by his curt leave-taking, she served his supper in silence or answered his few remarks in monosyllables. Nothing was said that night, and he retired without offering the usual kiss.
There he offended greatly. Her woman's unreason would, for that, accept no excuse. So when, after working off his own mood next morning, he came in to breakfast, he found her still the same. Really offended, she served him, as at the previous meal, in silence, and as, afterwards, she went about her work, her lashes veiled her eyes, her lips pouting.
It was their first real quarrel, and the very strangeness, novelty of her mood made it charming. But when, under urge of sudden tenderness, he tried to encircle her waist, she drew away, and, afflicted with a sense of injustice, he did not try again. There again he made a mistake. Justice has no concern with love. It is empirical, knows no law but its own. She wanted to be taken and kissed in spite of herself, as have all women on similar occasions, from the cave maidens down.
It so happened that she was in the bedroom when he left the house, and she did not see that he had taken with him the bundle she had packed the preceding night. She still intended to mention the letter. Indeed, as she heard his step on the threshold, she thought, "He'll stop at the door for his clothes."
But he did not; and hurrying out at the sound of scurrying hoofs, she was just in time to see him vanish behind a poplar bluff. She called, called, and called, then sat down and wept, the more miserable because of a secret, guilty feeling of relief.