Part 20

"You know what I mean," said Nahnya quietly. "Why waste talk?"

Philippe's eyes suddenly blazed up. "You are mine now!" he said.

"Not yet," said Nahnya coolly. "I say you can come with me if you want. I make no promise."

"You are mine!" repeated Philippe louder. "There is nothing to say!"

"There is much to say!" said Nahnya, with a direct look. "If you lay hands on me without I give you leave, I will kill you!"

There was a short, fierce struggle between the two pairs of eyes. The man's eyes gave way.

"I not want quarrel with you," said Nahnya presently, in a softened voice. "You helped me very much. I have a kindness for you."

His eyes stole back to her face furtively and humbly.

"I will marry you if you want," Nahnya went on. "Because I have learned a girl cannot be alone. And I have no people now. I will make you a good wife if you want me. I will always work hard. I will try to make you a rich, big man. But first the truth must be told."

"What truth?" muttered Philippe.

"I do not love you," she said.

"This is white people's talk," said Philippe. "What is love? You marry me. You keep my lodge."

"I love the white man," Nahnya said firmly.

He sprang up with a threatening gesture. In his simplicity he thought she was baiting him. His face was dark with wounded self-love.

Nahnya's eyes held his unflinchingly. "If you strike me I not stop loving him," she said.

The youth was no match for her. His eyes could not support the strong light behind hers. He turned away muttering.

"Do you want to marry me?" Nahnya asked after a while.

He turned on her with the violent upbraiding of a man's jealousy, which is much the same, Cree or English. Nahnya saw that he had misunderstood what she meant by "love." Interrupting him, she made the point clear.

"No man has had me!" she proudly concluded.

He scowled, regarding her doubtfully. The boastful male in him was loath to confess it, but he was like wax in her hands.

"Red and white cannot mate together," Nahnya said, with her strange, fatalistic calmness. "He is gone away. I will never see him again."

"Swear it!" demanded Philippe.

She raised her hand. "I swear it!" she said, without a tremor.

He was much comforted. He scowled still, not knowing what to say.

"Do you want to marry me?" she asked again.

It was a kind of stricken look that he turned on her. "I want to marry you," he murmured.

"There is my hand," said Nahnya. "Deal straight with me, and I will do all that I say."

He fondled her hand clumsily.

Nahnya's eyes became kindly. "You were a good boy at the school," she said. "It was good talk that we talked together. Why do you want to be called a bad man now, and not work, and drink, and make trouble everywhere?"

"I will tell you why I change," said Philippe boastfully. "I go among the white men, thinking to find my brothers. My father was a white man, and married to my mother in church. But they think little of me because my skin is dark. They treat me like a slave, and give me hard work and little pay like a slave. So I hate them. I am bad! I make all the trouble I can!"

"White men only laugh at a bad man," said Nahnya, "and put him in jail. You are going to make yourself a wise, big man now."

Philippe's self-love made its last stand. "I am a man," he said scowling. "It is not for a woman to tell me what to do."

Nahnya made no answer. She was playing with some bits of broken stone.

"I will be the master in my own lodge!" Philippe said louder. "You will work and keep quiet!"

"If you want me to live with you, you must live straight," said Nahnya, with an ominous softness. "You think it is fun to be a bad man. It is not fun to be a bad man's wife!"

"I will do what I want!" said Philippe boastfully.

"Look!" said Nahnya, pointing to the stones she had been arranging. "Here I have made the sign of the cross. Kneel, and put your right hand on it, and swear to live straight!"

Philippe laughed. Nahnya rose to her feet with the same dangerously quiet air. She did not look at him. Anxiety began to undermine his scornful smile.

"What are you going to do?" he asked sullenly.

"Swear!" she said. "Or I will jump off this rock into the valley!"

He sprang up. She was quicker than he. He saw her headed straight and determined for the edge. He stopped dead.

"Nahnya!" he cried hoarsely.

