CHAPTER XVIII

THE VIGIL-KEEPER

It was a clear starlit night when I rode across a tract of the Assiniboian prairie, some two hundred miles east of Crane Valley. A half-moon hung in the cloudless ether, and the endless levels, lying very silent under its pale radiance, seemed to roll away into infinity. They had no boundary, for the blueness above them melted imperceptibly through neutral gradations into the earth below, which, gathering strength of tone, stretched back again to the center of the lower circle a vast sweep of silvery gray.

There was absolute stillness, not even a grass blade moved; but the air was filled with the presage of summer, and the softness of the carpet, which returned no sound beneath the horse's feet, had its significance. That sod had been bleached by wind-packed snow and bound into iron hardness by months of arctic frost. Bird and beast had left it, and the waste had lain empty under the coldness of death; but life had once more conquered, and the earth was green again. Even among the almost unlettered born upon it there are few men impervious to the influence of the prairie on such a night; and in days not long gone by the half-breed _voyageurs_ told strange stories of visions seen on it during the lonely journeys they made for the great fur-trading company. Its vastness and its emptiness impresses the human atom who becomes conscious of an indefinite awe or is uplifted by an exaltation which vanishes with the dawn, for there are times when, through the silence of measureless spaces, man's spirit rises into partial touch with the greater things unseen.

My errand was prosaic enough--merely to buy cattle for Haldane and others on a sliding-scale arrangement. I could see a possibility of some small financial benefit, and that being so had reluctantly left Crane Valley, where I was badly needed, because the need of money was even greater. Also, as time was precious, I had decided to travel all night instead of spending it as a guest of the last farmer with whom I bargained. I was at that time neither very imaginative nor oversentimental; but the spell of the prairie was stronger than my will, and, yielding to it, I rode dreamily, so it seemed, beyond the reach of petty troubles and the clamor of our sordid strife into a shadowy land of peace which, defying the centuries, had retained unchanged its solemn stillness. The stars alone sufficed to call up the fancy, for there being neither visible heavens nor palpable atmosphere, only a blue transparency, the eye could follow the twinkling points of flame far backwards from one to another through the unknown spaces beyond our little globe. Nothing seemed impossible on such a night, and only the touch of the bridle and the faint jingle of metal material.

It was in this mood that I became conscious of a shadow object near the foot of a rise. It did not seem a natural portion of the prairie, and when I had covered some distance it resolved itself into a horse and a dismounted man. His broad hat hung low in his hand, his head was bent, and he stood so intent that I had almost ridden up to him before he turned and noticed me. Then, as I checked my horse, I saw that it was Boone.

"What has brought you here?" I asked.

"That I cannot exactly tell you when we know so little of the influences about us on such a night as this. It is at least one stage of a pilgrimage I must make," he said.

Had this answer been given me in the sunlight I should have doubted the speaker's mental balance, but one sets up a new standard of sanity on the starlit prairie on a night of spring, and I saw only that the spell was also upon him. He held a great bunch of lilies (which do not grow on the bare Western levels) in one hand, and his face was changed. Even in Boone's reckless humor there had been a sardonic vein which sometimes added a sting to the jest, and I knew what the shadow was that accounted for his fits of silent grimness. Now he seemed strangely calm, but rather reverent than sad.

"I cannot understand you," I said.

"No?" he answered quietly. "How soon you have forgotten; but you helped me once. Come, and I will show you."

He tethered his horse to an iron peg, beckoned me to do the same, and then, moving forward until we stood on the highest of the rise, pointed to something that rose darkly from the grass. Then I remembered, and swung my hat to my knee, as my eyes rested on a little wooden cross. Following the hand he stretched out, I could read the rude letters cut on it--"Helen Boone."

He stooped, and, I fancied with some surprise, lifted a glass vessel from beneath a handful of withered stalks. He shook them out gently, laid the fresh blossoms in their place, and a faint fragrance rose like incense through the coolness of the dew. Then he turned, and I followed him to where we had left the horses. "There are still kind souls on this earth, and one of them placed that vessel under the last flowers I left. You have a partial answer to your question now."

