Chapter 7

"A PRINCESS SENT TO PACK WITH WOLVES!"

But laugh she did, softly, unaffectedly and with plainly unsimulated amusement. She laughed as she might have done had he been a little child indulging in a fit of pouting, she the child's mother. Her laughter irritated him but did not affect a muscle of his rigid aloofness. Then she moved again, drawing no nearer but making a little half circle so that she stood just in front of him breaking his view of the river. The hard grey of his eyes met the soft greyness of hers.

"Why are the interesting men always rude?" she asked him out of a short silence.

He stared at her coolly a moment, of half a mind to reply to the foolishness of her question with the answer which it deserved, mere silence.

"I don't know," he retorted bluntly.

"Yes, they are," she told him with deep gravity of tone, just as though he had done the logical thing, been communicative and said, "Are they?" The gravity in her voice, however, was notably in contrast with the crinkling merriment about the corners of her eyes. "Perhaps," she went on, "that is one of the very reasons why they _are_ interesting."

He made no answer. His regard, sweeping her critically, went its way back down the mountain side. Not, however, until the glorious lines of her young figure had registered themselves in his mind.

"Perhaps," she ran on, her head a little to one side as she studied him frankly, "you didn't realise just how interesting a type you are? In feminine eyes, of course."

"I know about things feminine just as much as I care to know," he said with all of the rudeness with which she had credited him. "Namely, nothing whatever."

Without looking to see how she had taken his words he felt that he knew. She was still laughing at him, silently now, but none the less genuinely.

"You are not afraid of me, are you?" she queried quite innocently.

"I think not," he told her shortly. "Since your sex does not come into the sphere of my existence, Miss Ygerne, there is no reason why I should be afraid of it."

"Oh!" was her rejoinder. "So you know my name, Mr. Drennen?"

"I learned it quite accidentally, young lady. Please don't think that the knowledge came from a premeditated prying into your affairs."

She ignored the sneer as utterly negligible and said,

"And you used to be a gentleman, once upon a time, like the prince in the fairy tale before the witches got him. _Cherchez la femme_. Was it a woman who literally drove you wild, Mr. Drennen?"

"No," he told her in his harshly emphatic way.

"You are very sure?"

He didn't answer.

"You are thinking that I am rather forward than maidenly?"

"I am thinking that a good warm rain will help to clear the trails."

"You wish that I would go away?"

"Since you ask it . . . yes."

"That is one reason why I am staying here," she laughed at him. "By the way, Mr. Newly-made Croesus, does this mountain belong to you, too? Together with the rest of the universe?"

He knocked out the ashes of his pipe, refilled the bowl, stuffing the black Settlement tobacco down with a calloused, soil-grimed forefinger. And that was her answer. She saw a little glint of anger in his eyes even while she could not fully understand its cause. A maid of moods, her mood to-day had been merely to pique him, to tease a little and the hint of anger told her that she had succeeded. But she was not entirely satisfied. With truly feminine wisdom she guessed that something of which she was not aware lay under the emotion which had for a second lifted its head to the surface. She could not know that she awoke memories of another world which he had turned his back upon and did not care to be reminded of; she did not know that the very way she had caught her hair up, the way her clothes fitted her, brought back like an unpleasant fragrance in his nostrils memories of that other world when he had been a "gentleman."

"Your wound is healing nicely?" she offered. And, knowing instinctively that again his answer would be silence, she went on, "It was very picturesque, your little fight the other night. The woman who did the shooting, I wondered whether she really loved Kootanie George most . . . or you?"

"Look here, Miss Ygerne . . ."

"Ygerne Bellaire," she said with an affected demureness which dimpled at him. "So you may say: 'Miss Bellaire.'"

"I say what I damned please!" he snapped hotly, and through the crisp words she heard the click of his teeth against his pipe stem. "If the flattery is not too much for a modest maiden to stand you may let me assure you that the one thing about you which I like is your name, Ygerne. Speaking of fairy tales, it sounds like the name of the Princess before the witches changed her into an adventuress, and sent her to pack with wolves. When it becomes necessary for me to call you anything whatever I'll call you Ygerne."

It was enough to drive her in head-erect, defiant, orderly retreat down the mountainside. But she seemed not to have heard anything after the first curt sentence.

"So you do 'what you damned please'? That sounds interesting. But is it the truth?"

Her perseverance began, in spite of him, to puzzle him. What in all the world of worlds did she want of him? Also, and again in spite of him, he began to wonder what sort of female being this was.

"And so my name is really the only thing commendable about me?" she went on. "My nose isn't really pug, Mr. Drennen."

She crinkled it up for his inspection, turning sideways so that he might study her profile, then challenging his eyes gaily with her own.

"It is said to be my worst feature," she continued gravely. "And after all, don't you think one's nose is like one's gown in that it's true effect lies in the way one wears it?"

"How old are you?" he said curiously, the ice of him giving the first evidence of thaw.

"Less than three score and ten in actual years," she told him. "Vastly more than that in wisdom. Who's getting impertinent now?"

He hadn't said half a dozen sentences to a woman in half a dozen years. But then he hadn't seen a woman of her class and type in nearly twice that length of time. Besides, a week of enforced idleness in his dugout, of blank inactivity, had brought a new sort of loneliness. A bit surprised at what he was doing, a bit amused, not without a feeling of contempt for himself, he let the bars down. He leaned back a little upon his rock, caught up a knee in his clasped hands, thus easing the ache in his side, and set his eyes to meet hers searchingly.

"This is an odd place for a girl like you, Ygerne," he said meditatively.

