Chapter 8

DUST OF IDOLS

David Drennen's statement concerning the two powerful motives responsible for the presence in the North Woods of the greater portion of her hardy denizens had been essentially truthful. The shadow of prison bars or perhaps the gaunt silhouette of the gallows, vivid in an overstimulated fancy, has sent many a man roving; the whisper down the world of yellow gold to be taken from the earth, transforming the blackened claw gripping it into the potent fingers of a money king, has entered the ear of many a wanderer and drawn him to such a land as this. An evil nature, a flare of temper, a wrong done and redressed in hot wrath and red blood, a mistake or a weakness or a wild spirit born a hundred years too late, any of these things might send a man into the North Woods. But Drennen, who made the statement to Ygerne Bellaire, was in himself an exception to it.

For half a score of years this land of hard trails, this far out place where man met man without veneer, where nature's breasts lay stripped of covering and naked, where life was the old life of things elemental, where primal laws were good laws, where there was room enough for the strong and scant room for the weak, David Drennen had found a spacious walled home. Half of the year his house had the lofty, snow-capped mountains for its only walls, the sweeping blue arch for its roof, sun, moon and stars for its lamps. There were months when he knew of no other footfall than his own throughout the vastness of his house. There had been times when, seeing the thin wisp of smoke against the dawn telling of a camp fire five miles away, he had grumbled and trampled out his own embers and moved on, seeking solitude.

He had brought into the mountains a heart at once sore and bitter. The soreness had been drawn out of it in time; the bitterness had but grown the more intense. Hard, mordacious, no man's friend . . . that was the David Drennen who at Père Marquette's fête sought any quarrel to which he might lay his hands. The world had battled and buffeted him; it had showered blows and been chary of caresses; he had struck back, hard-fisted, hard-hearted, a man whom a brutal life had made brutal in its own image.

There had been a scar made in his world of men and women to mark his leaving it, such a scar as a thorn leaves in the flesh when rudely drawn out. A tiny cicatrix soon almost entirely lost as the niche which had been his was filled and the healing over was perfected. It doesn't take long for the grass to grow over the graves of the dead; the dew forming upon the mounded turf is less like tears than like glistening jewels to deck the earth in the joyous time of her bridehood in the spring; the flight of birds over it and their little bursts of melody are eloquent of an ecstasy which does not remember. How little time then must pass to wipe out the memory of the passing of a David Drennen from the busy thoroughfares into the secluded trails?

He had been a young man, the lightest hearted of his care-free set, when the crash came. The chief component characteristics of the young David Drennen of twenty were, perhaps, a careless generosity, a natural spontaneous gaiety which accepted each day as it came, a strong though unanalysed faith in his fellow being. Life made music in tuneful chords upon the strings of his heart. The twin wells of love and faith were always brimming for his friends; overflowing for the one man whose act was to turn their waters brackish and bitter. That man was his father, John Harper Drennen, a man prominent enough in the financial world to make much copy for the newspapers up and down the country and to occupy no little place in transoceanic cable messages when the story broke.

A boy must have his hero worship. Rarely enough does he find his Alexander the Great, his Washington or his Daniel Boone, his Spartacus or his Horatius in his own household. But the motherless David had proved the exception and had long ago begun to shape his own life in the picture of his father's, investing him with attributes essentially divine. John Harper Drennen was a great man; the boy made of him an infallible hero who should have been a demigod in face of the crisis. And when that crisis came his demigod fled before it, routed by the vengeance seeking him.

Young Drennen had struck a man in the face for breaking the news to him and had felt a virtuous glow as he called the man "Liar!" He experienced a double joy upon him, the lesser one of his militant manhood, the greater of realising that it had been granted him, even in a small way, to fight a bit of his father's battle. He had gone out upon the street and a newsboy's paper, thrust to him, offered him the glaring lie in great black letters for a penny. He had torn the thing across, flinging it away angrily. There would be a libel suit to-morrow and such an apology as this editorial cur had never dreamed he had it in him to write. He heard men talk of it in the subway and laugh, and saw them turn wondering eyes to meet his glare. He made short his trip home, anxious to enlist under his father's standard, thrilled with the thought of gripping his father's hand.

When he found that his father, who should have returned two days ago from a trip to Chicago had not come back, he despatched a telegram to the lake city. The telegram was returned to him in due course of time; his father was not in Chicago and had not been there recently. He wired Boston, Washington, Philadelphia. His father was at none of his hotels in any of these cities. The boy prepared himself in calm, cold anger to wait for his father's return. But John Harper Drennen had never returned.

During the week which dragged horribly, he refused to read the papers. They were filled with such lies as he had no stomach for. Only the knowledge that the older Drennen was eminently capable to cope with his own destiny and must have his own private reasons for allowing this hideous scandal to continue unrefuted, held him back from bursting into more than one editorial room to wreak physical, violent vengeance there. His respect for his father was so little short of reverent awe, that he could take no step yet without John Harper's command. Quizzed by the police, questioned by the Chief, knowing himself dogged wherever he went, feeling certain that even his mail was no longer safe from prying eyes, he said always the same thing:

"Some of you are fools, some liars! When Dad comes back . . ."

He had choked up under the keen eyes of the Chief. And what angered him most was the look in the Chief's eyes. It was not incredulity; it was merely pity.

