Chapter 10

But it was the two pack horses that offered the most diverting study of character. When they left the Settlement behind, Garth cast off their leaders. In Emmy, a rotund little mare, they had secured a treasure. Emmy had an indifferent air toward them, worthy of a breed; but unlike a breed, she was thoroughly business-like. Where the great mudholes of unknown depth blocked the trail, and they must strike into the bush, she required no guidance. They laughed and admired, to see her stop, looking this way and that, and deliberately pick her way through, always with due regard to the height and breadth of the pack on her back. Emmy declined to be hurried; she had an air that said as plainly as words, if they didn't like her pace, they could leave her behind, and be hanged to them!

The remaining animal was Emmy's son, a half-broken colt, whose only virtue was that he would not stray very far from his mother. Mistatimoosis was his mouthful of a name. He forgot his pack sometimes, and striking it full tilt against a tree, would be knocked endwise in the trail, blinking and dismayed, as who should say, "Who hit me?" The thing that caused them the heartiest laughter was to see Mistatimoosis's endless attempts to steal the leadership of the caravan from his mother. It was the only thing that could tempt Emmy out of her sedate pace. On a fair piece of road the two of them would race at top speed for half a mile; and the colt was continually making sly detours into the bush to get around his mother. But she kept him in his place behind.

The riders finding they could safely leave the packhorses to follow, had ridden ahead to spy out grass and water for the noon spell. They were walking their horses over the turf bordering the trail, when suddenly from among the trees came with startling distinctness the sound of a voice. They reined up, astonished. It was the gentle, ambling voice of a loquacious old man; and his conversation there in the wilderness was as quiet and intimate as chimney-corner talk.

"I should say half-past eleven," they heard. "When Mr. Sun sits down on yonder spruce tree we'll make a break. So work your jaws good, Mother, old girl; and you Buck, my dear, stop looking around like a fool and get busy! Meanwhile, we'll pack up the grub-box."

Garth and Natalie smiled at each other. There was nothing very alarming about this.

"Will you have a pipe of baccy now, Tom Lillywhite?" the same voice resumed. "Thanks, old man, don't mind if I do! Is there any cut? No? Well shave it close."

There was a pause here, while the speaker presumably filled his pipe. Then some one drew an audible sigh of content; and a kind of dialogue took place--though there was but the one voice full of quaint lifts and falls. Garth and Natalie, smiling broadly, listened without shame.

"Ah! a fine day, a bellyful of bacon, and a pipeful of tobacco!--would you change with a moneyed man, Tom Lillywhite?"

"Well I don't know, sir! Mebbe he don't enjoy his grub as much as us, havin' gen'ally the dyspepsy; but how about the winter, old sport, when we don't fetch up no stoppin'-house; and has to make a bed in the snow, hey? It's then a flannel bed-gown looks good to old bones; let alone woolly slippers and a feather bed! Seems I wouldn't kick agin the job of takin' care o' money in the winter time!"

"Ah! g'long with you, Tom Lillywhite! You'd a been dead long ago if you had money! Swole up and bust with good eatin', y'old epicoor! You'd be havin' a pig killed fresh every week if you had money!"

"Say, b'lieve I would cut some dash if I had money! I'd build me a house of lumber clear through, and I'd paint it all over, paint it blue! And I'd have sawdust on the settin'-room floor and a brass spittoon in every corner! 'Have a chair,' I'd say to stoppers, not lettin' on I was puffed up at all. 'Have a ten-cent seegar. Don't mention it! Don't mention it! I get a case full in every Fall!'"

Here there was a jolly chuckle.

Their packhorses joining them noisily, the dialogue was cut short.

"Some one comin'," said the voice.

Rounding the clump of bushes, Garth and Natalie found themselves in a grassy opening in the bush. An untraced wagon stood in the centre; and two horses browsed. Immediately under the bushes, an old man sat on the ground. They instinctively looked around for the other persons brought into his conversation; but, save for the horses, he was alone.

At the sight of them his face lighted up with the pleased naïveté of a child. "How do! How do!" he said immediately, without getting up or raising his voice at all. "My horses are quiet. They won't tech yours. The spring is down there at the foot of the spruce. Just blow up my fire a little and it will do for you." He seemed to take them entirely for granted; and he spoke as if resuming a dropped conversation.