I bent my head, and seeing that he was not averse to speech, said quietly: "You come here sometimes? It is a long journey."

"Yes," was the answer; and Boone's voice vibrated. "She who sleeps there gave up a life of luxury for me; and is a three-hundred-mile journey too much to make, or a summer night too long to watch beside her? I am drawn here, and there are times when one wonders if it is possible for us to rise into partial communion with those who have passed into the darkness before us."

"It is all," I answered gravely, "a mystery to me. Can you conceive such a possibility?"

"Not in any tangible shape to such as I, but this at least I know. In spite of the destruction of the mortal clay, when I can see my way no further, and lose courage in my task, fresh strength comes to me after a night spent here."

"Your task?" I said. "I guessed that there was a motive behind your wanderings."

"There is one," and Boone's voice rose to its natural level. "The wagon journeys suit it well. Had Lane ruined me alone I should have tried to pay my forfeit for inexperience and the risk I took gracefully; but when I saw the woman, who had lain down so much for me, fading day by day that he might add to his power of oppressing others the money which would have saved her life, the case was different. The last part he played in the pitiful drama was that of murderer, and the loss he inflicted on me one that could never be forgiven."

"And you are waiting revenge?" I asked.

"No." Boone looked back towards the crest of the rise. "At first I did so, but it is justice that prompts me now. I have a full share of human passions, and once I lay in wait for him with a rifle--my throat parched and a fire of torment in my heart; but when he passed at midnight within ten paces I held my hand and let him go. Perhaps it was because I could not take the life of even that venomous creature in cold blood, and feared he would not face me. Perhaps another will was stronger than my own, for, with every purpose strained against what seemed weakness, it was borne in on me that I could not force him to stand with a weapon, and that I dare not kill him groveling. Then the power went out of me, and I let him go. Yet I have twice lain long hours in hot sand under a deadly rifle fire, Ormesby. There are many mysteries, and as yet it is very little that we know."

"But you are following him still, are you not?" I asked. And Boone continued: "As I said, it is for justice, and it was here I learned the difference. I would not take the reptile's life unless he met me armed in the daylight, which he would never do; but for the sake of others--you and the rest, whose toil and blood he fattens on--I am waiting and working for the time when, without a crime, it may be possible to end his career of evil."

We were both silent for a few minutes, and I felt that Boone's task, self-imposed or otherwise, was a worthy one. Lane was a man without either anger or compassion--an incarnation of cunning and avarice more terrible to human welfare than any legendary monster of the olden time. It was no figure of speech to declare that he fattened on poor men's blood and agony, and his overthrow could not be anything but a blessing. Still, it was in prosaic speech that, considering the practical aspect of the question, I said: "I wish you luck, but you will need a long patience, besides time and money."

"I have them," was the answer. "The first was the hardest to acquire. Time--I could wait ages if I knew the end was certain; and, as to money, when it came too late to save her, someone died in the old country, and part of the property fell to me. Well, you can guess my purpose--using all means short of bloodshed and perjury to take him in his own net. She who sleeps there was pitiful and gentle, but she hated oppression and cruelty, and I feel that if she knows--and I think it is so--she would smile on me."

Boone's face was plain before me under the moon. It was quietly confident, calm, and yet stamped with a solemn purpose. He had, it seemed, mastered his passions, and would perhaps be the more dangerous because he followed tirelessly, with brain unclouded by hatred or impatience. I felt that there was much I should say in the shape of encouragement and sympathy, but the only words that rose to my lips were: "He has fiendish cunning."

"And I was once a careless fool!" said Boone. "Still, the most cunning forget, and blunder at times. I, however, can never forget, and when he does, it will be ill for Lane. I have--I don't know why--spoken to you, Ormesby, as I have spoken to no man in the Dominion before, and I feel I need ask no promise of you. I am going east with the sunrise, but I must be alone now."

I left him to keep his vigil with his dead, and camped in a hollow some distance away. That is to say, I tethered the horse, rolled a thick brown blanket round me, and used the saddle for a pillow. There was no hardship in this. The grasses, if a trifle damp, were soft and springy, the night still and warm; and many a better man has slept on a worse bed in the Western Dominion. Slumber did not, however, come at first, and I lay watching the stars, neither asleep nor wholly awake, until they grew indistinct, and a woman's figure, impalpable as the moonlight, gathered shape upon a rise of the prairie.

It was borne in on me that this was Helen Boone risen from her sleep; for she was ethereal, and her face with its passionless calmness not that of a mortal, while no shadow touched the grasses when she passed, and, fading, gave place or changed into one I knew. Haldane's elder daughter looked down at me from the rise, but she, too, seemed of another world, wearing a cold serenity and a beauty that was not of this earth. She also changed with a marvelous swiftness before my bewildered vision, and it was now Lucille Haldane who moved across the prairie with soft words of pity on her lips and yet anger in her eyes. She, at least, appeared not transcendental, but a living, breathing creature of flesh and blood subject to human weaknesses, and I raised myself on one elbow to speak to her.

The prairie was empty. Nothing moved on it; even the horse stood still, while, when I sank back again, moonlight and starlight went out together; and perhaps it was as well, for, sleeping or waking, a plain stock-raiser has no business with such fancies, and next morning I convinced myself that I had dreamed it all. I had doubtless done so, and the explanation was simple. The influence of the night, or the words of Boone, had galvanized into abnormal activity some tiny convolution of the brain; but, even that once granted, it formed the beginning, not the end, of the question, and Boone had, it seemed, supplied the best solution when he said we know so little as yet.

The sun was lifting above the prairie when I set out in search of Boone with my horse's bridle over my arm. I met him swinging across the springy sod in long elastic strides, but there was nothing about him which suggested one preyed upon by morbid fancies or the visionary. His eyes were a little heavy, but that was all, for with both of us the dreams of the night had melted before the rising sun. The air had been freshened by the dew, and the breeze, which dried the grasses, roused one to a sense of human necessities and the knowledge that there was a day's work to be done. I was also conscious of an unfanciful and very prosaic emptiness.

"I wonder where we could get anything to eat. I have a long ride before me," said Boone, when he greeted me.

"It can hardly be safe for you to be seen anywhere in this neighborhood," I said; and Boone smiled.

"I walked openly into the railroad depot and asked for a package yesterday. You forget that I partly changed my appearance, while, so far as memory serves, only two police troopers occasionally saw me. The others?--you should know your own kind better, Ormesby. Do you think any settler in this region would take money--and Lane offered a round sum--for betraying me?"

"No," I answered with a certain pride; "that is to say, not unless he were a nominee of the man you name."

No proof of this was needed, but one was supplied us. A man who presently strode out of a hollow stopped and stared at Boone. He was, to judge from his appearance, one of the stolid bushmen who come out West from the forests of Northern Ontario--tireless men with ax and plow, but with little knowledge of anything else.

"I'm kind of good at remembering faces, and I've seen you before," he said. "You are the man who used to own my place."

"How often have you seen me?" asked Boone.

"Once in clear daylight, twice back there at night," answered the stranger.

"Did you know that you could have earned a good many dollars by telling the police as much?" asked Boone; and the other regarded him with a frown.

"I'm a peaceable man when people will let me be; but I don't take that kind of talk from anybody."

"I was sure, or I shouldn't have asked you," said Boone. "They don't raise mean Canadians yonder in the country you came from among the rocks and trees. You're not overrich, either, are you? to judge from my own experience, for I put more money into the land than I ever took out of it. However, that doesn't concern the main thing. Just now I'm a hungry man."

The big axman's face relaxed, and he laughed the deep, almost silent, laugh which those like him learn in the shadow of the northern pines. There is as little mirth in it as there is in most of their hard lives, but one can generally trust them with soul and body.

"Breakfast will be ready soon's I get home. You just come along," he said.

We followed him to the log-house which had risen beside Boone's dilapidated dwelling. A neatly-dressed, dark-haired woman was busy about the stove, and our host presented us very simply. "Here's the man who shot the money-lender, and a partner, Lou."

The woman, who laid down the pan she held, cast a quick glance of interest at my companion. "We have seen you, and wondered why you never looked in," she said.

"Did you twice do a great kindness for me?" asked Boone.

The woman's black eyes softened. "Sure, that was a little thing, and don't count for much. The posies were so pretty, and I figured they'd keep fresh a little longer," she said.

"It was one of the little things which count the most," said Boone.

Thereupon the woman's olive-tinted face flushed into warmer color, while her long-limbed spouse observed: "She's of the French habitant stock, and their ways of showing they haven't forgotten aren't the same as ours."

Breakfast was set before us, and I think Boone had made firm friends of our hosts before we finished the meal. He had abilities in this direction. They, on their part, were very simple people, the man silent for the most part, rugged in face, and abrupt when he spoke, but shrewd in his own way it seemed withal, and probably as generous as he was hard at a bargain. His wife was of the more emotional Latin stock, quick in her movements, and one might surmise equally quick in sympathy.

"You are not the man who bought the place at the sale," said Boone, at length. "I can remember him tolerably well, and, if I couldn't, one would hardly figure you were likely to work under Lane."

"No!" and the farmer laughed his curious laugh again. "No. I shouldn't say. We never worked for any master since my grandfather got fired for wanting his own way by the Hudson's Bay, and I guess neither Lane nor the devil could handle the rest of us. He once came round to try."

"How?" I asked, and the gaunt farmer sighed a little as he filled his pipe. "This way. He was open to finance me to buy up a poor devil's place, and if I'd had a little less temper and a little more sense I might have obliged him, and landed a good pile of money, too."

"He's just talking. Don't you believe him," broke in the woman, with an indignant glance at her spouse.

I fancied Boone saw the drift of this, which was more than I did, and the farmer nodded oracularly in his direction when I asked: "What did you do instead?"

"Just reached for a big ox-goad, and walked up to him like a blame millionaire or a hot-headed fool. Them negotiations broke right off, and he lit out across the prairie talking 'bout assaults and violences at twenty mile an hour. Some other man will know better, and that's just how Lane will get badly left some day."

The woman laughed immoderately. "It was way better'n a circus," she said. "He didn't tell you he rammed the ox-goad into the skittish horse, and Lane he just hugged the beast."

The picture of the full-fledged Lane, who made a very poor figure in the saddle at any time, careering panic stricken across the prairie with his arms about the neck of a bolting horse appealed to me; but as to the possibility of the usurer's future discomfiture I was still in the dark, and asked for enlightenment.

"It's easy," said the farmer. "Lane he squeezes somebody until he can't hold on to his property, then he puts up the money and another man buys the place dirt-cheap for him, in his own name. Suppose that man goes back on Lane? 'This place is my own,' says he. Well, he's recorded owner, isn't he? and I figure Lane wouldn't be mighty keen on dragging that kind of case into the courts."

"But he wouldn't put any man in unless he had him by the throat," said I; and the farmer grinned.

"Juss so! He'll choke some fellow with grit in him a bit too much some day, and when the wrong breed of scoundrel is jammed right up between the devil and the sea, it's quite likely he'll go for the devil before he starts swimming."

"I"--and Boone regarded the farmer fixedly--"quite agree with you. Do you mind telling me what you gave for this place?"

Our host named the sum without hesitation, adding that he would be glad to show us over it; and Boone's face grew somber as he said: "It is more than twice what it was sold for when it was stolen from me."

We walked around the plowed land, inspected the stock, stables, and barns, and when, after a cordial parting with our hosts, we rode away, Boone turned to me: "It was an ordeal, and harrowing to see what might have been but for an insatiable man's cunning and my poverty. Another half-hour of the memories would have been too much for me. Well, we can let that pass. They were kind souls, and this last lesson may have been necessary. Strange, isn't it, that the simple are sometimes shrewder than the wise?"

"For instance?" I said; and Boone smiled significantly.

"Yonder very plain farmer has hit upon a weak spot in Lane's armor which the keenest brain on this prairie--I don't mean my own, of course--has hitherto failed to see."

Soon afterwards we separated, each going his different way.