Читать книгу: «The Settler», страница 21

"That's a cinch," Bender echoed. "He's due in Winnipeg to report his failure sometime in the next three days."

XXX
FIRE

Dawn saw the strikers going about their chores with a cheerful alacrity that was as gall to Michigan Red, who chewed the bitter cud of unsuccessful leadership as he sat drumming his heels on a block by the cook-house door. He had come to the end of his rope – rather, dangled there, an object of contemptuous pity in the eyes of his fellows. Had he doubted the fact, it was to be easily read in their studied avoidance; but he knew that he had failed – in what? He could hardly have answered the question himself; for whether or no he had plotted in the monopoly's interest, the strike was merely incidental to the persistent war he had waged against Carter, to the dogged opposition which had root in the turbulent anarchism of his nature. Sufficient that though his weird face held its usual bleak calm, he writhed, mentally, under defeat, while the few who ventured within range of his tongue sensed the lava beneath the crust.

"Not with this crowd. I draw the color line," he rasped, when Anderson inquired if he were not going to work, while Carrots Smith drew a curse along with the information, "It's me for a better job. I'm tired of herding sheep." So now he was left strictly alone, though speculative glances travelled often his way.

"He's waiting for the boss," a teamster remarked to his neighbor. "Say, I'd like to see 'em at grips!"

"Rather him nor me," the other said, expressing general opinion. "The boss is a tough proposition. They say he beat Shinn up so badly that he'll never be more 'n half a man again. Red ain't no slouch, though. Bet you I'd like to see it."

However, as tools had to be reissued and a hundred details despatched, the men were all at work before Carter could come to breakfast, so only Smythe and the cook witnessed that meeting.

It was a beautiful day. Already the heat fulfilled the prediction of a torrid sunrise, and, like an egg in a pan, the camp fried within the encircling spruce which, on their part, seemed to lift over surrounding birch and poplar as though tiptoeing for cooler air. The same errand had brought the cook out from the bowels of his own particular inferno, and as certain phases of the encounter could not be set forth in choicer terms than those in which he delivered himself to an interested audience that evening, now let him speak.

"I was sitting in the doorway, that close to Red I could have pulled his ear, when the boss kem along. Stopping opposite, he looked down on Red with eyes dark and steady as night. They're blue, you know, by rights, but they seemed to darken to pure black, an' I never felt him so tall before.

"'Well, Red?' he says, quiet, like that; but Red's eyes stayed down, though his lip lifted clear of his corner teeth like you've seen a trapped coyote, and so the pair of 'em remained for a full three minutes."

Imagine them – the greenish face of the one reflecting murderous passion, troubled as waves on shaken acid; the other darkly silent, yet, for all his quiet, oppressing both Smythe and the cook with the loom of imminent death. So was fought out the silent duel of personalities – one minute, two; at the third, sweat broke profusely upon the teamster's face, and the cook breathed once more. Burning with Cain's lust, his glance travelled but once above the other's knee, to fall as quickly again.

"What's the matter, Red?" Smythe actually started as Carter's voice broke on the quiet of the camp. "Quitting? What for?"

"No, it isn't exactly my business," he cheerfully answered the teamster's growl. "If you will, you will." Turning back after entering, he added: "Heading for Winnipeg, I suppose? Then give my compliments to Friend Buckle and tell him to please hand them higher up."

When he came out Michigan was still there, but Carter passed without a glance, and led Smythe down the right of way into the forest. Even then Michigan sat on. It was, indeed, almost noon before he loafed over to the horse lines, after refusing the cook's invitation to wait for dinner. Without returning a word of thanks for the grub-sack which the latter sent over by a cookee, he hitched to his wagon and drove slowly away.

A week's rest had freshened the blacks so much that, if given their heads, they would have covered half the distance to Winnipeg that day. But he took a vicious pleasure in balking their inclination. Jerking the bits, which hinged on a cruel curb, he pulled them down to a nervous, teetering walk.