"Is it? And why?"

"Because," he answered slowly, "so far as I know, only two kinds of people ever come this way. Some are human hogs come to get their feet into a trough of gold; some are here because there is such a thing as the law outside and it has driven them here."

"But surely some come just through a sense of curiosity?"

"Curiosity is too colourless a motive to beckon or drive folks out here."

"Why are you asking me a question like this? You have succeeded in making it rather plain that you feel no interest whatever in me."

"I am allowing myself, for the novelty of the thing, to talk nonsense," he told her drily. "You seemed insistent upon it."

"So that's it? Well, I at least can answer a question. Two motives are to thank or to blame for my being here. One," she said coolly, her eyes steady upon his, "has beckoned, as you put it; the other has driven. One is the desire to get my feet into the golden trough, the other to get my body out of the way of the law. Your hypothesis seems, in my case as in the others, to be correct, Mr. Drennen."

In spite of him he stared at her a little wonderingly. For himself he gauged her years at nineteen. He was rather inclined to the suspicion that she was lying to him in both particulars. But something of the coolness of her regard, its vague insolence, something in the way she carried her head and shoulders, her whole sureness of poise, the intangible thing called personality in her tempered like fine steel, made his suspicion waver. She was young and good to look upon; there was the gloriously fresh bloom of youth upon her; and yet, were it not for the mere matter of sex, he might have looked upon her as a gay and utterly unscrupulous young adventurer of the old type, the kind to bow gallantly to a lady while wiping the stain of wet blood from a knife blade.

"You are after gold . . . and the law wants you back there in the States?" he demanded with quiet curiosity.

"I am after gold and the law has sought me back there in the States," she repeated after him coolly.

"The law has long arms, Ygerne."

"It has no arms at all, Mr. Drennen. It has a long tail with a poisonous sting in it."

"What does it want you for?" He was making light of her now, his question accompanied by a hard, cynical look which told her that she could say as much or as little as she chose and he'd suit himself in the extent of his credulity. "Were you the lovely cashier in an ice cream store? And did you abscond with a dollar and ninety cents?"

"Don't you know of Paul Bellaire?" she flung at him angrily.

"I have never met the gentleman," he laughed at her, pleased with the flush which was in her cheeks.

"He died long before you were born," she said sharply. "If you talked with men you would know. He was my grandfather. We of the blood of Paul Bellaire are not shop girls, Mr. Drennen."

"Oho," sneered Drennen. "We are in the presence of gentry, then?"

"You are in the presence of your superior by birth if not in all other matters," she told him hotly.

"We, out here, don't believe much in the efficacy of blue blood," he said contemptuously.

"The toad has little conception of wings!" she gave him back, in the coin of his own contempt. "Queer, isn't it?"

He laughed at her, more amused than he had been heretofore and more interested.

"You haven't told me definitely about your terrible crime."

"You have been equally noncommittal."

Drennen shrugged. "I am not greatly given to overtalkativeness," he said shortly. "I have no desire to usurp woman's prerogative."

"But are quite willing to let me babble on?"

"I'm going to put in time for a couple of hours. You are less maddening than the walls of my dugout."

She looked at him keenly, silent and thoughtful for a little. Then she said abruptly:

"Have you told any one yet of your discovery?"

So that was it. His eyes grew hard again with the sneer in them.

"No," he informed her with a bluntness full of finality.

"You spoke of the hogs with their feet in the trough. You are going to let no one in with you?"

"I am not in the habit of giving away what I want for myself."

"But you can't keep it secret always. You'll have to file your claim, and you can't file on all of Canada. . . . I want to ask you something about it."

"No doubt," with his old bitter smile. "For a fortune you'd repay me with a smile, would you? You'd find easier game in the gilded youth on Broadway."

Her lips grew a little cruel as she answered him.

"You may tell me as much or as little as you like. You may lie to me and tell me that your gold is twenty miles westward of here while it may be twice or half that distance eastward. Or you may leave that part out altogether. But it would be another matter to answer the one question I will ask." Her eyes were upon him, very alert, watchful for a sign as she asked her question: "Were the nuggets free and piled up somewhere where some man before you had placed them?"

If she sought to read his mind against his will she had come to the wrong man. It was as though Drennen had not heard her.

"Are you married to either of the hang dogs with whom you are travelling?" he asked.

"No," she answered indifferently.

"They're both in love with you, no doubt?"

"I fancy that neither is," she retorted equably. "Both want to marry me, that's all."

Drennen gazed thoughtfully down into the valley, pursing his lips about his pipe stem.

"I'll make a bargain with you," he said finally from the silence in which the girl had stood watching him. "You have dinner with me; we'll have the best the Settlement knows how to serve us, and I'll let you try to pump me."

She looked at him curiously.

"You have the name of a trouble seeker, Mr. Drennen. Do you fancy that you can anger Marc and Captain Sefton this way?"

"That, too, we can talk about at dinner, if you like."

For a moment she looked at him, gravely thoughtful, her brows puckered into a thoughtful frown. Then she put back her head with a gesture indefinably suggestive of recklessness, and laughed as she had laughed when she had first come upon him.

"The novel invitation is accepted," she said lightly. "I must hurry down to dress for the grand occasion, Mr. Drennen."

Before she could flash about and turn from him David Drennen did a thing he had done for no woman in many years. He rose to his feet, making her a sweeping bow as he lifted his hat with the old grace which the years had not taken from him. And as she went down the mountain side he dropped back to his rock, his teeth again hard, clamped upon his pipe stem, his eyes steely and bitter and filled with cynical irony.