There was something very troll-like in the old figure, squatting on the ground; in his bright, glancing eyes, in his incessant, matter-of-fact loquacity, and the slight, peculiar gesticulation, with which he illustrated his talk. He was all of a colour; high moccasins, breeches, shirt and cap were weathered to the same grayish-brown shade--and that much the colour of his skin. Against a background of withered grass, only his white hair would have been visible. He was like some good-tempered, little familiar of the forest.

He stared hard at Natalie in his bright-eyed, impersonal way; and as soon as Garth, having made his horses comfortable, came to build up the fire, he started in with his questions.

"Where you going?"

"Spirit River Crossing," said Garth.

"Thinking of settling?"

Garth shook his head.

"No, you don't look like settlers. Company business, maybe?"

"No," said Garth.

"Police? Gov'ment survey?"

"Private business," said Garth--his usual answer to the question direct.

Baffled inquisitiveness, vice of the kindest natures, made the old man's face ugly; and for a moment he looked like a wicked troll. For a little while he preserved an offended silence; but then, probably recollecting that he would hear the whole story at the Settlement, or simply because he could not keep still any longer, his face cleared, and he resumed his engaging, inconsequential babble.

"See that horse over there, the buckskin? Best horse I ever had! True buckskin! Mark the zebra stripes round his legs, Miss; and the black stripe on his backbone. You can't kill a buck; he's got more lives than a cat. I call the old one Mother; she's good-natured, she is!"

"You're a freighter, I see," remarked Garth as a leader.

"Sure thing, stranger! Tom Lillywhite and his team is known to every settler in the country! Been here thirty-five year; and always on the move! Never sleep in the same place two nights going! That wagon there, and the grub-box is my home. It's a variegated life!"

Garth bethought himself the old man would likely prove a valuable source of information. "You must know everybody in the country!" he said, feeling his way.

"None better!" said Tom Lillywhite, bridling with pride.

"Are there many white men at the Crossing?" asked Garth.

"Quite a crowd," said the old man; "eight or nine at the least. There's the two traders, and Mert Haywood the farmer, and old Turner the J. P., and the priest, and the English missionary, and the school-master; that's seven. Then there's old man Mackensie but you wouldn't hardly call him a white man--smoked too deep, and squaw-ridden."

"Is that all?" said Garth, disappointed of his quest.

"Well, there's a sort of another. He doesn't regularly belong to the Crossing but he comes into the store for his goods once or twict a year. I forgot him--most everybody's forgot him now. It's Bert Mabyn."

Garth and Natalie pricked up their ears; and their hearts began to beat.

"I got good cause to know Bert Mabyn, too," continued old Tom innocently; while the other two listened still as mice, and apprehensive of disclosures to be made. "But that's all past. I don't bear him no ill-will now. He's a cur'us chap, a little teched I guess; but as pleasant a spoken and amoosin' a feller as another feller could want to have with him on the road! Want to hear about him?"

Garth looked at Natalie dubiously.

"Yes," she said boldly.

"Well, it was three years ago," began Tom Lillywhite, with the zest of the true story-teller. "The Gov'ment sent four surveyin' parties in; and I had more'n I could do freightin' from the Settlement to the different camps. It was rough haulin', you understand, over the lines they cut through the bush, straight as a string over muskeg and coulée. You couldn't load over twenty hundredweight, and sometimes you had to dump half of that, and go back for it. But right good pay, Gov'ment pay is.

"I needed another team bad, and I see a good chance to get one on credit from Dick Staley, with the wagon and all; but I couldn't get no white men to drive it for me. A breed, you understand, soon kills your horses on you!

"Well, it might be I was settin' outside the French outfit, talkin' it over," he went on tranquilly, little suspecting with what meaning his story was charged for the two strangers; "when along comes a feller and asts for me. Say, he was a sight! He was wearin' black clothes, though it were a workin'-day; and all muddied and tore, showin' the skin under; and his coat was pinned acrost the neck, with a safety-pin 'cause he hadn't no shirt. He had a Sunday hat on too--all busted. At the best he weren't no beauty; his teeth was out."

Natalie shuddered.

Garth, suffering for her, could not bear to meet her eyes. "Perhaps you'd rather hear another story," he suggested.

She braced herself. "No! Go on!" she said.

"Soon as I see him, I knew who he was," continued old Tom; "for I hear the fellers talk about a white man that took passage up from the Landing on Phillippe's boat. He let them pull him all the way; and when they got to Grier's point, he hadn't no money. They took it out of his skin; and say, when a white man is beat by a breed it's good-day to him up here! In a hundred years he couldn't live it down.

"'Do you want to hire a man?' says he mumbling-like; he was too far down to meet your eye.

"'Hum!' says I thoughtful, 'I want a _man_,' I says.

"You should have heard the fellers laugh at that! They still talk about it! 'Tom Lillywhite, he wants a man', they say. It's quite a word in the country. 'Tom Lillywhite wants a _man_!'"

The old freighter went off into an interminable chuckling over the antique jest.

It was inexpressibly painful to Natalie to have Garth there, a witness to her humiliation; but she would not stop the story-teller, nor let Garth stop him.

"However, thinks I, you can sometimes make a man out of unpromisin' mater'al," he resumed. "And in the end I took him for his grub. That was Bert Mabyn. For three months I didn't regret it; he was used to horses, and was first-rate company on the trail. I didn't give him no money--said he didn't want none--but I fed him up good, and he soon got fat and sassy. I give him other things too. I couldn't stand for the poor wretch a shiverin' by my fire in his buttoned-up coat, so I give him blankets; and afterward an outfit of clothes.

"What do you think was the first thing he ever ast me for?--a razor and a glass! And every day after that he used to shave hisself--every day mind you, if we was in the thickest part of the bush! And forever trimmin' of his nails, and polishin' 'em to make 'em shine! Wasn't that remarkable?

"He was a great talker. Nights around the fire he used to tell me all about himself. Seems he comes of real high-toned folks outside; but went to the bad young. Said he come West three years before that again, full of good resolutions, which lasted just so long as his money. Since then he'd been a grub-rider 'round the ranches, and dish-washer in hotels, and, 'scusin' your presence, Miss, worse than that--but he hadn't no shame about it!

"I liked the feller. He wasn't no good, but he had that persuasive way with him! And he knew so much more than me! You'd think a man 'ud feel shame to tell such stories on himself; but no! he'd make out as you ought to like him for bein' such a good-for-nothing waster; and by Gum! in the end you did! Never see such a feller!

"Well, all summer we travelled, me and him; him always behind me on the trail; and I hadn't any fault to find. But come September I had a rush lot up to Whitefish Lake; and at the same time there was some stuff wanted in a hurry in Pentland's camp over on the Great Smoky. So for the first time we divided. I sent him to Pentland's over this very trail!

"I got back long before he did. After a while word come from Pentland, where in thunder were the goods? It was after the first snow before Mabyn come back. He was a wreck and the horses were just alive, and no more. He told a story how his wagon capsized in the river, and he lost everything; but the whiskey gave the lie to that. By and by we found he'd buried a keg of it, outside the Settlement. In the Spring when it was too late to do anything, it all come out through a breed. Seems away up by Fort St. Pierre, he met one of them crooked traders, that sometimes sneaks acrost the mountains; and he sold him the stuff for a keg of rot-gut. When I hear that I was thankful he brought back the horses at all. The business near busted me; for I had to make good three hundred worth of groceries to Pentland; and sacrificed the second team, 'count of the shape they were in. That was what Bert Mabyn cost _me_!"

"Didn't you have him arrested?" asked Garth indignantly.

Tom shrugged. "What were the use of that? The inspector was after me to prosecute; but it was too late to get my money back, and put flesh on the horses--besides, I was too busy. Of course, it weren't just the same as robbin' me in cold blood," he added in the tone of one who must be fair; "for it were the whiskey, you see."

Natalie kept her face averted from the old man. "And what has become of this man since?" she asked, steadily controlling her voice.

"Oh, he hung around the Settlement, sponging on one and another till he were kicked out; then he come down to the breeds. It was a great honour for them to have a white man of any kind runnin' after them, you see, so they put up with him. Then he drifted West, up Ostachegan way; and lately, I understand, he's taken up a deserted shack he found on Clearwater Lake, away up on the bench there, northwest of the Spirit. There they tell me he lives all alone; but no one's seen him in a dog's age."

* * * * *

Garth and Natalie avoided everything beyond the merest commonplaces to each other until they were alone; and even after Tom Lillywhite, bidding them farewell, had driven off, chirping to his horses, it was a long time before either had the courage to make a move toward overcoming the ghastly constraint his story had caused between them.

"Haven't we heard enough?" said Garth quietly at last. "Need you go any further?"

Natalie in the interim had had time to pass her emotional crisis. She was very pale, and her eyes were big; but she was now calmer than he. "I have heard enough, surely," she said; "but after coming all this way it would seem cowardly, wouldn't it, to be satisfied with hearsay evidence?--and there is still my promise to his mother."

Her tone impressed Garth with the utter hopelessness of trying to dissuade her. "But how can I let you expose yourself to--to what we may find!" he groaned.

"I am not a child," said Natalie quietly. "And I shall not quail at the mere sight of ugliness." She turned away from him. "Besides," she added in a lower tone, "you know the worst now; and that was the hardest thing to bear--your hearing it I mean. No," she went on, facing him again, wistfully and valorously; "it promises to be _very_ ugly, but then I undertook it, you see. I am going on."

They could not bear to meet each other's eyes; and miserably turning their backs, affected to busy themselves with small tasks. Natalie, quivering with the shame of the lash all unwittingly applied by old Tom, longed with an inexpressible longing to have Garth with a hint or a look assure her that he loved her, and so, thrusting the wretch Mabyn out of their charmed circle, reinstate her in her self-respect. But poor Garth in his clumsy, masculine delicacy thought that to obtrude himself at such a moment would only hurt her more. He kept silent, and he averted his eyes, and Natalie, misunderstanding, tasted the very dregs of shame.

XIII

THE NEWLY-MARRIED PAIR

Out on the bosom of that infinite prairie, which rolls its unmeasured miles north and west of the Spirit River, a last place of mystery and dreams, still unharnessed by the geographers, and reluctantly written down "unexplored" on their maps, two human figures were riding slowly, with their horses' heads turned away from the last habitations of men. The prairie undulated about them like a sea congealed in motion--but seemingly vaster than the sea; for at sea the horizon is ever near at hand; while here the very unevenness of the ground marked, and fixed, and opened up the awful distances. The grass was short, rich and browned by the summer sun; and it mantled the distant rounds and hollows with the changing lights of beaver fur. The only breaks in its expanse were here and there, springing in the sheltered hollows, coppices or bluffs of slender poplar saplings, with crowding stems, as close and even as hair. The leaves were yellowed by the first frosts.

The man rode ahead, slouching on the back of his wretched cayuse, with eyes blank alike of inward thought or outward observation. He was not yet forty years old, but bore the cast of premature decay, more aged than age. What showed of his hair beneath his hat was sparse and faded; and of his visible teeth he had no more than a perishing stump or two left in his jaws. His discontented, satiated, exhausted mien, had a strange look there in the fresh and potent wilderness.

The girl who followed with a travoise dragging at her pony's heels, was, on the other hand, in harmony with the land. Of the extremes to which the breeds run in looks, she was of the rare beauties of that strange race. Her features were moulded in a delicate, definite harmony that would have marked her out in any assemblage of beauty; and the spirit of beauty was there too. There were actually pride and dignity under the arched brows--so capricious is Nature in shaping her wilder daughters--and in the deep soft eyes brooded, even when she was happiest, a heart-disquieting quality of wistfulness. She was happy now; and ever and anon she raised her eyes to the slouching back of the man riding ahead with a look of passionate abandon in which there was nothing civilized at all. She was slenderer than the run of brown maidens, and her clumsy print dress could not hide the girlish, perfect contour of her shoulders. In her dusky cheeks there glowed a tinge of deep rose; testimony to the lingering influence of the white blood in her veins.

Topping a rise, the man paused for her to overtake him.

"Here we are, Rina," he said indifferently. His voice was oddly cracked. His manner toward her expressed a good-humoured tolerance. His eyes approved her casually; inner tenderness there was none.

The girl apparently was sensible of no lack--but the breeds do not bring up their daughters to expect tenderness. Her eyes sparkled. "How pretty it is, 'Erbe't!" she breathed. "Ver' moch good land!" She spoke the pretty, clipped English of the convent school.

At their feet lay a shallow valley, hidden close until the very moment of stumbling upon it. In it was a sparkling slough but large enough to be dignified with the name of lake. It was something the shape of a gourd, with a long end that curved out of sight below, a very girdle of blue velvet binding the waists of the brown hills. At their left the shores of the wider part of the lake, the bulb of the gourd, were, in unexpected contrast to the bareness of the uplands, heavily wooded with great cottonwood trees and spruce. A grassy islet ringed with willows seemed to be moored here like the barge of some woodland princess. Away beyond, elevated on a grassy terrace at the head of the lake, and overlooking its whole expanse, stood a tiny weather-beaten shack, startlingly conspicuous in that great expanse of untouched nature. Sheltered by the hills from the howling blasts of the prairie above; and with wood, water and unlimited game at its door, it was a wholly desirable situation for a Northern dwelling--but it was seventy-five miles off the trail.

The girl brought her pony alongside Mabyn's; and slipped her hand into his. "It is jus' right!" she whispered. "We will be ver' happy, 'Erbe't!"

He let her hand fall carelessly. "It's damn lonesome!" he grumbled.

All the shy boldness of an enamoured girl peeped out of Rina's eyes, as she whispered: "I'm glad it's lonesome! I don' want nobody to come--but you!"

Mabyn was unimpressed. He struck the ribs of his tired pony with his heels. "Come on," he said; and led the way down the incline.

Later, reaching the shack, on the threshold Rina spread out her arms with an unconscious gesture. "This is my home!" she cried. "I will jus' love it!"

Mabyn looking around at the gaping walls, the empty panes and the foul litter, laughed jeeringly at her simplicity.

The girl was too happy to feel the sting. "I will fix it!" she said stoutly. "I will mak' it like an outside house. It will be as nice than the priest's parlour in the Settlement!" She clasped her hands against her breast in the intensity of her eagerness. "Jus' you wait, 'Erbe't! Some day I will have white curtains in the window! and a piece of carpet on the floor! and a holy picture on the wall! Oh! I will work so hard!"

"Get about the supper, Rina," said Mabyn shortly.

She prepared the meal at the rough mud fireplace built across the corner of the shack, for they had no stove; and they ate squatting on the floor in the breed fashion, for neither was there a table. Afterward Mabyn dragged the bench--a relic of the former tenant, and sole article of furniture they possessed--outside the door; and sat upon it, smoking, yawning, looking across the lake with lack-lustre eyes.

Rina having redd up the shack, came to the doorway, where she stood looking at him wistfully. Finally she hovered toward him and retreated; and her hands stole to her breast. She was longing mightily to sit beside him; but she did not dare. In a breed's wife it would have been highly presumptuous, and would very likely have been rewarded with a blow; but Rina had a dim notion that a white man's wife had the right to sit beside him--still she was afraid. In the end her desire overcame her fears; drifting hither and thither toward the bench like a frond of thistledown, she finally alighted on the edge, and her cheek dropped on his shoulder. The act must have been subtly suggested by the tincture of white blood in her veins, for it is not a redskin attitude. The man neither repulsed nor welcomed her.

"'Erbe't," she whispered, "my head is so full of things I am near crazy wit' thoughts! And my tongue is in a snare; I cannot speak at all!"

Mabyn's only comment was a sort of grunt, which meant anything--or nothing.

Rina was encouraged to creep a little closer. "Oh, 'Erbe't, I love you!" she whispered. "I am loving you every minute! I so glad you marry me, 'Erbe't!"

The man took his pipe out of his mouth, and uttered his brief, jeering cackle of laughter. "That wasn't altogether a matter of choice, my girl," he said. "It was a little preliminary insisted on by your father and mother."

Rina hardly took the sense of this. "But you do love me, 'Erbe't? jus' a little?" she pleaded.

"You're all right, Rina," he said patronizingly. "I never was one to make much of a fuss about a woman."