She stopped on the very edge, looking down into the gulf with a kind of wistful desirousness. One would almost have said that she was sorry he had cried out.

"I will swear it!" he cried quickly. He dropped to his knees beside the cross of stones.

She came back from the edge with a sigh. "I will do all that I said," she murmured, as if to herself.

The way down into the shallow valley on the other side was easy. As they proceeded Nahnya laid out their plans for the future with a kind of ecstasy in her sad eyes.

"All day I am thinking what we will do. We will gather those like ourselves who are not red and not white, and make a new people of them. First we will go to Caribou Lake and talk with the people. They have steamboats now on Caribou Lake and the little river and the big river; the York boats are rotting on the beach and the half-breeds have no work to do. They are poor and sick and full of hate for the white men. I know a fine country where the Tamarack River rises in the hills. There are no white men near, and the Kakisa Indians who hunted there are all dead or gone away with other tribes. It is the best fur country there is left. We will tell the people about this country, and make a village there. There is good hunting for all. The company will make a post there, and you shall be the trader!"

XXIV

EPILOGUE

At evening of a day early in August a raft landed on the beach below Fort Cheever. It bore a middle-aged man, a girl, and a young man. The last named ceaselessly tossed and muttered in a fever; he was strapped to the raft to keep him from rolling off.

The older man carried him up the bank. The girl followed, tottering a little with fatigue. There were dark circles under her eyes and her lips were white. At the top they met David Cranston the trader, in whose grim face surprise struggled with a welcoming courtesy. Seeing into the sick man's face he started.

"Is it Ralph Cowdray?" he asked.

The other man nodded.

"The poor lad!" exclaimed Cranston. "He stopped here six weeks ago. He is much changed."

"I am taking him to a doctor," the other said. "I am Jim Sholto from Milburn Gulch. This is my daughter."

Cranston bade her welcome with clumsy, old-fashioned deference. At Fort Cheever a white girl was like a creature from another world. Looking at her, his grim face softened with commiseration.

To Jim he said: "There's no doctor nearer than the Crossing. I expect the steamboat on her last trip within a week. Will you wait here for her?"

Jim shook his head. "Too uncertain," he said. "He might die on our hands. We will raft it down."

"Ye do well," said Cranston. "It is two hundred miles, but you can do it easy in three days by travelling nights, too. The river is smooth all the way. There's a kind of hotel at the Crossing where you can make him comfortable, and the police doctor is there."

"We will go on as soon as we eat," said Jim.

"I will send the little boys to cut spruce boughs to make you comfortable beds on the raft," said Cranston.

"Have you any remedies?" asked Jim. "We came without medicines."

"I will ask my wife," said Cranston. "She knows the simples of the country."

"Much obliged to ye," said Jim.

"The poor lad!" said David, looking into the flushed face and the sightless eyes. "I took a great liking to him. He had an honest way with him." Glancing sideways at Kitty, he said: "I wondered what brought him into the country. How did this happen?"

Jim looked at his daughter and bit his lip. The quiet tears were rolling down Kitty's face. "He capsized in the Stanley rapids and hit his shoulder on a rock," he said grimly. "He came to our shack much the same as you see him now."

"Was that the first you saw of him?" asked David, in surprise.

"It was the first."

"He was in the country before. There is some strange tale behind this," said David, wagging his head.

"I believe you," said Jim grimly.

Two months later in time, and in distance five hundred miles from Fort Cheever, the little steamboat _Northern Belle_ was making her way blithely down on the current of the Miwasa River on her last trip of the season. On the upper deck Ralph, a shadow of the blooming youth that had first set forth from Fort Edward, lay sleeping in an invalid chair that the "boys" at the Crossing had made him for the journey. Beside him sat Kitty, almost as pale and wasted as her patient, but with a soft triumph in her eyes; he was safely on the mend.

He stirred and murmured her name.

"Yes?" she answered, in her quick hushed voice.

"Nothing. I just wanted to make sure you were there."