For a while the trail paralleled the right of way, then swung on a wide arc around a morass, and for an hour thereafter ran alternately among sloughs, sand-hills, muskegs, through a country indescribably desolate and which teemed with savage life. Myriad frogs set his ears singing with dismal, persistent croaking; a pole-cat scuttled across the trail, poisoning the dank air. From brazen skies a hawk shrieked a malediction upon his head; his horses threw up their heads, snorting, as a lynx screamed a long way off. Here, too, dark woods shut off errant breezes and he fell a prey to a curse of sand-flies that stung and envenomed his flesh. There was no escape. They settled, by hundreds, on the hands that wiped them off his face; stung his face as he slapped his hands.

Coming back, mad with pain and rage, from this détour, his eyes drew to a trestle – longest, highest, most expensive of Carter's works – and, reining in, he allowed his glance to wander lustfully over the stout timbers which his fancy wrapped in flame. A single match – but reason urged that the embers would undoubtedly furnish red lights for his hanging, and he drove on, hotter, madder for the restraint. He was ripe for any mischief that offered a running chance of escape, when, midway of the afternoon, he came on wheel-tracks that swung at right angles from the trail into a chain of sloughs.

"Red River cart," he muttered, noticing the wide gauge; then, furiously slapping his thigh, "Carter's Cree, by G – !"

He meant the Indian who had brought in the venison which formed the tidbit at Dorothy Chester's first meal in camp. All through the summer he had come in with deer-meat twice or thrice a week, but though Michigan and other teamsters had searched for his tepee during the idle days of the strike, no one had penetrated to the woodland lake where his squaw – a young girl, handsome, as Indian women go – was free from rude glances, safe from insult or worse. Now the trail lay, plain as a pike-road, under Michigan's nose; and, leaping down, he tied his team to a tree and followed it along the sloughs.

Through a gully, patch of woodland, the tracks led into a second long slough, and presently debouched on the strand of a small lake, one of the thousands that gem that black wilderness. Bird-haunted in spring, lonesomeness now lay thick upon it. Uttering its weird cry, a loon rose on swift wing, angling in its flight over the tepee, whose bull's hide, raw, smoke-blacked, harmonized with that savage setting.

Just then Michigan was in fettle to exact a vicarious revenge. Early in summer Carter had nipped a disposition on the part of his men to joke and make free with the Indian, giving strict orders that he was to be unmolested, coming or going. This girl who lived in his protecting shadow would have fared ill at Michigan's hands. But the tepee flaps were thrown wide, and though he strained his eyes from a covert of tall reeds, he saw no sign of her, without or within. Save the lipping of waters, sough of a rising wind, no sound broke the solitude that guarded this, the lair of primitive man. Only those who have experienced its frightful loneliness can know how terrible a northern solitude can be; how awesome, oppressive. Some note of it caused the teamster to speak aloud, heartening himself with sound of his voice.

"They'll be back to-night, sure, for the ashes is banked over the embers."

Gaining back to his team, he drove on a scant quarter-mile, then turned into a slough parallel to those he had just left, and which had its end in a wooded dell. Here high banks would have effectually screened a fire, yet he endured mosquitoes till dusk smothered his smudge. Then tying his team in the thick of its reek, he cut across the intervening bush and followed, as before, along the slough chain till he saw a dim cloud quivering on the blackness ahead.

Beneath this, smoke from the Cree's fire, presently appeared a rich incandescence, and after worming the last yards on the flat of his belly, Michigan peered from thick sedge out at the Cree woman, who sat and suckled her child by the fire that enriched the bronze of her bosom with a blush from its glow. A free, wild thing, her deep eyes now caressed her child, again searched the fire's red mystery, giving back its flame as forest pools reflect a hunter's flare; sombre and silent, eons of savagery flickered in her glance.

From her the watcher's evil face turned to the Cree, who was skinning a deer that hung by the hams from a poplar crotch. The heavy, clammy odor of fresh blood hung thick in the air, filled his nostrils as he lay, like primitive man by the mouth of his enemy's cave, watching the knife slip around the carcass. Savage could not have been more wicked of intent. Again and again his hand gripped his own knife, always to fall again at sight of the rifle that leaned against the Red River cart, close to the Indian's hand. And thus he waited, baleful glance flickering between man and woman, till the deer was dressed and loaded upon the cart.

That modified without changing his purpose. "Going to camp first thing in the morning," he thought, as he crawled away. "Always goes alone."

Back once more with his team, he kicked the wet grass from the smudge, and after eating ravenously of the cook's provision by its flame, he spread his blankets and lay down, head propped on his hand, back to his team. He did not sleep; simply stared into the fire, or listened to the varied voices of the night. Now there would be a sighing, breathing among the trees, creaking of branches, soft rustlings. Then the night would talk loudly on a hush as of death – a loon laughed at the owl's solemn questioning, a fox barked among the sand-hills; the boom of a bittern came in from some dark lake; he heard the lynx scream again, loudly, shrilly, as a tortured child. Then the wind again, or a greater hush in which he heard only the crackling of his fire as he replenished its dying flame.

On these occasions a long trail of sparks would fly upward, and one, a tiny ember, at last wrought a strange thing. Passing over and behind him, it nested in the frazzle of tow at the knot of the stallion's frayed halter; where it smoked and glowed, growing larger, brighter. Lowering his ugly head, the beast sniffed at the strange red flower, then backed away as it burst into a bouquet of flame under his coaxing breath.

"Stan' still!" Michigan growled, without, however, looking around.

The stallion stood – till the end of the burned rope dropped to the ground.

Even then some time elapsed before he realized that he was free; but when he did – he turned white, wicked eyes on the resting man. Was that short worm the fiend that had ruled him? He stepped.

"Stan' still!" Michigan growled again.

The familiar voice gave the stallion pause – a moment. For, out of the tail of his eye, Michigan presently saw and became cognizant of a most curious thing – of a shadow, huge, black, upreared above himself.

Uttering a hoarse cry, he tried to rise – too late.

So, in the midst of his turbulence, passed Michigan Red, but the evil that he had done mightily all the days of his life followed him into death, for the pounding hoofs spread embers of his fire over a leafy carpet, where the night wind found them. Leaping under its breath, small flames writhed tortuously across the glade to the thing that had been a man – touched and tasted its clothing with delicate lickings, then flashed up and sprang from the smouldering cinder into thick scrub, and so ran with incredible swiftness through the forest. Crouched, like a runner, at first, close to the ground, it suddenly straightened and bounded high over a patch of dry poplar burned by a former fire, cowered again, to crawl through thick green spruce, and so stole softly on, as though to catch the Cree in his sleep.

As well try to singe a weasel. Already the Cree was urging his ragged pony, with squaw and papoose, towards Carter's camp, and, balked there, the fire swung with the veering wind into poplar woods, and flamed on, a roaring, ebullient tide, overtopping the tallest trees. Under its effulgence, black lakes and sullen tarns flashed out of thick night with scared deer, belly-deep in the water. Huge owls went flapping through the smoke, leading the ducks, geese, vagrant flocks of the night, leaving hawks and other day birds to circle, shrieking, ere they whizzed down to a fiery death. Gaining strength from its own draught and the freshening wind, it flowed, at an angle, over the railroad and poured down both sides, licking up bridges, trestles, culverts, leaving the hot rails squirming like scorched snakes in empty space; and so, about midnight, roared on to the great trestle at which Michigan had paused that afternoon, and where Carter had lined up his men.

Roused by the Cree from a dream of Helen to a nightmare of flaming skies, Carter first sent out a gang under command of Hart and Smythe to back-fire around the camp, then loaded the remaining crews on flat-cars and raced the fire down to the trestle. Bender, who was with him in the engine-cab, leaned to his ear as the train pulled out of the cut.

"Michigan Red?"

"Looks it." Nodding, Carter turned to watch the rails which gleamed under the sky-glow, running like scarlet lines on black ribbon between dark, serried ranks of spruce. "Lucky it is coming at an angle," he said, as the engine thundered over the first bridge.

Bender raised his big shoulders. "If the wind don't shift? But it generally does about this time o' night. If she slips to the east – p-s-st! a puff of steam, a crackle, an' we're gone up like flies in a baker's oven."

Carter returned his shrug. "As good a way as any." He added, grimly smiling: "And very fit. Give us a chance to get acclimated. But with luck we ought to be able to wet her down and pull out south. Without it we can lie down in the creek."

"I like mine wet," Bender grinned. "Drowning ain't exactly comfortable, but if there's to be any preference I'll take it." And in the face of danger and disaster, Carter smiled again.

Starting out, it had seemed a toss-up between them and the fire, but the train rolled over the trestle and drew up in a cut on the southerly side, a quarter-hour to the good. The creek ran under the northerly end, with a short approach to the bank, the bulk of the trestle leading over a quarter-mile of morass to firm ground; so Carter, with Bender, Carrots Smith, and other half-dozen, dropped buckets from the bridge to the stream, thirty feet below, and passed them to the men who were strung along the plates. Dipping, drawing, dashing, they worked furiously under the glare of the conflagration. While still half a mile away, its heat set the trestle steaming. At a quarter of a mile, the furious draught rained embers large as a man's hand upon the men, who turned their faces away from the blistering heat. Casting uneasy glances over humped shoulders, they began to increase their distances, edging along the south approach towards the train; but as they still maintained communications, neither Carter nor Bender took notice until they suddenly broke and ran.

"Here! Come back!" Bender's angry roar drowned Carter's shout, and was lost, in turn, in a shrill whistling; for the engineer had seen that which had been hid from them.

"My God!" Carrots Smith cried; and Brady broke out in whimpering prayer to the saints.

They stood, staring.

As aforesaid, the fire was running south and westerly at an acute angle to – in fact, almost paralleling the railroad, with its extreme point farthest away but already beyond the trestle. And now, veering swiftly southeast, as Bender had feared, it swung at right angles and came broadside on, a fiery tide high over the forest. To the engineer it seemed that the wind lifted a mass of flame and threw it bodily into a tangle of poplar-brake, red willow, tall reeds, and sedge at the trestle's south end. Dry, explosively inflammable from a summer's heat, it touched off like a magazine, whirling skyward, a twisting water-spout of flame, and as he jerked wildly on his whistle he saw, as under the calcium of lurid melodrama, men running like wingless flies along the wet, black trestle. Careening, the column fell across them.

Only the few who were drawing with Carter escaped that first explosive flame, and they gained only time to jump as the main fire came hurdling over the trees. Falling, Carter saw the stream, blood-red; jagged rocks rising swiftly to meet him. A flash blinded his eyes, then —

He rubbed them – that is, he winked, for he was far too weak for such robust exercise. Yes, he winked it. Was – could that be Helen's face bending low over him?

XXXI
WHEREIN THE FATES SUBSTITUTE A CHANGE OF BILL

Carter winked again. The face, however, did not move. On the contrary, it lit up with sudden delight and said smile helped his limping consciousness forward to the idea of a dream. Yes, he was dreaming, undoubtedly dreaming! No! Here memory took hold and gave him back the flaming forest; wet rocks, rising swiftly from red water, carried him back and left him at the precise moment that he had struck a projecting timber. He was falling! Involuntarily he stiffened, expecting the shock … but – ah! a clew! He was dead – of the fall; and this? Must be heaven, or why Helen? If t'other place? 'Twas not so bad as long as she was there! Here his eye, through removal of the face, touched the whitewashed ceiling, then wandered to blank walls, a stand with medicine, covered glasses and spoons, a linen-press, two chairs – he arrived at truth, a hospital! Then, tired out by these strenuous mental exercises, his eyes closed once more, to the ineffable relief of the anxious watcher, and sleep, natural sleep, replaced the coma that had held him these two days.

For a while Helen listened to his breathing, then, once sure that he was really asleep, she tiptoed out to the corridor and, under urge of relief, ran, fairly flew, with her good news to the head doctor's office. For these had been days of haggard waiting, as, for the matter of that, had the last two weeks – Bender's battles, Carter's triumph, the strike and forest fire had all been packed into ten short days.

Beginning at the morning after she saw Carter at dinner with the general manager, her joyful prayer had gone with the jubilant roar of press and people at the ceding of the crossing, and for several following days her ears drank thirstily of the plaudits which were universal in the hospital, on the street, at her boarding-house. When, indeed, the topic cropped up at her first operation, her fingers trembled so over a bandage that Carruthers excused her, thinking the sight of blood had turned her sick. At Jean Glaves's table she had to veil the eager exultance of her eyes. The merchants who were discussing competition in freight rates on the street would have stared could they have heard the heart-cry of the pretty nurse then passing.

"He did it! Yes, he is very clever – all that you say! But you cannot have him, for he is mine! I'll lend him to you – for a while! But I must have him back! He's mine! mine! mine!"

From breathing the rare atmosphere of these exalted heights, she had been precipitated by the strike into bottom deeps of despair, and while agonizing therein over additional rumors of Greer & Smythe's impending failure, a morning paper came to her breakfast-table with six-inch fire scareheads and a long tale of burns, bruises, breakages that would have been longer but for the softness of the morass. Carter, Bender, Brady, Carrots Smith, all who were on the trestle, had been more or less injured; and six bridges, five trestles, dozens of culverts had gone up in smoke, a maleficent memorial to Michigan Red, before the conflagration back-fired itself out among labyrinthian lakes. But she paused not at the tale. The injured were on the way to the hospital, and with that piece of news clutched to her bosom she ran all the way and broke, at one time, a rule that was as the law of the Medes and Persians and the privacy of the head doctor's study.

It will be easily seen that under such circumstances her hysterical gaspings were not exactly informing, but a man does not attain to headship of a hospital without ability to extract truth from obscure premises – what else is diagnosis? – and when, indicating the heading that told of Carter's injuries, she gasped, "My husband!" the Head grasped every detail of the situation.

"I must nurse him!" she pleaded. "Must! must!"

A man prodigiously dignified and very solemn behind imposing glasses, the Head offered a stereotyped objection; but it speaks for the feeling beneath his dessicated exterior that he eventually set rules and regulations at defiance, and outraged the discipline and morale maintained by the Scotch head nurse, by appointing her, a novitiate, to a capital case.

"But remember," he said. "Only if you can forget, for the present, that he is your husband?"

He did not believe she could, and had been astonished by her quiet, almost mechanical performance of duty during those two harrowing days. For he did not see her leaning over the inanimate form when alone in the ward; her strained watching, desperate listenings for the first flutter of the returning spirit. Now he did see her flushed delight, and muttered to himself as Carruthers, the under surgeon, hastened with her to Carter's bedside: "I suppose I ought to tell him! … What's the use; he'll hear soon enough."

So her secret was kept, and being uninformed of the matrimonial complications in the case, the surgeon set her delighted flutterings to professional interest and so joined her felicitations. "'Twas touch and go," he whispered. "Few could stand such a crack on the head; must have made an omelet of his brains and his fever was hot enough to fry it. But he'll pull through, Mistress Morrill, and it is good that he will, for he's a gran' character, fine and useful to the province."

To indulge a pleasant conceit, that refreshing sleep may be regarded as an intimation of the fates that comedy was about to be substituted for impending tragedy upon the boards; and the opening of Carter's eyes may very well be considered as the rise of the curtain on the first, and what would also have been the last, act had he been in the enjoyment of his usual health and strength. Lacking these, he could only take things as he found them; chief over all, a demure nurse who administered bitter draughts or took his pulse without sign of recognition, compunction, or emotion.

As her shapely back always hid the pencil when she noted her observations on the chart, he could not see it tremble; and how was he to know that the pulse-taking was a sham? That she could feel only her own heart thudding five thousand thuds to the minute? That she had to guess the pulse by his temperature, which cardinal crime of the nurse's calendar was partly condoned, because if she had set down its vibrations at the moments she held his hand, every doctor in the hospital would have come running as to a lost cause.

Ignorant of all this, he could only lie and watch her moving about the ward, tantalizingly trim and pretty in her nurse's dress; wait till some softening of her coldness would justify the clean confession he ached to make. Always the desire was with him and it waxed with the days. But whether or no she discerned it lurking behind his surreptitious glances, she afforded no opportunity, and what can a man do against a fate that nips every approach to the tender with nasty medicine or chill phrase – "You are not to talk."

"I believe you like to give me that stuff," he growled one day.

"Doctor's orders," she severely replied, and her stony face effectually repressed him while indicating that she was not to be drawn from her vantage-ground by that or a sudden remark – "It seems strange to see you in that uniform."

"Doesn't feel so to me," she coldly answered, adding, with a spice of malice, "If it did I should get used to it, for I expect to wear it for the next three years."

He winced, and he did not see her smile as he gave her his angry back – that or her droopings over his sleep an hour thereafter. Alone in the quiet ward, bent so low that her breath moved the hair on his temples, the occasion vividly recalled the night, long ago, when she had watched the moon etch with line and shadow the promise of the future upon his face. It lay there now, under her soft breath, the fulfilment. For two years stress and struggle had tooled away every roughness and left the accomplished promise, a man wrought by circumstance to a great fineness.

She also had changed – from a well-intentioned if careless girl to a thoughtful woman. Contact with life in the rough had rubbed the scales from her eyes and now she saw clearly – many things, but all centring on one. Outside people were declaiming against the vindictive fate that had joined with the monopoly against this their champion. That morning's papers had it that Greer & Smythe were surely ruined. Yet she was glad, overjoyed. Wealthy and honored, it would have been difficult to the verge of impossibility for her to go back to him. Always she would have felt that he might doubt her motives. But now —

"It's time to take your medicine!" She sprang up as he opened his eyes, wondering if he had felt her light kiss.

Had he, it would have been "curtain" there and then, but as he did not the play went on, and its sequence proves that, however honorable her intentions, she had by no means relinquished her sex's unalienable right to bring things about in its own illogical, tantalizing, perversely charming way. Drooping over his sleep, hoping that he would wake and catch her, she took care that he should not – assumed a statuesque coldness at the first quiver of his eyelids. Undoubtedly, and with her sex's habitual unfairness, she scandalously abused her position, exercising a tyranny that was as sweet to herself as mortifying to him.

"You must not do that – must do this – now go to sleep." She hugged her power in place of him, and when he achieved a successful revolt against her ban of silence by appealing to the Head for permission to talk with Smythe, she revenged herself by injecting a personal interest into her dealings with Carruthers. It was madness for him to see their heads close together over his chart; the shining eyes she brought back from whispered conferences in the hall. To be sure, it was all about pills and plasters, but how was he to know that? And it was in revenge for this shamelessly injurious conduct that he arranged the scene which opens the second act.

On the morning that he was promoted from spoon-feed to the dignity of a tray, behold him! head bent, elbows square with his ears, knife and fork grabbed at their points, proving his indifference to her opinion by the worst behavior that recent better practice permitted. Alas! he was cast all through for a losing part. Displaying, before his face, the irritating curiosity which a child bestows on a feeding lion, she privately peeped from behind the door-screen, gloated over the old familiar spectacle. She caught him coming and going. Also she turned a delighted ear when he dropped into the homely settler speech; listened for the old locutions; but called his bluff when he overdid the part by running amuck of the grammar in a manner frightful to behold.

"I really don't see why you talk like that," she remarked, patronizingly. "You speak quite well, almost correctly, to Dr. Hammand and Mr. Smythe."

"Yes?" he retorted. "I didn't notice. Mebbe you'll correct me if I side-step it again?"

But the last case of that man was worse than the first. "Thank you," she coldly answered. "I have given up teaching school."

He sniffed sarcastically. "Hum! Shouldn't have known it. I always heard that the spanking habit stuck through life. But don't give up. Remember the copybook line, 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.'" But she was going out of the door at the time and took care that he should think she had not heard. "You were speaking?" she inquired, coming back. And, of course, it would not bear repetition.

He fared just as illy when, next morning, Bender hobbled into the ward with the aid of a crutch and cane. Having been visited by the lady protagonist, the giant was fully informed on the situation and so achieved a sly wink behind his chief's sarcastic introductions. "Mr. Bender – Mrs. Morrill."

Also her quiet answer was disconcerting. "We have met before. Have you heard from Jenny lately, Mr. Bender?"

Now Bender had. A letter, small note, simple and direct as Jenny herself, was even then burning his pocket, and, blushing like a school-boy caught in the theft of apples, he produced and read it. If he insisted – was perfectly certain that he couldn't get well without her – Jenny would!

"'Fraid I took a mean advantage," he confessed. "Reg'lar cold-decked her. You see, a busted ankle ain't much to spread on, so I hinted at complications. She sure thinks I'm dyin,' an' when she comes she'll find me hopping around."

"Oh, well." Carter glanced stealthily at Helen. "She has oceans of time to pay you. With any old luck you are good for eighty-five, and it doesn't take a loving wife that length of time to get even." For which insolence he paid instantly and doubly – first by a nasty dose, secondly by loss of Bender, who was summarily ejected under pretext of its being the patient's hour for sleep.