At first the papers had it that John Harper Drennen had absconded with fifty thousand dollars of the Eastern Mines Company's money. With rapid investigation came ready amplification of the first meagre details. Drennen's affairs were looked into and it was found that through unwise speculations the man had been skirting on thin ice the pool of financial ruin for a year. The deficit of fifty thousand grew under the microscope of investigation to sixty thousand, eventually to seventy-five thousand.

When at last David Drennen got the back numbers of the papers and locked himself up in his father's library to work his way laboriously through the columns of fact and surmise he was not the same David Drennen who had struck a man in the face for suggesting to him that his father was a thief. Here was the first sign of a weakening of faith; here the first fear which strove wildly to prove itself a shadow. But from shadow emerged certainty. He looked his spectre in the face and it did not dissolve into thin air. When he had done he put his face upon his arms and sobbed. The tardy but crushing sense of his hero's guilt had stricken him; the thought that his father had in no way confided in him, had left him without a word, perhaps without a thought, broke his heart. He was never to be quite the same David Drennen again.

He remained at his father's home through the weary months during which the miserably sordid horror dragged on. One morning he packed into a suitcase the few little articles which he felt were his own. He went out of the house before the others came in; he had no desire to see the home go, as everything else had gone, to pour its handful of golden sand into the great hole which John Harper's ruin had left behind him. It had been almost a year since the first news; and upon the day on which David Drennen set his back to all he knew and his face toward what might come to him, a paper brought the last word. He read it calmly upon the train, wondering at himself that there was such a thing as calm left to him. A man, looking over his shoulder, commented on the news lightly. Drennen didn't answer. He was visualising the final episode dully; the great, masterful body of his own father in the Paris morgue, the ignominious grave, even the cowardly death, self-dealt.

"And he never wrote me," he muttered to himself.

There he was wrong, though he could not know it until months later when the brief letter, forwarded to him by the Chief, reached him. His face had been hard, because his heart was hard, when he read the note which at last John Harper Drennen had written and which, sodden and blurred, was found upon the dead body drawn from the Seine.

"Dear Davy," it had said. "Some day maybe you'll come to forgive me. God dealt me a hard hand to play, boy. Be a man, Davy; for your mother's sake if not for your dad's."

Drennen a year ago would have dropped his face into his hands and would have wept over this letter; now he laughed at it. And the laugh, this first one, was the laugh men came to know as Dave Drennen's laugh. It was like a sneer and a curse and a slap in the face.

The hardest blow the fates could deal him had been delivered mercilessly. But other relentless blows were to come after, and under their implacable, relentless smiting the soul of the man was hardened and altered and made over as is the bit of iron under the blacksmith's hammer. Those characteristics which had been the essentials of the spiritual man of last year were worked over; the fine steel springs of buoyancy were beaten into thin knives of malignancy. That the work might be done thoroughly there was left in him one spark which glowed later on and grew into friendship for a man whom he met far in the north where the Yukon country called to such men as Drennen. The friendship fanned into life a lingering spark of the old generous spirit. Drennen, gambling his life lightly, had won as careless gamblers are prone to do. He made a strike; he trusted his new friend; and his friend tricked, betrayed and robbed him. This blow and others came with the gaunt years. At the end of them David Drennen was the man who sought to quarrel with Kootanie George; he was a man like a lone wolf, hunting alone, eating alone, making his lair alone, his heart filled with hatred and bitterness and distrust. He came to expect the savagery of the world which smote and smote and smote again at him, and he struck back and snarled back, each day finding him a bitterer man than the preceding day had left him. Long before he had turned back from the Yukon to the North Woods, empty handed, empty hearted, men had come to call him "No-luck" Drennen. And as though his ill fortune were some ugly, contagious disease, they shunned him even as invariably as he avoided them.

Men knew him in Wild Cat, two weeks hard going over an invisible trail from MacLeod's; they knew him at Moosejaw, two hundred and fifty miles westward of the Settlement; wherever there was news of gold found he was known, generally coming silently with the first handful of venturesome, restive spirits. But while his coming and his going were marked and while eyes followed him interestedly men had given over offering their hands in companionship. Now and then he moved among them as a man must, but always was he aloof, standing stubbornly apart, offering no man his aid in time of difficulty, flaring into blazing wrath the few times on record when men showed sympathy and desire to befriend him.

Superstition, abashed-eyed step daughter in the house of civilisation, lifts her head defiantly in the wilderness. She is born of the solitudes, a true daughter of the silent places. Here, where men were few and scattered broadcast by the great hand of adventure across the broken miles of all but impassable mountains, superstition is no longer merely an incident but an essential factor in human life and destiny. And here men long ago had come to frown when their questing eyes found the great, gaunt form of David Drennen in the van of some mad rush to new fields: He was unlucky; men who rubbed shoulders with him were foredoomed to share his misfortune; the gold, glittering into their eyes from a gash in the earth, would vanish when his shadow fell across it.

In many things he had grown to be more like a wild beast than a man. He had hunted with the human pack and he had found selfishness and jealousy and treachery on every hand. He came to look upon these as the essential characteristics of the human race. Even now that he was wounded he saw but one sordid motive of greed under the hesitant offers of help; even now he had been less like a wounded man than a stricken wolf. The wolf would have withdrawn to his hidden lair; he would have contented himself with scant food; he would have licked his wound clean and have waited for it to heal; he would have snapped and snarled at any intrusion, knowing the way of his fellows when they fall upon a wounded brother. So Drennen.