"Lazy!" she said. "Why didn't you open your eyes and look?"

"My eyelids weigh pounds!" he said. "I can sleep twenty-three and a half hours a day!"

He lay musing for a while. "Kitty?" he said again.

"Well?" One could see "Dear!" on her lips, but it was not uttered.

"I was thinking--I'm glad I didn't hop the twig after all!"

She did not answer.

"It's just beginning to come back--the will to live, I mean."

Made curious by her continued silence, he raised his lids at last, and saw that her eyes were big with tears. "What's the matter?" he asked quickly.

"Nothing!" she said. "I can't help thinking--all the time you lay there, you wished to die. In your delirium you prayed to die."

"That's funny!" he said, with an air of calm interest. "I remember that. It was as if some force stronger than I kept me from passing peacefully out. How it hurt!"

"Don't think about it," she said.

"It's over," he said. "The sun feels good. I feel like a new-born babe, with everything to learn and everything to experience all over again!"

"You've talked enough."

"Where are we?" he asked, defying her with a lazy smile.

"We will get to Miwasa landing before supper. We will stay there until you are a little stronger. Then we'll drive the hundred miles to town in a democrat. Father made the arrangements on his way out."

"How good you've both been to me!" murmured Ralph.

Kitty let this pass with a private smile. "I got a letter from father at Silver landing this morning," she said. "It was posted as they were leaving Fort Edward. They are all back at Milburn Gulch by now."

"What will they do without you?"

"They have taken a man cook in with them."

"Are you going in later?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Dad says after all it's no country for a woman."

"What will you do?"

"I shall go to live with my aunt in Winnipeg, and study something, so that I can earn my own living. A teacher, perhaps."

"That's a lonely life!" said Ralph.

She looked away. "Better than being idle," she said.

"I must begin to think what I am going to do," said Ralph.

"Plenty of time."

"I shall go home for a while, of course. The mater will luxuriate in a convalescent son! Then I must build up a practice in some growing city. A doctor goes to seed in the wilds; there is not enough to do. I begin to feel a need of work!"

"Work!" said Kitty, looking at his transparent hands with a smile of affectionate scorn.

"Doctoring's a great job!" said Ralph. "Where would you advise me to establish myself?"

"How should I know?" murmured Kitty, head averted.

"What kind of a place is Winnipeg?"

A slow crimson tide crept up from her neck to her forehead. Fortunately Ralph's eyes were closed. "A busy, ugly town," she said. "But it's growing very fast. They say it has a great future."

"As soon as I am on my feet I'll come up and look it over," he said.

He soon fell asleep again. Kitty leaned her arms on the rail, and gazed dreamily at the brown flood with its squadrons of foam vessels sailing demurely under the steamboat's counter; and at the shore with its endless procession of pine trees wrapped in the delicate veils of October. She chid herself for the little spring of happiness that welled in her breast, and sought to choke it with common sense, but it continually found new ways out.

Downstream she saw a canoe lying on a point, and behind it a thread of smoke ascending among the trees. They had seen no sign of humanity since they had left Silver Landing sixty miles upstream, and she waited curiously to see what manner of people these were. Presently she distinguished two figures, a man lying on the ground and a woman bending over the fire. The steamboat was travelling fast with the current and she had no sooner made them out than she was upon them. It was a point of rock, and they passed close enough to toss a biscuit ashore.

The woman straightened, and Kitty instantly recognized the firm round figure and the graceful, proudly poised head. As the steamboat swept by they looked directly into each other's faces. A wild agitation shook Kitty; it was as if the terrible past had been fished up and suddenly placed before her. The other woman's hands went to her breast in the old quick way. She glanced quickly from Kitty to the sleeping form in the chair and back again. Then she smiled--a wonderful smile irradiating her sad face from within. Kitty experienced a quick revulsion. The tears sprang to her eyes. She stood up, and leaning over the rail, kissed her hand to the rapidly lessening figure on shore, A bend in the river intervened.

THE END

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK