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Title: Empty Hands
Date of first publication: 1924
Author: Arthur Stringer (1875-1950)
Date first posted: December 20 2012
Date last updated: December 20 2012
Faded Page eBook #20121231

This eBook was produced by: David T. Jones, Mary Meehan, Mardi Desjardins
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net




                              Empty Hands

                           By ARTHUR STRINGER

    AUTHOR OF "The Diamond Thieves," "The Hand of Peril," "Silver
    Poppy," "The City of Peril," "The Prairie Child," "The Man Who
    Couldn't Sleep," etc.

    A. L. BURT COMPANY
    Publishers       New York

    Published by arrangement with The Bobbs-Merrill Company

    Printed in U. S. A.

    COPYRIGHT, 1923, 1924
    BY THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE COMPANY

    COPYRIGHT, 1924
    BY THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

    _Printed in the United States of America_




[Illustration: He hoped to the last that he might overtake the girl.]




EMPTY HANDS




CHAPTER I


Endicott, oppressed by the silence of the house, dropped his bags on the
Sarouk rug at the foot of the cascading wide stairway and went on to the
twilit living-room. Finding that empty, he wandered out to the sun-room,
where he hesitated a moment, then stepped through the double
screen-doors to the garden terrace. There he turned abruptly south. He
followed the leaf-filtered gloom of a pergola until he came to the
Etruscan seat that overlooked the swimming-pool. And there he sat down.

It was a hot night. It was more than hot; it was stifling. Not a breath
of air stirred the syringa leaves that hung on either side of him.
Somewhere back of the faded tamarisks a pair of katydids had already
begun their nocturnal antiphony. A cricket shrilled from time to time,
in the parched grass-parterres behind the grape-arbors. There was no
moon, as yet, and even the stars were shut out by the tepid haze that
seemed to blanket a burned-out world. It was so close and sultry that
Endicott, as he stared down at the pool, found something consolatory in
the mere thought of water.

There was a time when he had been inordinately proud of that pool. He
had planned it himself, on the hillside where a spring had bubbled out
below the twisted root of an umbrella-elm. He had tamed and harnessed
that spring, and had built his basin of cement, eighty feet long and
thirty feet wide, lining it with Tennessee marble and fashioning seven
marble steps to lead into its shallower end. Along its full length, on
either side, ran a marble colonnade shaded with wistaria, with Tuscan
urns at the four corners. At its upper end stood the arched grotto which
he had built of field-stone, after landscaping the higher garden-slopes.
He had thought of it as an arena of sane and healthful pleasure. But
life had taken the savor out of it, as life took the savor out of so
many things. For all its trellises and vines and tubbed greenery, for
all its double beauty of jade-green water reflecting unwavering flowers
and foliage framed in their milky oblong of marble, it was now a pool of
bitterness to him.

As he stared down at it, through the lifeless hot darkness, Endicott
remembered how Erica, his wife, had once loved it. He could almost
picture her sitting on the Roman bench at the far end of the pool. The
wistaria vines were thinner, in those days, and the sun would strike
slantingly down on her drying hair. It was wonderful hair, like spun
gold, and she had an incredible amount of it. She had always claimed
that the water from his spring was not like other water, nursing the
purely personal belief that it was slightly radiumized, since it had the
trick of leaving one's skin so satin-like in its smoothness. But the
blight had fallen with the Osborne affair, when Erica and Bertie Osborne
had drifted into the habit of swimming alone there, after dark. Endicott
had objected to that, had finally taken his stand and forbidden it. When
his wife had laughingly defied him, and proclaimed that she and Bertie
were going to swim at midnight, he had as grimly proclaimed otherwise.
To establish his authority, he returned to the pool and opened the valve
that let out the water. Then he went to bed.

At midnight his wife and Osborne slipped down to the pool, without
switching on the lights. Osborne dived, laughing and light-hearted, from
the carpet-covered spring-board. It was one of his swan-dives, of which
he was so proud. His skull crushed in, like an egg-shell, against the
floor of the empty cement basin.

Endicott, as he sat there, fancied he could still hear Erica's scream
through the midnight quietness of their garden. He even fancied that he
could see her, sitting crouched on the Roman bench at the pool-end,
staring down into the depths of the jade-green water. Yet she had been
dead for five long years. And that second tragedy had always seemed to
Endicott as gratuitous and as ironic as the first. For as they were
motoring through northern Georgia she had drunk from an abandoned farm
well, after he had warned her not to. Three weeks later she had died of
typhoid. She had been a beautiful woman. But some women, he told
himself, were not to be controlled. They remained untamed and
intractable, always seeming one page late in reading the lesson of life.
And they not only suffered themselves, but they brought suffering to
those about them. He had built up his fortune, as he had built his pool,
for her good. And the one now stood as futile as the other. He wondered,
as he stared down at the vaguely opalescent oblong of water, if she ever
came back there, in the stillness of the night, and brooded over that
one place that had once seemed alluring and beautiful to her.

Endicott, the next moment, caught his breath sharply. For as he stared
down through the gloom he saw by the sudden flare of a match that a
woman was sitting alone and silent on the Roman bench, on the bench
where Erica used to sit and dry her hair. He started up from his seat.
Then he sat down again, being able to breathe once more. For he saw
that it was merely his daughter Claire, striking a match and lighting a
cigarette; Claire in a bathing suit, obviously trying to keep cool.

He could see the slender oval of her thin face, the heavily-lashed eyes
under the thoughtful brow touched with petulance, the dusky tone of the
sun-tanned skin as the momentary light-flare played on her bare
shoulders, forward-thrust and boy-like in their slenderness. He could
make out the mass of her bobbed hair, framing the intent, narrow face,
darker and more girlish-looking than her mother's. He could see the
curved and short-lipped mouth holding the cigarette as she drew the
flame in against its end. Then the light went out, with an impatient
shake of her hand, and the glowing match-end circled through the
darkness and fell into the pool at her feet. All that remained was the
tiny glow of the cigarette, growing intermittently brighter as the air
was sucked in through its shredded leaf corseted in rice-paper.

What impressed Endicott was the passiveness, the isolation, of the
figure on the Roman bench. It amazed him to think how little he
understood the girl, if she could still be called a girl, for he
remembered that she must be well past nineteen. Perhaps she was more;
there was a great deal he could not remember about his Clannie. But he
wondered if she too sat oppressed by the loneliness of life, if she too
found Hillcrest, this huge house on the hillside, an empty place. She
had been left a great deal to herself this last year or two, he
recalled, for a man can't run copper-mines next door to Alaska and
northern Quebec and at the same time hug his own fireside. Then he
wondered why his heart could remain so unmoved at the thought of her.
She was his only child; she was all he had. Yet they lived in worlds of
their own, with interstellar æons of space between them, with so few
discernible ways of signaling across that gulf.

He was startled, the next moment, by her clear soprano voice calling
through the darkness.

"You'd better switch on the lights, Baker."

Endicott could see that she was speaking to one of the servants who
carried a flash-light as he wheeled a loaded tea-wagon to the arched
outer end of the grotto. He could hear the servant's respectful reply
and could see the pencil of light waver about the stone wall in search
of the switch. A moment later a sudden garden of color flowered out of
the gloom. The dusky oblong of water flashed into incandescence as the
current ran through the strings of bulbs enclosed in their huge globes
of many-colored Japanese lanterns, globes of beryl and orange and rose
and yellow. They fused and merged in a misty crown of light above the
mirroring pool where the water, now green and lustrous as malachite,
reflected the motionless globes, line for line and color for color,
making the tubbed arbor-vitæ and the cerise phlox in the long
flower-boxes as fantastically unreal as the paper foliage of a
stage-setting.

And at the edge of the pool, with her bare feet trailing in the limpid
water, sat the motionless girl in her attenuating dark bathing-suit,
alone in her little world of light and silence. She seemed to be waiting
for something.

Endicott realized what this was when he looked up and saw the
wide-wheeling twin-ray of motor head-lights as a car circled into the
lower drive. Down the valley-side opposing him he could see a second
pair of head-lights groping their way. A horn sounded, abrupt and
insolent and sonorous, as the first car drew up below the pool, bathed
for a moment in the clear light of the car that followed it. To
Endicott, in that momentary illumination, it seemed like a car full of
white legs. It was filled to overflowing with men and girls in
bathing-suits, and from it rose a careless babel of voices, singing
voices, shot through with laughter and the sustained chant of a
musical-comedy song from the motor behind them.

"Hello, Clannie!" cried a bare-armed youth almost as dark as a Nubian.
He leaped the flower-boxes to the pool-edge as he spoke.

"Oh, boy, to get cool!" cried a pale girl in black satin with angel-fish
painted on her skirt.

"And Blinkie's bringing some bubble-water," announced a large girl with
butternut-brown shoulders and arms.

They crowded and clamored along the pergola until they surrounded the
impassive Claire. A girl's voice cried: "Here goes--a jack-knife,
everybody!" And that challenge was followed by the repeated
splash-splash of straightening bodies striking the dark water, the
shouts and gasps of swimmers, the careless screams and laughter of
contending couples.

Endicott could see them, when they emerged, sitting side by side along
the marble lip of the pool, flesh against flesh, brown against white,
while they smoked and chatted and a fat youth, prematurely bald, passed
among them with glasses and a glistening cocktail-shaker. Endicott
noticed that Claire drained her glass, drained it silently and
impersonally, and still without speaking held it out to be refilled. She
tossed away a half-smoked cigarette and stood poised, for a moment of
abstraction, as a chorus of laughter followed the sound of a sudden
splash. The fat youth with the shaker had slipped and fallen into the
pool.

"Go after him, Jappie, and save the hooch!" cried a round-armed girl in
a one-piece suit.

"What's the use, Nicky, when we all know fat must float," was Jappie's
indifferent retort as chocolates from a brocaded carton that passed
from wet hand to wet hand were thrown at the youth swimming with one
hand and clutching the shaker with the other. There was a second chorus
of laughter as some one tossed him a wine-glass, which, after turning on
his back, he poised on his protuberant stomach and solemnly filled from
his shaker. Then a car honked from the outer darkness and somebody
called: "Here's Blinkie with the champagne!"

But Claire, Endicott noticed, was not thinking of Blinkie. She moved
moodily on to the diving-board, where she stood for a moment, to speak
to a youth whom she addressed as "Milt." Then she turned and faced the
pool. She balanced, for a moment, on the end of the spring-board, with
her bare heels together and her hands above her head, as brown and
slender as a dryad, assured, indifferent, insolently impersonal. Then
she rose in the air, incredibly, with her knees drawn up against her
body, straightening miraculously at the precise moment of her descent,
so that she struck the water taut as an arrow, and disappeared below its
surface with scarcely a sound. She stayed under for what seemed an
alarming length of time to the watching man. He was on his feet, in
fact, before her head slowly emerged within a foot of the marble steps,
where she shook her bobbed hair with a casual dog-like movement and swam
lazily back to the deeper end of the pool. She seemed as much at home
in the water as a young seal might have been. She reminded Endicott of
a seal, in fact, as she lowered her head and doubled her thin body and
disappeared below the surface again. She came up and went down again,
giving the watcher an impression of wallowing, making him think of a
porpoise at play. He could see where her lazy movements broke the
water's surface into eddies, many-colored under the magnifying light,
indescribably lovely in their transmuting tones that merged off into
opal and amethyst and broke away again into beryl and still again
brightened under one of the swinging globes into orange. Lovely, too,
seemed the languid figure floating on that tissue of intermingling
colors, so competent and close-muscled, so slender and assured, so
passive and yet so poignantly alone in the midst of its noisier
companions.

"Can't she," gasped Endicott, "O God, can't she be saved from all this?"

For he could see that glasses were being once more passed from hand to
hand. He could see the cool and deliberate stare of men, neither young
nor old, scanning the half-clad bodies of women. He could see a brown
arm about a stooping white shoulder and above that shoulder the laughing
face, reckless with alcohol, that stared into the solemnly hungry face
beside it. And it came home to Endicott, as he gazed down at them, how
they were so pallidly and yet so persistently steeping themselves in
sensation. That, as he saw it, seemed the one end of this younger
generation. All their lives, apparently, were a quest for sensation.
They were being catered to, as they idled there in the enervating
sultriness, by an appeal to every sense, to taste and touch, to smell
and sight. Color was about them and the soft flow of water from the
bronze dolphin's mouth was beside them and the body-cooling depths of
the pool was below them. They had the scent of flowers floating above
the heavier scent of their own perfumed cigarettes. They had sweets for
their caprices of appetite, waiting food for their hunger, fantastically
flavored drinks for their thirst, and for those darker wants of the
spirit the casual contact of velvet skin with velvet skin.

It sickened Endicott, at the same moment that it confronted him with a
sense of his own helplessness. It filled him with a passion to snatch
the blood of his blood from their midst, to stride down amongst them,
scattering them from side to side, and carry his child out of their
reach. But where, he asked himself, could he carry her? Where could he
take her beyond their influence? She announced herself as one of them by
having them about her. And even in carrying her to the end of the world
he could not carry her away from herself.

He groaned, without quite knowing it, as his unhappy eyes once more
sought out his daughter. She was floating at the far end of the pool
now, idly watching the man called Milt as he dove with a lighted
cigarette between his lips. This cigarette he adroitly kept alight by
reversing it between his teeth and holding it there until he was above
water again. Thereupon he floated triumphantly about on his back, side
by side with Claire Endicott, puffing smoke up toward the many-colored
globes. The father, watching from his seat above them, moved restlessly
when a careless wet hand passed the cigarette over to his daughter, who
inhaled a lungful or two of the smoke, luxuriously, and lay floating on
the pool-surface, as motionless as a drifting cadaver facing the sky.

There even the man named Milt deserted her, when he found the pool
abandoned for Blinkie and his bubble-water. The ensuing laughter grew
louder, in the remoter shadows, and the voices dreamier. Back in the
grotto a music-box was started up and the wet-clad figures fell to
dancing, two by two, about the splashed marble floor.

"Say, Clannie, when do we eat?" an impatiently casual voice called out.
And Endicott, a minute or two later, could see the impassive Baker
behind the laden tea-wagon. Then couples emerged from the shadows,
fantastically like wolves from a forest, and the noise became general
again. They shouted and laughed as they ate. And when the music-box was
once more started up thin-clad couples with capon-wings in their hands
started to dance again.

"These crumpets are cold, Baker--get hot ones," the daughter of the
house commanded in her clear and reedy voice. "And some fresh coffee."

Then the scene was blotted out, at a breath, for some one had switched
off the lights. A soft pedal fell on the noise about the pool.

Endicott, starting up from his seat, heard a stifled scream that ended
in a bubble of laughter. As he stood there, breathing hard, he could see
the significant twin-glow of cigarettes from smokers side by side in the
darkness. A girlish voice called out in mock terror. "Make this cave-man
stop biting me!" From the pergola-end came a deeper male voice, careless
and mocking: "No necking, you two!" Then some one dove into the pool and
an indifferent-voiced girl called out: "There goes poor Baker!" Then
Claire's voice again, reedy and quiet but strangely penetrating: "Milt,
I want the lights on!" Scattered groans of protest arose at this
command. But the girl disregarded them. "I said I wanted the lights on."

"Why so solemn, Clannie?" demanded a drawling contralto voice.

There was an echo of the drawl in the girl's voice as she retorted:
"King Langford says my dad got home to-night!"




CHAPTER II


Endicott waited until the last voices had died away and the last noisy
car had circled insolently about the lower drive. He waited, watching
the crawling twin-lights as this car mounted the opposing valley-slope,
oppressed by the silence hanging over the home that seemed no longer
home to him. He stared down at the pool where the mocking globes of
radiance still swung, pondering the dark problem as to why man's
happiness is so often destroyed by the very things with which he seeks
to perpetuate it. He had fashioned this pool for innocent pleasure, yet
he found himself, for the second time, nursing nothing but hate for it.
He would be glad, he told himself as he stood waiting for his daughter,
when she and he had seen the last of it. It would be better for them
both.

Endicott's daughter, however, showed no signs of returning to the house.
So he pocketed his repugnance and made his way down into that region of
revelry left doubly obnoxious by the mockery of its over-colored
lanterns and the memory of its over-hectic hours. He moved slowly,
mysteriously touched with age, down through the darkness toward the
gaily-lighted oblong of refracted colors framed in drooping shrubbery,
feeling utterly and incommunicably alone in a world which had in some
way outlived him.

He realized the gulf of time between them as he caught sight of his
daughter in her wet bathing-suit, on one end of the Roman bench, staring
down into the water. She sat quite motionless. She seemed as remote from
him, staring with odd grotesquery from her lonely perch, as a gargoyle
of stone staring down from its medieval tower. Yet some humanizing touch
of wistfulness in her face prompted Endicott to wonder if she too could
be shadowed by a trace of that same isolation which clouded his own
heart. He asked himself why he should suddenly think of her as a child,
as a lonely child surrounded by an aura of pathos. For she looked
ridiculously small and ridiculously youthful in her trivial wisp of a
suit. And she gave him an impression of careless fastidiousness, with
her sinewy young body, slender as a dryad's, leaning listlessly forward
with the narrowing brown chin cupped in the palm of her hand.

Surely, he felt as he moved so wearily toward where she sat, she was
worth saving, worth saving in some way or another?

"Hello!" was all she said, without any trace of emotion, as he came and
stood beside her.

"Hello, Clannie!" was his reply to her, equally casual, equally
barricading.

"When'd you get back?" she asked as she stooped to wring the water from
her trunk-leg.

"To-night," he told her. He sat heavily down on the other end of the
Roman bench. "Hot, isn't it?"

"Like hell!" she said in a small voice flat with weariness.

He resented that, yet it gave him a point about which to centralize
still earlier resentments.

"It doesn't seem to have interfered with your fun," he retorted.

She looked languidly up, at the barb of bitterness in his voice.

"Oh, _that_!" she scoffed with a small hand-movement of indifference.
"You heard us, of course?"

"Most all the countryside did, I imagine!" Then he added, gathering
momentum as he went: "Yes, I've been both hearing and seeing you. And
it's been giving me a great deal to think over."

She gazed directly up at him, for the first time, with her limpid and
fearless eyes fixed on his face. She had courage, the man looking so
intently down at her was forced to admit; she had courage and a
something beyond courage. He would have found it hard to define that
added something, but he tended to the belief that it was a stubborn
quality akin to sportsmanship, a sort of skeletonized code of ethics
evolved out of the one normalizing phase of her existence, her
athletics. Whatever she did, she would at least sullenly prefer to have
it known as the sporting thing to do. But life, Endicott was
remembering, was a trifle more complicated than a squash-court.

"And what did you think about us?" his daughter was asking him, almost
insolently.

Some instinct, kenneled deep in his indignation, warned him to be calm.
Tragically little, he remembered, was to be gained by passion, with a
girl like that. So he waited a moment or two, determined to have his
voice a steady one.

"They impressed me as a pretty rotten lot," he finally asserted. But the
casualness of his tone was discredited by the granitic grimness of his
jaw.

"Yes, I know," said the girl, with quite unlooked-for quietness. "But it
seems the only way out."

"Out of what?"

She emitted a ghost of a sigh, before speaking.

"Oh, I don't know. Out of being bored, I suppose."

A second tide of indignation rose and ebbed through Endicott, rose and
ebbed without her knowledge, before he spoke again.

"Have you any idea what you're heading for?" he suddenly demanded of
her.

She laughed, quietly and indifferently. But there was bitterness about
the youthful lips bent over the pool.

"That's the trouble," she complained. "I'm not heading for anything."
She felt about on the wet bench until she found a gold cigarette-case.
"I'm just drifting."

"Then I imagine it's about time somebody interfered with your
movements," said the man at her side.

"Who?" she asked, audaciously abstracted.

"Your father," he announced, refusing to countenance the tide of
frustration that was creeping through him.

"How?" she inquired in her indifferent small voice. And with that one
word, in some way, she had been able to reaffirm the fact of their
remoteness, their astral remoteness, from each other.

"To begin with, this pool swimming is going to be stopped, and stopped
right now," he heard his own irate voice proclaiming.

"Isn't that rather ridiculous?" demanded the girl in the wet
bathing-suit.

"No, it's more like getting back to sanity."

"You mean," she challenged amiably enough, "you're telling me I'm not to
swim in this pool?"

"Precisely!"

"But Montie and Gypsy Bowers and Milt are coming back a little after
midnight, when the moon's up. And it would be rather humiliating, to
have to leave word that I'd been scolded and sent up to bed, wouldn't
it?"

He stared at her, wondering what would have happened to her if she had
lived in an earlier and more rudimentary generation. He stared at the
two brown hands buckled over a bare brown knee, realizing how small and
helpless she would be in the face of physical violence. But physical
violence, he remembered, would never tame her, would never altogether
break down her spirit.

"You are not going to swim in this pool to-night," he announced with a
fierceness which brought her narrow face slowly around to his.

"Nor any other night?" she studiously interrogated.

"Nor any other night," he just as studiously asserted, with the thought
of history so ironically repeating itself making his face more haggard
than he imagined. "Is that clearly understood?"

"I heard you the first time," she said with her barricading flippancy.

"There are a number of other things you're going to hear!"

"What?"

"Things we've got to talk over."

"Isn't it horribly hot," she complained, "for that sort of thing?"

"There are worse misfortunes than mere heat," he reminded her. And he
was reminding himself, at the same moment, that she would not be easily
driven, that she was not even bridle-wise. She had never bowed to
authority. She was his daughter, his one and only child. Yet they had no
points of contact, apparently, except that of brute force. And he
suspected that she would break, under force, before she would yield.

She surprised him by getting languidly up from the stone bench.

"Then I'd better phone Milt and the others," she casually announced.

"And what are you going to do after that?" he demanded.

"I don't know," was her listless retort. "It seems so hot in the house."

His scrutinizing eyes followed her as she moved moodily away. Then he
went to the valve that emptied the pool. Still again, as he turned the
brass wheel and heard the rash of the escaping water, he was oppressed
by the sense of history repeating itself. His heart was heavy as he
moved slowly on to the grotto and switched out the lights.

"I've emptied the pool," he announced as he passed the slim figure of
his daughter groping through the half-lighted sun-room.

"I know," she said in a neutral voice.

"Then where are you going?" he demanded.

"I want to sit outside for a while," she answered in her insouciant cool
way.

"We understand each other, don't we?" he challenged.

"I wonder if we do?" she countered in her careless soprano.

"We'd better!" he called out with a harshness which arrested her, for a
minute or two, in the outer doorway.

Endicott watched her as she passed down the balustraded terrace into the
garden. Then he went up to his room.




CHAPTER III


Endicott went up to his room, but he did not sleep. He sat at his open
window overlooking the pool, which took on fantastic shadows under the
filtered light of the late moon. Claire, he saw, had gone back to the
Roman bench. He could make her out only vaguely, in the broken shadows,
sitting inert and motionless, with her hands clasped over her knee. The
solitariness of her figure distressed him as he watched it. She had
grown away from him, calamitously, just as he had grown away from her.
She was all he had, he remembered for the second time that night. She
was all he had, yet of late he had seen little of her, had known
tragically little of her companionship.

That, in some way, would have to be corrected. Yet he could see no
immediate promise of change in his mode of life. And he could anticipate
still less in hers. Before another week was over he would be once more
on the wing: this time it was the Little Elk Lake project that was
demanding his presence. Within two weeks he would be well beyond the
rail-head, half-way up to the Circle itself, trafficking by canoe and
york-boat toward the Barrier Camp on the fringe of the Barren Grounds.
There Shomer Grimshaw held disturbingly ambitious plans to lay before
his attention. That restless-souled young engineer even wanted a
portable saw-mill and a hydroplane and a shallow-draught side-wheeler
sent up in sections to his wilderness outpost beyond the Pas. And there
was a showing of gold in the pre-Cambrian to the east of Barrier Lake.
And the sooner Endicott was on the ground to look over his claims the
better for all concerned.

The thought suddenly occurred to him that he might do worse than take
his Clannie along with him. That would get her out of the welter into
which she had drifted. It would lift her out of that cloying mess, the
same as one lifts a drowning mouse out of a cream-pitcher. She was
ear-deep in enervating softnesses that were smothering her, the same as
so many women of to-day were being smothered. And the other thing would
rather shock her into some sort of reason. She would find herself
confronted by raw life, up in that mine camp. She would face sterner
conditions and stabilizing roughnesses and a man or two with a backbone.
And that would do her good.

Endicott stopped short, trying to picture Shomer Grimshaw, his
field-engineer, confronted by a girl like Clannie. She would be new to
him, for women had never seriously entered into Grimshaw's scheme of
things. He had not permitted them to. It was not without reason that he
had been called Shomer, the Watcher. But Endicott had no wish to bring
that old story up out of the depths of the past. He preferred to think
of Grimshaw as functioning like a Diesel engine, efficient and silent,
as self-contained as a Salteaux, but by instinct and training still a
woodsman, a man who preferred always to go ahead of the steel and map
the lonelier frontiers for those who came after him. He had seen much of
the world, but he preferred to remember only his woodcraft. He had a
working knowledge of seven Indian languages and could shoulder a barrel
of flour over a broken portage, but in his sleeping-tent he read Pater
and Francis Thompson. No, a man like Grimshaw could never grow into an
understanding of a girl like Claire. She would be something
undecipherable to that single-track mind of his. She would probably
knock his camp discipline into a cocked hat and criticize the grub-tent
cuisine and announce that the smell of fly-oil was objectionable to her
fastidious young nostrils. It would, ten to one, result in trouble. For
Clannie, of course, liked to have her own way. And Shomer, on the other
hand, knew a grimness of purpose that had proved not without its value.
In his rough young veins ran that commendable enough thing that has
been called the blood of the conqueror. And Endicott, lounging at the
open window, wondered half idly which of the two would win out, if it
ever came to some final contest of will.

Then he noticed that the low-hung moon had gone under a cloud. He heard
a growl or two of distant thunder and felt grateful for what he accepted
as a promise of relief from the heat that was making even midnight
intolerable. Men didn't think straight in such weather. And what he
needed was sleep. But before turning back to his bed he stared once more
down at the vague outlines of the pool.

Claire was smoking there. He could see the small cherry-glow of her
moving cigarette-end and the dark blur of her body against the pale
marble bench. Then his eye wavered on to the other end of the pool,
attracted by what seemed a movement along the trellised foliage. He
thought, for a moment, he saw a figure in white, a woman's figure,
walking slowly along the wistaria-covered pergola, in the direction of
the Roman bench. He pressed his face against the bronze screening,
staring out with an odd quickening of the pulse. Then, with an
incredulous upthrust of the shoulders, he rubbed his eyes and looked out
again. He could no longer decipher that drifting white shadow. He turned
back to his room with what was almost a grunt of impatience.

"This heat's getting on my nerves," he said as he switched on his
oscillating fan and pushed the bed out so that it would stand in the
fuller play of its current. He lay down and covered himself with a
sheet. But he did not sleep. He was thinking about his daughter.

He was still thinking about her, inconsequently and barrenly, when his
wakeful ear caught the sound of his bedroom door being opened. He sat up
at once as the vague blur of a figure crept in through the door.

"Father!"

It was his daughter Claire, calling to him in a voice thin with terror.

"What is it?" he asked as she groped, cowering, toward him. "What's
happened?"

She sat down on the edge of the bed, feeling for his body in the
darkness, craving, for the first time he could remember, some sustaining
contact with him.

"What's happened?" he repeated as he became conscious of the tremor of
her hand, which felt cold through the sheet.

"Something terrible," she said in a strangled whisper.

"But what is it?" he demanded. "Are you all right?"

She drew a long and quavering breath.

"Yes, I'm all right," she finally asserted. "But it--it was terrible."

"What was?" he insisted, letting his hot hand close about her cool small
fingers.

"_Mother came back to the pool_," the girl said in a quiet voice.

There was a silence of several seconds.

"You've been dreaming, child," Endicott was finally able to say. Yet an
odd tingle of nerve-ends ran through his body as he spoke.

"She came to where I was sitting on the bench there," asserted the quiet
but tremulous voice so close to him. "She was in white. I could see her
distinctly, even before she spoke to me."

"You've been dreaming," repeated the girl's father.

"I tell you she came and spoke to me. She came and sat beside me and
asked me not to go."

"Go where?" asked Endicott, reaching for the light-switch. But for some
undefined reason he declined to turn it on.

The girl on the edge of the bed sat silent for several moments. Then she
spoke, even more quietly than before.

"Milt Bisnett and I were going to run away to-night. We were to motor
over to Morristown and then take a morning train in to New York to catch
the steamer for Bermuda. We intended to stay there until Milt's wife
could--could arrange about the divorce."

She moved abruptly in the darkness.

"Good God!" gasped Endicott, out of the silence.

"That's off now, of course," she said in her incomprehensibly quiet
voice.

"Off? I should think it _is_ off!" cried the man on the bed, startled by
the vastness of his suddenly revealed inadequacy. "Do you know what
you're going to do, Claire?"

"No," she said, almost indifferently.

"When I go north on Saturday, you're coming with me."

"Going with you?" she repeated, her thoughts obviously not on what she
was saying.

"Into clean, hard life, out of this muck," he announced with
unlooked-for vigor.

So prolonged was her silence that he felt she was casting about for
excuses, searching for some avenue of escape.

"All right," she said in her small voice. "I'll go!"

He found it hard to articulate a question obscurely clamoring for
expression.

"It's--it's not too late?" he exacted.

She sat silent a moment, letting the full significance of his question
filter through to her brain.

"It's not too late," she replied. The listlessness of her tone would
have disheartened him, but for the tightening of the small fingers about
his moist hand. Then she asked, almost dully, out of still another
silence: "Why should she come back, like that?"

He compelled himself to stroke her shoulder reassuringly.

"You must have fallen asleep, child, and dreamed it," he valorously
contended. But he felt the shiver that passed through her thin body.

"Do you mind if I leave the door open, between our rooms?" she asked as
she rose to her feet.

"Of course, Clannie," he said, doing his best to control his voice,
shaken as he was by the unexpected forlornness of her tones.

She groped toward him in the darkness.

"Good night, father," she cried, with her thin arms clinging to him.

And Endicott, with his hand on her childishly bobbed hair, kissed her
for the first time that he could remember.




CHAPTER IV


Claire Endicott's first meeting with Shomer Grimshaw at Barrier Lake was
not an auspicious one. Grimshaw, in fact, disapproved of the entire
arrangement. He objected to women in camp, just as he objected to the
foolish paraphernalia which had been brought along with them. While
still unable to spare men to bring up his thirty-foot shallow-draught
paddle-wheeler, which had arrived at the rail-head in sections, he had
been compelled to "pack" in effeminate double-walled silk tents,
collapsible army-cots, aluminum cooking toys and silver-plated
fishing-rods and rifles. And while he detected an unlooked-for
self-reliance in the close-muscled and cool-eyed girl who so casually
inspected his grub-tent and his sleeping quarters, he remembered that a
person who traveled with a French maid was not to be easily absorbed
into his established order of life.

Mademoiselle Lamer, it is true, retired promptly and disdainfully to the
privacy of the double-walled silk, where she applied countless unguents
to a sun-burned cuticle and railed volubly against black-flies and
mosquitoes. But the slim-legged girl with the butternut-brown skin gave
evidence enough of a more active interest in her new world, promptly
commandeering old Napoleon Faubert and directing him to show her
everything from the canoes and the york-boats to the assay-tent and the
burned-over lands where the blue-berries grew thickest. She studiously
avoided Grimshaw, who looked unnecessarily rough in worn corduroy and
flannel and spiked river shoes. But that young man was busy enough with
Robert Endicott, explaining how they needed a hydroplane and an expert
flier, a portable saw-mill, and sheet-iron pontoons for trying out the
Malign Canyon rapids.

It was not until Endicott had started back to the rail-head to inquire
into his delayed chemical shipments that Grimshaw came into actual
contact with the brown-skinned girl. He watched her with a silent frown
as she lighted a cigarette and smoked it. But he made no move until she
tossed the lighted end into the underbrush.

"Put that out!" he commanded.

She turned and inspected him with a cursory eye.

"What do you mean?" she asked quietly enough.

"I want that cigarette butt put out," he said with no perceptible
softening of the voice.

"Why?" she indifferently inquired.

He strode over to where she stood, towering thunderously over her.

"Because if you knew anything about this country, in the first place,
you'd know you were breaking the law. And because, in the second place,
I don't want these woods set afire. And if you want a third reason,
because I said so!"

His force seemed quite wasted on her.

"Who are you?" she mildly inquired, as their glances met and locked.

"I'm the boss of this camp," he announced, knowing that this information
had already been imparted to her. "And I want that fire put out."

She glanced about to where a small drift of smoke rose from the dried
moss and pine-needles into which she had thrown her cigarette-end. But
this, apparently, did not greatly disturb her.

"And supposing I prefer not putting it out?" she speculated aloud, with
her appraising eye on his tightened jaw-muscles.

"You are going to put it out," he said, achieving a semblance of her own
quietness. And again their contending glances meshed together.

She studied him for a tense moment or two and then turned and walked
away. Grimshaw's eyes followed her, but he said nothing more. He strode
over to the creeping blaze and stamped it out with his spiked shoes.

He saw nothing more of her for the rest of the day, but the next morning
when he emerged from the grub-tent old Napoleon showed him where Claire
Endicott was swimming far out on Barrier Lake. Grimshaw, as he watched
the bobbing dark head on the sunlit water, did not greatly relish the
situation. The girl, whatever her own attitude, had been definitely left
in his charge, and he realized that she was disagreeably close to the
sucking open mouth of Malign Canyon, where the waters of Barrier Lake,
breaking through the Height-Of-Land, roared and rushed for miles down a
series of rapids where not even an Indian would venture. It was there
that the wilderness began, guarded by a line as abrupt as an
international frontier, a seven-mile barrier of rock-wall and crevice
and upland muskeg which reserved from man the virgin forest beyond.
Through that barrier twisted and lashed and whitewatered the wasted
power which Grimshaw ached to harness, and behind it lay the _terra
incognita_ which he longed to invade. But there was much to be done, he
knew, before Malign Canyon could be charted.

So he climbed to higher ground, to make sure the swimmer was not
advancing toward that point of treachery where the water, dark and
smooth like fluid steel, poured silently out into the _Grande Décharge_.
He saw, to his relief, that she was more than holding her own. So he
lighted his pipe and walked down to the camp-landing, where he waited
for her to win back. He could have gone for her in one of the canoes,
but he stood there, grimly watching her as she fought her way to shore.

He waited until she drew herself up on one of the landing-planks and sat
there, obviously out of breath but otherwise unperturbed. Her body
looked ridiculously small in its abbreviated bathing-suit of knitted
blue wool.

"I suppose you know you were within an ace of going down," observed
Grimshaw, with studied quietness.

"Down where?" she asked, without even looking up at him.

"Down Malign Canyon," he retorted.

"That _would_ have been a swim for me!" she gaily announced.

"And your final one," he solemnly amended. "No one ever went and came
out alive."

He waited for her to speak, but she sat silent. So he added, as he
refilled his pipe: "It would be just as well if you kept away from that
part of the lake."

She turned about on the wet plank so that she confronted him.

"Don't imagine I'm made of Dresden china," she reminded him.

He did his best to make his glance a disparaging one as he looked her
over.

"Nothing so fine, I imagine!" he curtly amended. And he was rewarded by
seeing the color deepen on her already dark face.

"You seem to be worrying a great deal over my welfare," she retorted, by
way of reprisal.

"I need to," he announced.

"But I'm rather a decent swimmer," she said with her hands linked over
her upthrust knees. "I imagine I'm as much at home in the water as you
are."

"Not in these waters," he told her.

"Then apparently I have a great deal to learn," she observed.

"I think you have," asserted Grimshaw, not putting too much faith in her
momentary parade of meekness. And he cut their colloquy short by turning
on his heel and striding back to camp.




CHAPTER V


It was early the next morning that Claire Endicott took her
silver-plated casting-rod, appropriated one of the canoes at the
landing, and paddled out into Barrier Lake. She fished desultorily along
the open water, using a small brown trout-fly on the thinnest of gut.
She had no luck, however, until she drifted closer to the _Grande
Décharge_, where a three-pound black bass gave her a fight which taxed
her over-fragile rod and left her little thought for other things. She
noticed, once she had her fish safely aboard, that she was drifting
disagreeably close to the entrance of Malign Canyon. So she promptly
dropped her rod and caught up her paddle, remembering what Shomer
Grimshaw had told her as to the perils of that neighborhood.

She swung her canoe leisurely about, in the smooth and oily water,
deciding to head for the western side of the lake. It disturbed her a
little, as her eye followed the rocky shore on her right, to discover
that she was not making the headway she had expected. She noticed that
this same rocky shore seemed to be expanding, towering closer and
closer over her even as she paddled in an opposing direction. This
worried her. And her worry became acute as she caught sight of the
clear-cut rock-cleft of the Portal. She knew then that she was on the
fringe of the Malign Canyon current and she knew that she must bend
every effort to get out of it. So she swung sharply about, deciding to
strike back eastward. She paddled with all her strength, with her small
jaw set and her eyes on the rocky silhouette above her. But she seemed
to make no headway. She paused for a moment to confirm this alarming
suspicion, and then bent once more to her work. But still she did not
advance. She was in the clutch of a current stronger than her rounded
small arms. She was being sucked, inevitably, ineluctably, into the
narrowing maw of the canyon.

She called out, just once, as the truth of this flashed over her. But
she continued to wield the paddle with all her strength, her strokes
growing quicker and shorter as the struggle continued. She kept on
fighting that smooth and silky current, even when she saw that to do so
was useless. She was still threshing the lake-water, amber-tinted in the
slanting morning sunlight, when she heard an answering call and looked
up to discover a pointed york-boat bearing down on her. In that boat,
she saw, was Grimshaw, rowing recklessly toward the jaws from which she
was striving to tear herself free.

For Grimshaw, emerging from his tent with a bath-towel over his arm and
a tooth-brush in his hand, had paused for a moment, on his way to the
Back Cove for his morning dip, to study that distant canoe which was
skirting so closely the margin of safety. His face clouded as he watched
the movements of the frail craft and made out the bare-armed brown
figure in its constringing bathing-suit of knitted wool. He stood in a
momentary stupor as he watched the struggle of that bare-armed figure
against the current which was proving too strong for it. Then he flung
away his brush and towel and ran, clad only in his pajamas, straight to
a small york-boat lying beside the landing. He leaped into it and caught
up the oars, shouting over his shoulder as he rowed.

He hoped, to the last, that he might overtake the girl. He even nursed a
ragged tatter of faith that the two of them, once paddling together in
the lighter canoe, might fight their way out of the current. When that
hope was no longer reasonable, he prayed that since they were to be
flung down the tumult of the canyon, they might at least be flung there
together, side by side, with his stronger arm to help the other when
help would be needed.

But even this, he soon saw, was not to be granted him. For as he swung
toward the portal he noticed that the girl was already in the head
waters of that narrowing chasm. And she herself must have realized it,
for he saw her turn her frail birchbark craft sharply about, so as to
face the racing tideway that awaited her. He tried to shout to her still
again, but the roar of the cataract must have been already in her ears.
So he stood up in his boat, catching at one of the oars, for a steering
sweep, as he saw the dark and ominously boiling water take possession of
him.

He knew that the run had begun. He saw himself swept in between
overhanging rocks, with a sudden roaring in his ears and a thin drift of
spray against his face. He felt himself being flung forward, down a
narrow raceway of seething white stippled with dark-green boulders. His
first duty in life, he knew, was to veer off from those dark-green
shadows with the tell-tale crown of spume, to avoid them as he flashed
past them. The canoe, he could see, was still afloat, and the girl with
the paddle was still cool-headed enough to make an effort to keep her
craft to the center of that raging torrent, which she rode as one rides
a runaway horse with a broken rein. To Grimshaw it seemed as though he
were careening along on the very back of that river, for the racing
waters, toward the center, piled up into an ever-churning ridge several
feet higher than the water-line along the broken shore. And their only
salvation lay in keeping to that central ridge which swept them along
like corks. He even nursed the forlorn hope that they might in some way
make it, that with luck they might keep afloat through all that boiling
and seething hell.

This hope grew stronger as the narrow gorge widened into a brief fan of
gravel-shallows threshing from bank to bank into white foam. But the fan
closed in again, and again he found himself being hurled along a boiling
cataract between dark green walls. He could see the canoe dance down
ahead of him, like a brown feather on a flat-blowing wind. He saw it
shoot down the incline and take the great swell of "the cellar" below,
where the over-driven water reared on itself like a horse falling back
on its rider, take it in a cloud of spray and smother of foam that for a
moment completely shut it away from him. The girl still had the paddle
in her hand, when he caught sight of her again as the racing white
horses once more snatched her up and dashed her along. She impressed him
as a tragically passive unit in the midst of that power. For she, like
himself, sat immersed in forces which dwarfed the puny strength of a
puny human body. She seemed incredibly small under the great green
rock-shoulders that shadowed her. Yet she still used her paddle, now on
one side, now on another.

"That woman has grit!" Grimshaw muttered aloud as he braced himself for
the cellar and brought his bow sharply around so as to strike the great
swell at right angles. He went through it, clean as an arrow. He went
through it and twined and twisted onward, wondering how much more of
such hell lay before them, hoping that in some way they might still ride
that lashing madness until it wearied of its roaring and plunging and
rearing back on itself. But hope wore thin as he found himself swept up
to the brink of another violent descent. For one brief moment the
staunch little craft steadied itself, paused, and seemed to take breath.
But the next moment the pointed bow dipped, the stern went up like a
kicking burro's, and Grimshaw found himself plunging down another
foaming gorge where the roaring and hissing water broke amber and white
over huge boulders that strove to block its way. It took all his
strength to sheer off from these ominous patches of amber and white. But
he knew, as he strained and tugged with his oar, that the birchbark
canoe was still dancing on ahead of him. And again amid the roar and the
tumult the hope grew up in him that all might yet be well.

Already, he felt, they had raced down miles of rapids. Sometime soon,
he contended, there must be an end to it. And it was only reasonable to
feel that the worst was already over. He nursed this delusion,
forlornly, as they rocketed, for a mile or two, along a smooth-walled
canyon which reeled past them with express-train speed, but the
moderating roar behind him soon merged into a crescendo roar in front of
him, and still again he saw a widening fan of shallows and the racing
and frothing channels and the ominous green boulders that seemed to
snarl, that seemed to snap like fangs, at the speeding flood they could
not stop. Yet shallow as that water appeared, he knew that a human being
could not hope for a footing in it. Immersion even to the knees meant
being whisked off like a feather, meant being tossed helplessly along
like a pebble on a thresher-screen. So he did not dare to look up until
he had emerged into a darker and deeper run of the narrowing channel.
Then he noticed, to his relief, that he was drawing closer to the
birchbark canoe, which was riding lower in the water. It seemed loggish,
less resilient, and it no longer danced lightly along the boiling
inclines.

That worried Grimshaw, for it implied that the canoe had either sprung a
leak or had shipped considerable water in one of the "cellars." Then all
thought on the matter went from him in another racing and churning rapid
spangled with white foam, with spray once more in his face and the
booming roar of wasted power once more in his ears. He caught sight of a
green-shouldered rock under his bow in time to sheer off from it. But in
doing so he worked too far to the other side. A curling amber wave
lifted his boat-bottom and thudded it down on a sharp-angled stone that
held him like a spear-point. The york-boat swung slowly around, end for
end, as the water boiled up through the rent in its bottom. Then it
released itself, and went careening on, as Grimshaw half-stumbled and
half-fell to its tilted rear-end. For one stupefied second he stared at
the hole in the bottom. To sink in that maelstrom, he knew, meant death.
And he did not want to die. So he tore off his pajama-jacket and with
his oar-handle tried to plug the hole through which a disturbing amount
of water was still seeping. Realizing the need for more wadding, he
stripped off his drawers and tamped them into the crevice.

His own craft, he saw, was already low in the water, but he had no time
for bailing. For still another cataract boomed ahead of him, a cataract
over which hung a curtain of spray. He saw the birchbark canoe ahead of
him draw closer to this curtaining mist. He saw the girl make a movement
in the air with her paddle: whether it was meant for a signal to him or
not he could not tell. But the next moment the mist engulfed her and he
saw her no more.

He found, as he raced into that white turmoil after her, that his
half-filled boat no longer responded to his prying-oar as it ought. But
he did not give up. He struggled to keep to mid-channel. He fought to
maintain his pointed bow headed down-stream. He strained every muscle of
his naked and drenched body to sheer off from the rock-fangs that
fringed and fashioned his course. Then in the veiled light he felt his
bow dip, and rise, and dip again. A sensation of incredible speed, of
being projected helpless through watery space, chilled his body. A
stupefying roar filled his ears. He catapulted, down, down on a tumbling
amber-green flood that fell away and rose again and threw him dizzy and
helpless against solid rock.

He could feel the boat going to pieces, under his very feet, as he tried
to stand in that boiling tumult. He felt the oar snatched from his hand
as he was tossed and tumbled along. He felt his body thrown against
stones mossed with velvet slime, stones on which his foolishly clutching
fingers could retain no hold. He knew a second sensation of incredible
speed, only this time he was plunging under uncounted depths of writhing
green water, which spewed him again into the shallows where he was
carried on between boulders worn smooth as ice, rounded and slimed so
that his helpless body rolled against them and over them and was swept
stunned into a whirl-pool which he circled twice before he found the
strength to clutch at a dead spruce leaning down to him from a shore of
sloping wide sand on which the morning sun shone yellow and warm.

He clung there, fighting to get his breath back, re-marshalling his
scattered senses, telling himself he was still in the world of the
living. And as he clung there, panting, he caught sight of a mottled
blue and white mass on the surface of the circling amber flood flecked
with splashes of cream-colored foam, a mottled blue and white mass that
twisted a little as it swept toward him.

It was close beside him before he realized it was a woman, a drowning
woman. He reached out with one hand and hooked his fingers in under the
shoulder-strap of her woolen bathing-suit, ragged and torn from its long
fight with the river-rocks. The current tried to take her away from him,
yet he held firm. He held firm, but the upper portion of the bruised
wool fabric came away in his hand and the faintly struggling body eddied
off on the current.

When the whirl-pool brought it toward him for the second time he
clutched frantically at what was left of the torn suit. But as he clung
to it a white body slipped out of it, like a sword out of a scabbard. He
flung away the sodden fragment of wool and let the current take it, for
his mind was clearer by this time and he realized that no woman could
live long with her head half-under water. So he dropped back into the
eddy and swam after her.

It was not easy, for his body was bruised and strained and sore from end
to end. He was weak, too, so weak that when he caught up to her he no
longer had the strength to swim with only one hand, but was compelled to
hold her up by taking her hair in his teeth as he struggled with shorter
and shorter strokes to sustain himself on the circling current. And just
as he realized that he could breathe no more, that any further movement
was beyond him, he felt sand under his feet.

He staggered ashore, dragging the inert body after him and letting it
lie where it fell as he stumbled full length on the sloping warmth of
the white sand.

He lay there, moment by benumbed moment, without moving, letting the
sunlight soak into his chilled body. He lay there until the will to live
slipped back on its shaken throne. And then he remembered that he had
more than himself to remember.




CHAPTER VI


Grimshaw struggled to his feet heavily, and stared down, for a helpless
moment, at the huddled white body on the sand-slope. He was not shocked
at its nudity. What startled him was its air of fragility, its
impassiveness, its resemblance to a body from which life had already
slipped away.

That both terrified him and spurred him into action. Remembering his
first-aid to the drowning instructions from his earliest army days, he
promptly turned the woman over on her face. Stooping above her, he
grasped the lean ribs and lifted her waist as high as he was able. When
sure that her throat and bronchial tubes were clear of water, he turned
her on her back, with a flat stone under her shoulders to expand her
chest. Then he began a rhythmic upward and downward movement of her
arms, pressing sharply on the lean-ribbed torso at the end of each
downward sweep of the arms. Much sooner than he had expected he saw the
lungs fill and empty of their own accord. When he looked into her face,
at a small and throaty sound from her, he saw that her eyes were open.

He took the stone from under her shoulder-blades and pillowed her wet
head on it. He was foolishly disturbed, when he looked at her face
again, to find that her eyes were once more closed. But under the firm
flat breast he could feel the languid beat of her heart. He could see by
the rise and fall of her bosom that she was breathing regularly. He knew
that heat was the one thing her bruised and water-chilled body now
needed and he knew that this was being beneficently poured into her by
both the sun overhead and the warm sand on which she lay. But that
untempered sun, he remembered, would soon burn the skin of her body, so
disturbingly white from her shoulder-blades to her thighs and so
amazingly brown about the neck and arms and legs. He stood momentarily
bewildered by this odd contrast in coloring until he remembered her
bathing-suit and realized how little of her body, in days gone by, that
flimsy attire must have protected from the sun. He found something
vaguely fortifying in the thought of how such exposure had already
partly Indianized her, just as he found something intimidating in the
thought of her tenderness, her vulnerability, as revealed by the milky
whiteness of the pathetically denuded torso. The one thing essential, he
felt, was to protect that tenderness, was to restore its violated
reticences, was to shield it from roughness of wind and light.

So he turned away and crossed the wide slope of sand, clambering up the
broken rock-wall beyond until he came to a stretch of swampy ground
where alders grew. From these he tore away a number of the smaller
branches.

It was not until he carried these back to the figure lying so incredibly
flat on the sand that he realized his own body was altogether unclad. He
knew by the regular rise and fall of her bosom, as he covered the white
body from shoulder to thighs with the aromatic leafy branches, that
strength was returning to her. But he was grateful for the drowsy stupor
that kept her eyes closed and her face turned indifferently away from
him. So he left her, without further loss of time, and climbed to a
region of upland muskeg where swamp-willows grew in profusion. He picked
his way with the utmost care, guarding his feet against injury, knowing
only too well how calamitous a foot-wound might prove, under the
circumstances.

From the young shrub-willows along the swamp-edge he broke away the long
and pliant wands festooned with velvety leaves. Then with a flake of
slate-stone, to which he had given a cutting-edge by chipping with a
boulder of quartz, he tore away strips of the inner bark of the larger
willow-trunks. These he plaited hurriedly together. When he had enough
of these improvised thongs made ready he selected his willow-branches
and laid them side by side, almost touching each other at the butts.
Then with his braided bark-thongs he knotted the serried wands together,
first at the heavier ends and then half-way down. After securing heavier
strands of the tough-fibered willow-bark, he wove them patiently in and
out through the sappy willow-sticks, making a rough but pliant
wicker-work which ended in a pendent fringe of leaves. Then he
double-braided still heavier thongs of bark-fiber and wove and knotted
them into the sides of his rough fabric, for tying-straps.

When he had bound this closely about his body and pulled it in at the
waist-line by still another thong, he found himself covered from the
armpits to almost the knees with a sort of flexible basketwork which
served to keep both the sun and the black flies from his skin. But that,
he knew, was not altogether the reason why he worked so feverishly and
yet so stubbornly at his weaving. For, once he saw himself even thus
primitively clothed, he found a new sense of fortitude creep back into
his tired body. He was no longer a helpless being stripped bare and
tossed aside by the forces of nature. He was once more man the
artificer, confronting those forces and demanding that they restore to
him his lost dignity. He was a man, with his nakedness covered, clothed
against sun and wind.

With the consciousness of this first small conquest over helplessness
came the knowledge that he must make similar clothing for his partner in
destitution. She, too, must promptly know the taste of that recovered
dignity. But a glance at the sun told him that precious moments were
slipping past. And he was averse to the thought of remaining long away
from the figure he had left huddled so helpless on its bank of sloping
sand. So he gathered an ample supply of willow wands and bark-fiber and
hurried back to the river-bank, resolved that the rest of his wattling
should be done closer to his companion.

He called to her, reassuringly, as he clambered down the rock-wall. But
she attempted no answer to that call.

When he dropped his burden and ran to her, alarmed at her silence, he
found her half-turned on her side, with her head resting on one brown
arm. Her eyes were open and her glance met his as he kneeled down and
stooped over her.

"Are you all right?" he asked. Those, he remembered, were the first
words he had spoken to her. And, once he had uttered them, they
impressed him as foolishly inadequate words.

She looked up at him, studying him with oddly impersonal and meditative
eyes. But still she did not speak. Her embittered gaze merely continued
to study his face. Then she emitted a small sound that was neither a
gasp nor a sob.

"Why didn't you let me die?" she demanded in a voice flatted with
hopelessness. "Why didn't you?"

"Why should I?" he countered with studied curtness as he replaced some
of the alder-boughs which she had thrust aside in turning.

"It--it would have been better than this!" she said with a small
hand-movement of abandonment, of utter hopelessness.

"This may not be so bad as it looks," he valorously contended. And she
lay silent again, studying him intently, her face puckered with
perplexity.

"But what can we do?" she finally asked, out of the abysmal silence that
hung between them. Her voice impressed him as thin and singularly
humbled.

He sat back on his haunches, at that question, and stared up at the open
sky. They were alone in the northern wilderness, as much alone as though
they had been cast up on an island in mid-ocean. They were alone in the
untracked forest, without food, without fire, without clothing or
shelter, without arms or tools. To the southwest lay the great barrier
of rock and muskeg, of cliffs and upland tundra pierced by its one
impassable seething canyon, which cut off all mortal help from them.
And there could be no going back the way they had come. To the east,
where the spent river still ran in foam-flecked tumult and a loon was
crying desolately among the reed-grown backwaters, a _terra incognita_
of woodland and rock and swampland lay empty before the lengthening
shadows of the waning afternoon sun. And to the north, where a wolf
howled and was answered from a farther hill by a fainter howl, the dark
ridges of the pinelands stretched inimitably off toward the pale green
horizon of the Sub-Arctics. Somewhere, beyond those uncounted leagues of
solitude, lay the watery desolation of Hudson's Bay. There was, he knew,
a post on that bay. But it was hundreds of miles away. And there was no
road open to it, and no paths leading to it.

"What can we do?" repeated the woman, her voice made tremulous by the
gravity of his face.

He looked down into her eyes again. And inappositely, as their glances
met and locked, he knew a glow of gratitude at the thought that he had
human eyes to look into. Yet they were eyes touched with panic and
protest and a mute questioning which made him think of a doe brought
down by a rifle-bullet. His mind had been too occupied to give much
direct thought to his predicament. He knew, however, that it was
anything but promising. And he knew she wanted the truth, that she
would insist on the truth. But he was without the courage, as yet, to
confront her with it.

"We ought to thank God that we got through alive," he told her with a
glance back at the river.

"Ought we?" she demanded in her listless small voice. The hopelessness
of it roweled Grimshaw's dormant courage into restiveness.

"And we're going to _keep_ alive!" he said with sudden and strident
vigor as he took a deep breath and folded his sinewy arms over his
chest.

"How?" she asked almost indifferently, as she studied the interlacing
muscles of his bronzed biceps and shoulders.

He sat back for a moment or two of silence, as though confronted by the
necessity of picking his words.

"We've been flung out here," he told her, "we've been flung out here
between the knees of Nature, and we've got to meet her on her own
ground. And we'll live, as other people have lived through the same
predicament."

"Without food?" she challenged. "And without clothes?"

"I'll get them," he retorted.

"How?" she demanded.

"I've lived enough in the woods," he asserted, "to learn a trick or two
at this business. I tell you, we'll get clothing. And we'll win out, and
be waiting for them, when they come through for us!"

"Will they even know we're here?" she disconcerted him by inquiring.

"Of course they'll know!" he mercifully dissimulated. "And they'll keep
at it until they find us."

"Until they find us!" she repeated meditatively, with her face turned
down into the hollow of her crooked arm.

She lay silent there for several minutes. "I wish we'd drowned, in those
rapids," she finally said, without looking up at him.

"That's not fair," he contended, with a protective show of anger. "You
want to live, don't you?"

She lifted her face, at that, and studied him. Then she slowly moved her
head from side to side.

"I don't believe I do," she finally asserted.

"Well, I do!" proclaimed Grimshaw. "And the time will come when you'll
feel the same way about it." He rose to his feet. "But it isn't what we
feel that's going to save us; it's what we _do_. And we need every
minute of this time we're wasting."

Still again she fell into her habitual silence. The look of mute protest
was no longer on her face when she glanced up at him.

"I understand," she said in little more than a whisper. "What must I
do?"

"Believe in me!" he exclaimed, with an unlooked-for up-gush of emotion.
"Will you do that?"

"I'll try to," she murmured, without meeting his eye.

"You _must_ do that," he contended. "It won't be easy, at the best. And
without your help it might be impossible."

She misread the meaning of his words, for she made an effort to sit up,
an effort that ended in a gasp of helplessness.

"I'm afraid I won't be of much use to you," she quavered as she let her
bruised shoulders sink back on the warm sand.

It was her humility more than her helplessness that disturbed him.

"Time will take care of that," he maintained. "You'll be better, after a
good night's sleep."

He stood over her, puzzled by the involuntary shudder which passed
through her body.

"And after the good night's sleep?" she queried.

He caught the touch of mockery in her question. But he decided to ignore
it.

"Our first problem," he told her, "is to get covering and shelter. And
we must get that before the sun goes down."

So he left her there, after a quick glance at the western sky, and
hurried back for his willow-wands and bark-thongs. Then he fell to
weaving a second _surtout_ of pliant wicker-work, profiting by his
experience with his first effort and producing a more closely woven mat.
The upper part, where the willow-butts stood thick together, he bruised
and shredded and shaped between heavy stones. And before placing this
odd garment beside her he double-braided and attached two
shoulder-straps, to hold it in place after it had been bound and tied
about her body.

"You'll have to use this," he told her, "until I can get something
better."

He noticed her listless eye as she studied the roughly wattled tunic.

"There won't be much warmth in it," he explained. "So the next thing I
must do is to build a shelter, a shelter for the night. We've got to
keep warm. And we've got to have food."

"Food?" she echoed in her half-indifferent voice. "Where is there food
to get?"

He forced a smile, at the forlornness of her voice, though it cost him
an effort to do so.

"It's all about us," he proclaimed, "waiting for us to take it. This
country is teeming with it, with fish and hare and game."

"It may be there," she admitted. "But with nothing to--with nothing but
our naked hands?"

"I'll get you food," he proclaimed, for once sure of his ground.

"But food without fire?" she objected. "We haven't even a match."

"I don't need a match," he told her. "Before to-morrow night you'll have
your fire. And before the next night you'll have something more, and
before the next night, still more. We're going to get through this. But
to do it you've got to believe in me."

She sat back, apparently pondering his words.

"It's not you I'm afraid of," she finally confessed. "It's--it's this
terrible North."

"There's nothing terrible about it, if you meet it right," he said to
the unhappy-eyed woman as she gazed about at the lonely hills.

"But if we don't get away?" she ventured. "It can't be always summer
like this!"

"When the cold comes," asserted Grimshaw, "we'll be ready for it. But
first of all we must get ready for to-night. As we are, we're rather at
the mercy of the weather. So even before I look for food I'm going to
throw a night-shelter together."

She gazed away, drearily, to where a heron called from the midst of the
wastelands before her.

"I dread it," she said with a slight cringing movement of her body, "the
thought of night!"

He turned back to her, solemn-faced.

"You'll sleep as warm as you would in your own bed," he asserted. Then,
observing the stricken light that had crept into her eyes, he was
prompted to add: "_And as safe._"




CHAPTER VII


Grimshaw, after a hurried appraisal of the territory close about him,
decided that the best place for his night-shelter would be against an
overhanging rock-wall a few hundred paces lower down the river. Here the
sand-slope was both harder and higher than at the spot where he had
first landed and the concave back-wall offered a ponderable shelter
against wind and a complete one against landward approach. Twenty paces
away lay an abundance of small and large stone, for which he had already
figured out a future use, and down a fissure in the rock-wall flashed
and sang a rivulet of clearest spring water. Below him, on the near-by
gravel-bar of the river itself, lay a long tangle of driftwood, higher
than his head. And he decided, after looking over this matted hillock of
spruce and pine and tamarack and birch logs, worn smooth by their
descent down those miles of rock-lined rapids, to build his first
shelter, not of stone, but of wood.

So without further loss of time he fell to work, dragging from that
lavish store the poles and timbers best suited to his purpose. These he
carried up across the river-slope to the back-wall that shut in his
little amphitheater of sand. Then selecting smaller birch-poles that
would serve as stakes, he drove a double row of uprights into the sand
about five feet apart. Between these uprights he piled his longer and
heavier logs, one on top of the other, strengthening his structure with
shorter cross-pieces, on which he piled a close-fitting layer of roofing
logs. Then, circling lower down the river, he made trip after trip to
the higher ground, carrying back pine and spruce boughs, which he piled
closely along his timbered roof to make it tighter. Then, venturing
still farther into the uplands, he gathered moss and dried grass and
carried it back to his shelter. But, not altogether satisfied with this,
he made his way back to the muskeg along which bulrushes grew and there
gathered armful after armful of the ripened cat-tails. After bringing
these, together with still more spruce boughs, back to his shelter, he
went to his pile of driftwood and selected two knotted tamarack poles,
which he placed lengthwise along their constricted sleeping quarters,
decently dividing the enclosure into two narrow berths. Each of these he
carefully bedded with a layer of spruce branches, feathering the needled
twigs so that the coarse ends lay next to the sand. Over these again he
spread the dry grass and moss. And he was busy piling the silky floss
stripped from the bulrush catkins, piling it knee-deep along the narrow
berths, when he became conscious that he was no longer alone.

He peered out from his low-roofed cabin to see a brown-armed figure in a
willow tunic watching him intently, with a look of wonder on her face.
And that look of wonder deepened as he called her to his side and
explained how she could nest in the core of that feathery mass of down
without fear of the night's chill reaching her.

"But I want flat boughs for top-blankets," he pointed out, "and a few
short timbers to place across the entrance. Then we'll be secure, except
for the roof. That I'll have to thatch or cover with bark before the
rains come."

But before his task of finding short timber for his shelter-end was over
Grimshaw was disturbed by the discovery that he had to sit down and
rest. His growing weakness, he realized, was due more to the lack of
food than to mere fatigue. And food in some form or another, he also
realized, must be promptly obtained.

So, after thinking the matter over, he concluded that his readiest
source of supply, all things considered, would be the river. Rallying
what was left of his energy, he made his way down to the water's edge,
where he mounted a boulder and carefully studied the contours of the
winding and twisting shore-line.

When he clambered down from that boulder an odd change had crept over
him. He became man the hunter, desperately in search of food. He slunk
quietly along the broken river-bank, crouching low, studying each
shallow and bay and cove for some sign of life in its depths.

When he came to a backwater pool little more than waist-deep at the
center, widening out into a sandy shallow toward the shore and connected
with the river by a shallower throat not more than twelve feet wide, he
felt he had come to the likeliest spot for his purpose. As he stood
intently studying it he could see flies hanging over its shadowed
surface, and even as he looked a sudden flurry of flying minnows
foretold him some larger fish were feeding there. But he drew back from
the pool, making his way cautiously down-stream until he came to a
water-logged tree-trunk below the limpid surface. He pried this free
from the accumulated sands about it and found that by supporting it a
little he could float it into deeper water. So, moving with the utmost
caution, he dragged the heavy timber toward the pool-mouth. He knew that
any fish within that pool, when alarmed, would promptly seek deeper
water, and his intention was to shut off that shallow throat before his
purpose would be disclosed. His log, he found when he had warped and
rolled it into place, fell a foot short at either end. So he completed
his dam by quietly piling river-stones along these shallow water-gaps
and along the base of the log itself, to anchor it more securely in
position.

Then, arming himself with a spruce-bough, he waded into the pool,
sweeping the bottom as he went. His object was to drive any fish
imprisoned there into the shallows, where it could be stunned or killed.
And he was rewarded, in the end, by catching sight of a dodging
dorsal-fin or two. He even caught the flash of silver bellies as he
worked his prisoners into ever narrowing quarters. One of the larger
darting shadows escaped between his very knees, though another, a small
perch, he kicked frantically ashore with his bare foot. But his eye, all
the while, was on a heavier-bodied form that fought and floundered
through the muddied water. On this, when his chance came, Grimshaw flung
himself bodily, disregarding its poisonous spines as he pinned and held
it against the sandy bottom.

When he had three fingers hooked through its gills and could hold it up
he found it to be a muskalonge of at least five pounds in weight. And he
knew that food had been given to them. It was not the best food in the
world, perhaps, but it was sufficient.

His first impulse was to shout the good news aloud and bring Claire to
his side. But on second thoughts he decided to clean and dress their
meal before confronting her with it. Searching along the river-side
gravel-beds, he found the bleached rib-bone of a deer, which he
sharpened and pointed on a piece of sandstone. With this he was able to
scale and gut the two fish, which he tore into small sections and
carefully washed at the water's edge. Then, carrying his bone-knife and
his precious food with him, he climbed the river-bank and found a white
birch from which he could peel a large enough piece of bark to serve as
a platter. With still another plaque of birchbark, artfully folded and
held together with thorns, he fashioned a rogan for a drinking-cup. Then
with his laden platter and his rogan filled with water he staggered in
triumph back to their elongated igloo of logs.

"Are you beginning to believe in me?" he demanded, oppressed by the
impassivity of Claire's face, which now seemed bleached almost to a
cheese-color under its tan.

She looked at the fragments of white meat for a long time. Then she
turned away.

"I don't think I'm worth it!" she asserted in her quietly dispirited
monotone.

He put the bark-platter down on the sand between them. He resented that
dashing of his momentary enthusiasm. His first impulse was to retort:
"Supposing we keep alive to find out!" But a glance at her face, with
the shadows of fatigue under her brooding eyes, reminded him of what she
had passed through that day.

"I want you to eat," he said. He said it very quietly, but there was a
note of authority in his voice which was not to be mistaken.

Her gaze swung slowly back to his. She did not speak, but something fell
away from her, in that brief clash of wills. An alteration, small but
subtle, took place between them. The man, who was stronger, rose
slightly in some ghostly balance of life, and the woman, who was weaker,
went down as he rose. It was, she remembered, the way of the wilderness,
where all things were made over.

"We'll eat," he repeated as he placed the food more immediately before
her.

She did not look up at him. Instead, she turned her face a trifle away,
that he might not see the returning pucker of misery which quivered
about her mouth.

So they squatted down on the sand, in the slanting sunlight,
naked-limbed man and woman, and ate the raw flesh together.

When they could eat no more Grimshaw carefully tied what was left of the
meat up in the square of birchbark and stowed it away in the upper
corner of their shelter, for with the break of another day, he knew,
they would be hungry again. Then he looked up at the sun, which was
dropping ominously down toward the sky-line.

"We'll lose this warm air," he explained to her, "during the next
half-hour. And that, of course, means bed-time for us."

"Bed-time?" she repeated, with a catch of the breath.

"Until we have fire," he told her. "Then it will be different."

She sat staring toward the black-fringed hills that shut them in. The
opaqueness of her eyes disturbed him.

"Are you afraid?" he asked.

"No," she told him.

"Then shall I cover you, or can you do that as well yourself?"

He asked it as casually as he was able to, looking away from her and
staring in through the narrow opening of their shelter. But she stood
with her intent eyes fixed on his face.

"I can manage it," she said in an impersonal small voice which reminded
him of a child's.

He turned away, still avoiding her eyes.

"I want to have a look over the lower reaches of the river," he told
her. "From the lay of this land there ought to be a caribou-crossing
somewhere in the neighborhood. And I want to find some iron pyrites, if
possible, and open up the dam in my fish-pond again. It's just occurred
to me another meal might wander into it before morning."

"Would you mind not being away too late after--after the light goes?"
she asked with a humbled quietness which brought him up short. He turned
back to her as she stood at the shelter-end, a strangely solitary figure
in the slowly graying light. Their eyes met, directly and openly, for
the second time. Yet on this occasion the woman's eyes were the more
tranquil of the two.

"I'll be back well before night sets in," he told her.

But he had much to see and many paths to explore before the waning light
reminded him of his promise. He inspected the lower river-valley and
then climbed to the uplands where he examined rabbit-runs and the spoor
of larger animals. He studied the timber-growth and the cropped
branch-ends that told of moose. At a swale-side he saw the footmarks of
a black bear. Then he busied himself in grubbing for a handful of
cedar-roots and a supply of dry punk from the core of a rotting log. He
also gathered together a handful of small bird-feathers which indicated
where a shrike had recently dined. Then he turned homeward in the
twilight, conscious again of his weariness and of the sharpening air
against his uncovered shoulders.

Utter silence reigned over his narrow shelter as he crept into it. His
wilderness mate, he knew, was already in the nest he had made for her.
And it impressed him as odd, while blocking the opening with his shorter
pieces of tree-boles, that he should already regard this strange
habitation as home. He listened intently, after burrowing down under the
dry moss and leaves and covering himself with what remained of the
spruce-boughs, and heard the silence broken by the occasional sound of a
fox-bark. And it seemed to him, as he lay there with the tides of
weariness ebbing and flowing through his body, that he could vision and
feel life in every degree in every corner of the world, yet with all his
accumulations of that world's knowledge he had, at a stroke, been flung
back into the barbaric beginning of things. Then, nesting deep in his
bed, he felt a comforting warmth creep over quieting tides of fatigue.
From beyond the two barrier tamaracks he could even hear the regular
breathing of his companion, of the woman it was his destiny to sustain
and guard and deliver back to her own. He knew by the sound that she was
asleep. And he found a vague consolation in the thought that sleep was
possible to her, just as he found a ghostly and wayward satisfaction in
the thought, as he ebbed off into slumber, of her nearness to him.

He awakened, during the night, at the cry of some forest-animal within a
biscuit's toss of his shelter. The anesthesia of exhaustion was slow in
slipping away from him, but when he came into full consciousness of his
surroundings he sat up in the midst of his mattressing moss and
tree-boughs and listened for the breathing of the woman beside him.

He could hear nothing. So with a small tingle of alarm he reached over
the two barricading hemlocks and thrust an interrogative hand through
leaves and moss and catkin-down.

Then he withdrew his hand, as promptly as though his fingers had come
into contact with living fire. For at the core of that rustling mass he
had found sudden warmth, like the warmth of a ptarmigan's body under its
plumage, the reassuring warmth of bare flesh.

"What is it?" she asked sharply out of the silence.

He knew then that she was wide awake. And the discovery, in some way,
left him singularly discomfited.

"I wanted to make sure you were all right," he explained to her as
casually as he was able.

She lay silent a moment.

"Was that a wolf that howled outside?" she finally asked.

"No," he assured her. "More likely a fox."

Still again she lay silent for a moment or two.

"But there are animals--"

She did not finish her question. Grimshaw, however, caught the drift of
her thoughts.

"I know these northern woods better than you imagine. I've traveled
them, night and day, hundreds of miles, without even a knife. And
there's not an animal in them that will deliberately molest a human
being. Do you believe me when I tell you that?"

"Yes, I believe you," she finally acknowledged. He heard her small sigh,
in the darkness, followed by indeterminate nestling movements which
persuaded him that she was again settling down to sleep. But when he
listened for the sound of her breathing, the deeper breathing of
slumber, he could hear nothing. And he himself lay there for a time,
oddly wakeful, once more oppressed by the feeling that all life as he
knew it had gone out like a lamp, that all life, with the coming of day,
would begin again as it had begun at the birth of the world.




CHAPTER VIII


When Claire Endicott awakened, the next morning, the sun was high in the
heavens and oblique rays of Roman gold, penciling from mysterious chinks
between even more mysterious logs, lay across the narrow gloom that
encompassed her. She emerged from a sleep so profound that it was a full
minute before her dazed mind could fix itself in time and place. Then,
sitting up bare-armed in her smother of catkin-down, she realized
exactly what lay about her.

But sleep had restored that resilient young body to its customary vigor
and it startled her a little to find a wayward surge of well-being flow
through her rested limbs, still warm with slumber. For the first time
she thought of her deliverance, and thought of it with a gasp of
gratefulness. Then two small troubles intruded upon her moment of meager
contentment. One was that she was inordinately hungry. And the other was
that Shomer Grimshaw was no longer in his narrow shelter-berth.

Through the opening that faced the river, however, she soon caught sight
of him. But so strange was his position and so remarkable his movements
that she sat arrested, staring at him with wondering eyes. For he was
squatted on the sand between a pile of small sticks and a cairn of
stones which he had thrown together. Between his knees he held a slab of
tamarack wood with a depression ground in its center. In his mouth he
held a piece of stone, also with a small hollow at its center. Upright
between the hollows in wood and stone stood a thin shaft of pointed
tamarack on which, at first, she assumed the man to be fiddling with a
roughly-made bow. But as she looked closer she saw that the fiber thong
of the curved bow was looped around the tamarack-shaft, so that as the
bow was drawn frenziedly back and forth the shaft revolved at an
amazingly high rate of speed. On the slab of wood about the lower end of
the spinning tamarack stick she saw a sprinkling of powdered punk, a
pile of dry moss, and a scattering of small bird-feathers. She could see
the bent head wet with sweat and the knotted arm flying back and forth
in its uncomprehended exercises. But she had no inkling of what it all
meant until she perceived a thin vapor of smoke float up from the
wood-slab between Grimshaw's knees. And then she understood. She saw
that he was struggling to produce fire by means of friction.

She leaned forward, intently watching him as the signs of smoke drove
him to redoubled efforts. He pressed down with his clenched jaws until
his face grew brick-colored, his pumping hand flew back and forth, and
with a sudden throaty cry he tossed away the bow-drill and dropped to
his hands and knees above the punk-strewn slab, on which he began to
blow with long and steady breaths.

Claire could see the wisp of wreathing smoke increase in volume. She saw
it thicken and darken as he added a bird-feather or two and scattered a
handful of moss about the center of the slab. Then from him she heard a
sudden shout of triumph, startlingly savage in note, as he fell to
blowing with all the strength of his lungs and the small smoking pyre
showed a glow of ruby at its core. He added more moss, holding it close
down over the pathetically small jewel of incandescence and never once
stopping his blowing. Then, as he added still another handful of moss
and on this placed a slender spruce-twig or two, the smoldering mass
burst into a sudden small flame. He nursed that flame. He fed it
tenderly. He added to it and built it up and fanned it to wider vigor,
coaxing it on until its life was assured.

Then he stood upright, with a second rough shout, as he mopped his brow,
for the miracle of fire had been achieved. And Claire, as she watched
him throw wood on the growing flame, awakened to the fact that she had
never before, in all her life, thought fundamentally of this thing
called fire. She had never realized what it meant to the sons of man,
how its gift of warmth and light marked the first step upward from the
jungle, how it separated the emerging mortal from the brute. She
remembered, vaguely, how the Egyptians and Greeks had once enshrined it
in their early temples and how savage tribes had once worshiped it as a
god. And she began to understand why it had been regarded as holy, why,
when by mischance it went out in the Temple of Vesta, all Rome had stood
still, all business had stopped and all state affairs had hung
forgotten, just as she realized why the armies of the Cæsars, when
marching into the unknown countries of the North, had always carried
along with them their altar-litter of living coals. For with fire, no
matter what tangled hinterlands he pierced, the _voyageur_ was never
quite homeless.

She watched Grimshaw as he enclosed the fire in a circle of stones which
he selected from his near-by cairn, making a sort of hearth about the
flames. She watched him as he added heavier pieces of wood to the coals
and then turned away and disappeared toward the lower reaches of the
river.

She took advantage of his absence to emerge from the shelter. Then she
ventured down to the water's edge, where, after a moment's thought, she
turned and made her way up-stream until she came to a rocky pool with a
pebbly floor. There she bathed and dried her chilled body in the warm
sun and banded her tunic of wattled branches about her waist again.
There was still a vague stiffness in her joints and innumerable small
aches about her ribs and shoulders and thighs. But the depressing dull
ache that had hung about her heart was no longer there. And as she made
her way back to the rough hearth before the shelter she found at least
one thing to be grateful for, and that was the fact that with all she
had not been she had at least been a bit of a sportswoman. Physically,
at least, she was not a weakling. And her athletics had given her a
boy-like disregard for the human body undraped. Yet she was womanly
enough in her eagerness to get her tangled mat of hair in some sort of
order before her camp-mate's return. She was busily raking it with her
hooked fingers when she happened to glance about and catch sight of
Grimshaw as he made his way up from the lower river. In one hand he
carried a fish, half as long as his arm. In the other, she saw to her
surprise, he carried a limp-hanging hare.

She called to him, but he did not answer her. He seemed preoccupied and
impersonal as he crossed the sand-slope to the fire. But after dropping
his burden beside the hearth he swept the waiting girl with a quick
scrutiny. The frown went from his brow after that hasty study of her
face.

"You look better," he said quite simply.

She told him, as she stood watching the fire, that she felt better. "I
was hoping that I could help you."

"You can, in time," he said, "but not to-day. I want to get sandals,
first, to protect your feet, for if those give out, we're helpless.
Later on, of course, we'll have moccasins."

"Made of what?" she asked.

"Moose-hide," he answered as he dropped on his knees beside the dead
hare, with his bone knife in his hand. He caught up the belly-skin of
the animal with his knife-point and tore a rent in it well back between
the hind legs. He elongated this until he could get a grip on the
skin-flaps, then with a quick series of tugs and twists he dragged the
hide over the hare's head and turned the bald carcass out of its
covering.

"I knocked this fellow over with a club. I had better luck there than I
did with my twitch-ups. I set out three last night, in their runs beyond
the second muskeg. But my root-fiber wasn't strong enough. It was broken
in both loops that were sprung. But we'll cure and twist some of his own
gut, after this, and then it may be a different story. In the meantime
I'd like you to watch me as I do this," he added as he hacked off the
head and opened and dressed the carcass, "for we'll have many a rabbit
to take care of, once we've got the right sort of traps."

She winced perceptibly as his strong fingers tore the entrails from the
slim-ribbed body. But by the time he had come back from washing the
carcass in the river she was again entirely composed. She watched him as
he broke the small bones by forcing the body flat, skewering it open
with two sticks, ready for broiling before the coals.

"This jack-fish was all our pool brought us this morning," he explained
as he fell to scaling and gutting his capture. "But before the week's
out we'll be doing our fishing in a better way."

She continued to watch him as he prepared the fish for cooking,
skewering it flat like the rabbit's body and poignarding it on a green
twig which he stuck in the sand, inclined toward the fire. When he had
done the same with the rabbit's carcass he raked the live coals closer
about them, in a glowing bank. And in a minute or two Claire's nostrils
were assailed by the altogether consolatory smell of broiling flesh. He
asked her, as he watched over that cooking meal, to bring what was left
of the muskalonge-flesh from the shelter. And while he cooked this on a
stone over the coals, Claire placed a flat piece of timber, bleached
bone-white by sun and water, on the sand as a table, and to it carried
two rogans of water from the rock-spring.

"I hate to see that good fat going to waste," said Grimshaw as he
watched the jack-fish dripping grease over the coals.

"What good would it be?" asked the puzzled girl, stepping back from the
river with her fresh-washed birchbark platter.

"We'll have use for every ounce of fat we can harvest," explained her
companion as he deposited the well-browned hare on the waiting bark
platter. Beside it, a minute later, he placed the cooked fish. And while
this food cooled in the morning air he raked back the coals and
replenished his fire. Then they knelt, side by side before their
sun-bleached timber, and ate.

"You'll have to tell me when to stop," cried the famished girl, picking
her second leg-bone clean. She smiled as she said it, though it was
rather a wintry smile. But it was the first time, Grimshaw remembered,
that she had been capable of any such thing; and the moment impressed
him as a memorable one.

"Don't stop until you have to," he told her, "for there's plenty more
where this came from. And once we get things properly organized we'll
have less trouble in taking possession of it."

She sat back, at that, staring off at the lonely horizon that melted
away into tier after tier of wooded hills.

"That makes me feel that you've decided we're going to be here a long,
long time," she finally said. "Are we?"

He drank from his rogan of water, with his brow knitted, before he
answered her.

"That," he said, "is something we can never foretell. We can only
hope--hope and keep a stout heart."

"But does that mean we have to stay here, without trying to get back?"

"It means we have to stay here until we're equipped to travel," he
explained. "And when we travel I don't think it can be back over the
Barrier. The fact that this country we're in has remained a wilderness
argues that it's been cut off, even from the Indians. So when we go,
we'll have to go eastward, until we win through to Hudson's Bay. For our
only lanes of travel, of course, are the rivers. And all our rivers here
flow either east or northeast."

"But that," she objected, "only takes us farther and farther away." She
sat staring at the receding spruce-tops, picturing the unmapped North
where the fir-ridges dwindled off into bare and broken land-waves strewn
with lonely lake and slough where the musk-ox drank, and these low
land-waves again merged into lonelier savannas of lichen and moss, and
these again melted off into tundras that stretched out empty arms to
endless meadows of Arctic ice.

"It will take us to human beings, who have frontier posts there,"
Grimshaw was pointing out, depressed by the desolation in her eyes.

"But how can we reach--even them?" she asked after a moment of silence.

"It will be done, all right," he averred with studiously achieved valor.
"But before we can travel we must have clothing, warm clothing, and we
must also have tools and weapons. We'll get those things, in time. But
until we get them there are certain other things to remember. We are not
in the tropics. We are in what people regard as the Far North. That
means we have to build against the weather. It may even mean we'll have
to prepare against winter. But whatever happens, we've at least got to
insure against want by accumulating more than our daily needs, in the
matter of food-stuffs. It will be slow at first, in spite of all the
material that lies so close about us. But we'll improve at that. Even
now, though, we have one thing to remember: and this is, that time is
precious."

He reached out for the rabbit-skin, which he laid flat on the log-top
and began to scrape with his bone knife.

"These," he said as he held the moist-skinned hide in the smoke of the
fire, "are what we will have to dress in, when we get enough. I'll make
stretching-frames, for every scrap of fur must be saved and cured. Then
I'll show you how to sew them together, with a bone awl and sinew. Or
they're even better if they're cut in strips and plaited, for that gives
ventilation and more air-anchorage. The Eskimo can live through an
Arctic winter in clothing like that, and live comfortably."

Her brown fingers caressed the soft fur that he had placed on the timber
beside her. Then she looked up at the face of her companion, darkened
with its two days' growth of beard, crowned with its mat of uncombed
hair. Yet she found no trace of coarseness there. All she saw was a
strength to exult in, a quiet fortitude to wonder at.

"But there are so many other things," she reminded him, with her hand
still on the rabbit-skin.

"Yes, there are many other things," he agreed, "but those will have to
be met as they crop up. The one thing to guard against now is wasted
effort. We've got to show ourselves intelligent enough not to go
maundering over the same ground again and again and undoing to-morrow
what we did to-day. And as the first thing we need now is a home, a
permanent shelter, our first decision will have to be where to put it."

He did not tell her that early that morning, beyond the third tier of
spruce-slopes, he had caught sight of a lean-bodied timber-wolf skulking
through the shadows. Yet the discovery of this unwelcome prowler had
worried him more than he would have been willing to admit.

"Half a mile down the river," he went on, "is a pool, and in the center
of that pool is an island. It's wooded enough for shelter, and in many
ways would make an ideal situation for us. You'd be secure there, shut
away from practically all trespassers. But once the river freezes up
we'd lose that protection. And until it did we'd have to ferry back and
forth on a raft made of logs. On the whole, after looking over this
district, I don't believe we could hit on a better spot than where our
shelter now stands. We are well protected from winds, we have water and
wood in abundance, and by running a stockade down from the cliff-side to
the water-edge we can shut this home-corner of ours completely off from
the outside wilderness."

She turned and looked at their small log shelter, wondering at the
minute yet mysterious tendrils of feeling which were already striking
into the soil, which were already making the place seem like home.

"Then we can have a better house than this?" she asked as she watched
him once more smoking the rabbit-skin over the fire. And for the first
time he also could afford to smile.

"That," he retorted with a glance over his shoulder, "is only a
make-shift. Whether we make our real home of wood or stone I can't yet
decide. Wood, with a stone fireplace at one end, would in many ways be
preferable, but to build it of wood we must have an ax, a metal ax. And
I'm not yet sure if I can manage that. But there's plenty of limestone
about us here, and by burning that in a kiln I can make a mortar and
work my stone into walls. Then I can roof it either with a weather-proof
thatch or by overlapping spruce-logs split with stone wedges. Our only
tools, at first, will have to be stone. For we've been flung back, here,
into the Stone Age. We'll emerge, before long, into a Bronze Age, and
I'm hoping in time that we can even advance into our Iron Age."

His intent, obviously, was to hearten her. But his words only brought
more blankly before her the extent of their empty-handedness. She
remembered how vast a part the various metals in one shape or another
played in the world she had left behind her.

"But where are we to get iron?" she demanded as she stared down at the
inadequate bone knife that lay on the sand beside his knee.

"That," he retorted as he rose to his feet, "depends on a number of
things I haven't yet had a chance to investigate. And there are
countless other things I have to look into. So it means I must get to
work. For even this eighteen-hour day is going to be a trifle short for
the things I want done before darkness comes. When I'm away, if you feel
able to, I'd like you to plait this green willow bark-fiber into
strings. Twist it tight into three-ply before braiding it, and then take
the rougher braids and rebraid them into rope. I'll need that for tying
the cross-pieces on our _starchigan_--that's what the Indian would call
his stores-platform. One of the first things we must have is a stage to
cache our skins and food on."

"What is there to protect them from?" she asked him as he banked the
fire with sand and ashes. And he stopped short at that unexpected
question from her.

"A wolverine or some other small animal might prowl about at night," he
told her, without meeting her eye. Then he added, as he gathered what
was left of their food together: "By to-morrow I'll have a good sharp
spear-head of flint bound in the end of a six-foot poplar shaft for you.
That will help when it comes to spearing fish--and also make you feel
less defenseless. I'll be back at midday, when the sun's highest. If you
get tired of rope-making before I get back, it would be a good thing to
carry up some of the smaller timbers, for our fire here. Is that all
right?"

If she was conscious of his blunt matter-of-factness she did not openly
resent it. She even sensed something dissimulative and protective about
it, remembering that they were skirting emotional abysses which should
never be too minutely examined. They were alone, on the loneliest peak
of Time. And that was not the place for heroics.

"I intend to do my part," she said with an odd twitching of the lips as
she crossed to the different layers of bark-fiber which he had placed
beside the shelter wall.

When Grimshaw looked back he could see her kneeling in the strong
sunlight, beside the store of bark-strings he had gathered for her. He
could see her with lowered head, as she stooped over the three slender
withes which she had knotted at one end and looped over a timber-point
and began industriously to twist together. And as he headed down the
river, through the shadowy slopes of pointed firs, he felt singularly
like a cave-man starting off on his day's hunt while his half-clad mate
labored frugally about her pre-Adamitic camp-fire.




CHAPTER IX


Claire found her morning a surprisingly busy one. When she had completed
her fiber rope-making she turned to carrying up smaller pieces of
driftwood from the bleaching piles along the gravel-bars. She placed
these in an orderly row along the outside wall of the shelter, seeing it
grow tier by tier until her unprotected feet became too bruised and
sensitive to tread longer over a path so rough. So she turned then to
sweeping her dooryard clean with a spruce-bough and raising on two low
piers of stones the flat timber they had appropriated as a table. After
replenishing the fire she stood studying the sun-steeped woodlands above
her. Then she ventured down-stream until she came to a place where it
would be possible for her to mount to the higher ground.

This she did slowly and cautiously, with many stops and many studious
glances about her. It had been her intention to search for fresh
birchbark for food platters, but when she came to a whispering
parliament of bulrushes along the edge of the first muskeg, she decided
otherwise. Instead of venturing farther, she gathered as big an armful
of the half-dried bulrushes as she could carry and picked her way back
to camp.

Her intention was to weave these pliant rushes into a sort of
basketwork, as Grimshaw had done with the willow-withes. Her efforts,
however, were not crowned with great success. She tried again and again,
but her weaving in some way failed to hold together. And when she looked
up, in despair, she caught sight of her wilderness companion slowly
advancing along the river-edge. He moved guardedly and wearily, with a
huge pack slung over his stooping back and a number of wooden shafts
clutched in his left hand. Hanging from the fingers of that hand, too,
was a fish even longer and thicker than the arm which swung it.

The fish and the slender wooden poles he dropped on the sand beside the
fire, but his pack he lowered more carefully beside the waiting woman.
She saw, as he put it down, that it was a well-filled container made of
wattled reeds, somewhat similar to the thing she had been trying to
fabricate with her own fingers. But the coarser fingers, in this case,
had been more cunning than her own.

Still without speaking he lifted from the top of his pack two covered
birchbark bowls held together with spruce-fiber, and handed them to the
woman kneeling beside him.

Claire lifted back the bark covers and saw that one was filled with
blue-berries, with a sprinkling of wild currants, and the other with
raspberries so deep-colored and so aromatic that she stooped over them,
sniffing them with a gasp of delight.

"That's only a part of my good luck," he told her as he sat down in the
sand at her side. "It's important enough, however, for we must have
fruit and starch, along with our meat, for a balanced diet. And I find
there are acres of berries to the northeast of us here. Our one trouble
is going to be the matter of containers, to hold them for winter when we
dry or preserve them."

Claire lifted some of the berries to her lips. The taste reminded her of
her forgotten hunger. But she watched Grimshaw as he removed article
after article from his wattled carrier.

"For that reason," he went on, "I've brought these samples of clay from
different cut-banks. One of them, I hope, will give us something we can
fire into pottery and later glaze into a sort of porcelain. Then I've
brought these bulrush roots. They're farinaceous and plenty of the
northern Indians use them for flour. They also make a sort of sirup out
of them. If you taste one you'll find it's quite palatable even in the
raw state. I also stumbled across some cranberries, which we can gather
later on. But my best finds were along the river. That seems the quarry
that will give up most to us. These are pieces of sandstone, for
sharpening and polishing. We have lots of it. And this is iron pyrites.
If we had steel, or even iron, it could give us fire at any time, though
I've seen Salteaux who've managed to get fire by striking it with
quartz. I haven't succeeded at that, but it will at least give us
sulphur, to help later on in drying our fruit. I was hoping for a
glimpse of some ferruginous rock, to get the iron out of, or even some
outcroppings of copper, which ought to be plentiful in this district.
But that was one of my disappointments. I did find, though, this
spruce-spar, into which I'm going to fit a flint head, to make you a
spear. It will be tougher than poplar. And this longer shaft I've
already polished and sharpened on sandstone, for myself. I speared this
pike in one of the lower river-pools with it. But it's hardly strong
enough as a spear for animal hunting, for the big game we'll have to
get."

She looked up at him, with her characteristic pucker of perplexity on
her face.

"Do you mean we've a chance of--of ever getting big game?" she demanded.

There was no hesitation in his head-nod of assent.

"And this is what we'll do it with," he said, as he lifted a larger
piece of timber from his collection. "I intended, at first, to use
swamp-elm which is both tough and wiry. But I'd the good luck to find
this along the lower river-bank. I thought at first it was ironwood, but
I can't be certain. At any rate it's been brought here by high-water,
from heaven knows how far away, and left high and dry on our drift-pile.
That means it's well-seasoned and ought to be almost as good as
second-growth hickory for making each of us a bow. We'll have to use
these pointed stones, for splitting it, and these shards of flint I'll
have to chip into arrow-heads. The one thing still missing is sinew
strong enough for bow-strings."

"And these other things?" asked the girl, stooping over what remained of
his precious collection.

"The heavier flints are for ax-heads, to be bound on wooden handles. And
that longer shred of flint I'm going to shape and polish into a knife
for you. And that pointed bone will make us a fairly good awl. We'll
need it when we trim and bind these tougher slabs of bark together for
sandals, for we must have protection there before another day goes by."

The girl kneeling on the sand looked over their newly acquired store.

"All this," she finally said, "looks like--like success."

Grimshaw, with his bone knife, was already attacking the body of the
huge pike.

"We can't call it success," he reminded her, "until we are sure of
metal. For we can't campaign against bigger game until we have metal, or
until we have animal-sinew for our bow-strings. And it's the larger game
we have to count on. We need both their fur and their meat. And that
reminds me that I was also looking for some traces of salt. There must
be salt, for no animal, tame or wild, can live without it. But so far
I've seen no sign of it."

They cooked and ate their meal more hurriedly than before, since
Grimshaw found so many tasks awaiting him. Yet he stopped long enough to
watch Claire as she knelt on the warm sand licking her fingers clean. It
came home to him, with a small sense of shock, as he stared at her
loosened hair and sun-browned skin, that she was already the victim of
some vague process of barbarization. Yet as he fell to working on his
spear-head and sat up to study her stooping figure while she struggled
to bind the bark-sandals together with her bone-awl and fiber, he was
oppressed by the innate defenselessness of the slender figure. She was
without great strength; she was tender of skin; she was without teeth or
talons for fighting; she was the most defenseless of all living
creatures in the wilderness about them. Yet in that small and tragically
vulnerable head of hers, he remembered, she had cunning. And that, he
recalled as he shaped and bound his spear-head of flint into the split
end of its seven-foot shaft, was the one thing that might save her and
save him alike. They had the cunning to make tools, the wider knowledge,
perhaps faded and fragmentary, of the wider world they had left behind
them. And as they worked side by side he tried to make their situation
clearer to his companion.

"This pole with the V-shaped branches at the end and the center point
that makes it look like a Neptune's trident," he explained to her,
"reminded me of the Eskimo's fishing-spear. The center point I'm going
to divide with this flake of flint. I've chipped it into a sort of saw
and with it can rasp a deep enough notch to bind in this polished tusk
that I found in one of the lower clay-banks. It would be more permanent
if I could do the binding with rawhide, for rawhide shrinks as it dries.
But we must do the best we can, until we get our rawhide. These are
virgin waters and there's fish enough in them to keep a camp of a
hundred souls going. But we must get ahead of the game by drying and
smoking as many as we can. When we get salt and I've a firing-kiln big
enough to bake and glaze decent containers, we'll pickle them in brine.
In nearly every instance here we have to remember what the Indian has
done, and follow in his footsteps, for his situation, where he has
survived in territory like this, has been exactly the same as ours."

"But have we the chance the Indian had?" asked Claire as she stopped in
her work.

"In one way, we have a much better chance than the Indian, for we have a
knowledge of things he never dreamed of, and we can take advantage of
it. Our spears and traps and snares and bows and arrows will be like
his, at first, but we know a good deal more about metals than he does,
and once we've got them, of course, we can step up out of his Stone Age.
But in another way we're weaker than the Indian. We haven't his
primitive endurance. We can't survive a winter on his narrow diet of
meat and fat. We must have greens and fruit and meal. But we've got them
all, in some form or another, right about us. Our one problem is to
prepare them and preserve them."

The woman kneeling on the sand sat back to think this over.

"It's not those things that are weighing on my mind," she acknowledged.
"It's more the question of clothes. I've been trying to believe in you,
in what you tell me, but I don't see how we can ever get along."

He sat back, with an understanding nod of the head.

"At first," he explained, "you'll have to wear rabbit-skin. But you'll
have all you want of them, once we get our bows made and our trap-lines
set out. Even your footwear and leggings can be made of that. But later
on we'll have the softest of doe-skin for your under-clothing, and
double-ply moose-hide lined with hare-skin for your moccasins. For your
outer clothing you'll have buckskin sewed with the strongest of
deer-sinew, and faced with fur if you like. Before the cold weather
comes you'll have an entire suit made out of fur. And before winter sets
in we'll have warm mittens and caps and sleeping-bags made of doubled
rabbit-skin interlined with duck feathers."

This seemed to give her a great deal to think over. She sat silent for
several moments. Then she looked up at Grimshaw with solemn eyes.

"I think you are wonderful!" she said with a small quaver of emotion in
her voice. And her solemnity brought, for the first time, a deepening
color of embarrassment to his dark face.

"No, there'll be little that's wonderful about it," he corrected.
"There'll be a great many things we'll fail at. Some of our schemes,
you'll find, won't quite work, and some of our traps will fail us, and
some of our weapons won't prove of much use, perhaps. That's why we've
got to have so many irons in the fire. We've got to have enough
resources so that if one thing fails we can fall back on another. But
our most pressing need now is weapons. So I'll have to ask your help in
splitting this shaft of ironwood, or whatever it is, for our bows."

They carried their shaft and their carefully selected stone wedges to a
flat shelf of rock. Then Grimshaw searched along the cliffs until he had
found a heavy-ended slab of stone suitable as a mallet. Then after a
careful study of the grain of the ironwood, he made an incision for the
placing of the first wedge. As it required both his hands to wield the
awkward sledge it was necessary for Claire to hold the pointed
stone-shard in place, by means of a loop of willow-rope, until it was
well-fixed between the widening fiber of the wood. Then another and
still another wedge had to be added along the deepening split. But the
wood was dishearteningly tough, and sometimes a wedge would break, and
sometimes the uncontrolled cleavage of the tissue would spoil what
promised to be a presentable bow-shaft. After an hour's hard work,
however, Grimshaw had two rough bands of ironwood, one considerably
thicker than the other, which he pronounced adequate for his purpose.
Yet even more tiring work was their slow shaping and charring and
grinding down by means of his supply of sandstone. Long before they were
tapered and smoothed, in fact, he put them aside to show Claire how to
bind the tying-straps on the sandals which she had so roughly fashioned.
They were not altogether appealing to the eye, but when once adjusted to
his bruised feet they proved such a relief that he announced his
intention of at once carrying up the timbers for the making of a
_starchigan_ on which to cache their stores.

This stage he prepared by planting eight-foot poles in two rows before
their shelter, with a running-piece lashed to the top of each row and
lighter cross-pieces connecting the two. These poles Claire held in
place while Grimshaw bound them together with his roughly-plaited ropes,
making a sturdy pergola which, he explained, would place their
possessions beyond the reach of forest prowlers.

"But we don't seem to have many possessions," objected Claire.

"We'll get them," was Grimshaw's confident reply.

They fell to work again on their bows, the girl taking the lighter strip
of timber and the man the heavier. Patiently they ground down the rough
edges with the slabs of sandstone, laboriously they wore away the
tough-fibered wood to the desired thinness, carefully they preserved the
symmetry of the tapering ends. Yet before their task was completed the
sun swung low and the pangs of hunger once more assailed them.

It was as Claire stooped to place fresh wood on their fire that she
stopped short, uttering a faint cry of excitement as her glance fell on
one of the boulders which had formed a part of their primitive hearth.
This boulder was dark and vitreous-looking. The heat from their coal-bed
had shelled off a huge flake of the stone, a keen-edged fragment several
pounds in weight, not unlike an antique battle-ax in general contour.

"Why wouldn't that make a hatchet-head?" asked Claire, as she caught up
a stick and pushed the hot stone away from the ashes.

Grimshaw promptly joined her, and together they bent over the heavy
flake of stone with the scimitar-like curve to its rough cutting-edge.
He turned it over in the sand, studying it from every side. Then he
studied the boulder from which the heat had shelled it.

"I don't know whether that's obsidian or a tachylyte," he said as he
went back to the knife-edged fragment. "But it's the one thing we need.
It reminds me of the _itztli_ the Mexicans used to quarry at the Hill of
Knives, near Timapan." He found a smaller flake and tested it with one
of his larger flints. "It may even be meteoric. But at any rate it's
tough enough for our purpose. And by chipping the butt of this piece we
can bind it into a split haft and make a weapon that isn't to be
despised."

He hesitated as he turned back to her.

"I'd like to get this done at once, and done while the light is good. Do
you think you could cook supper, this time, while I'm working on a
handle for our broad-ax?"

She smiled at his hesitancy.

"That's my duty, isn't it?" she said with a shortness which brought his
eyes around to hers.

"Only when I've provided you with the proper means," he amended as he
took the bone knife from her fingers and knelt before the huge pike that
lay between them. Instead of scaling it, however, he went to the river
and returned with a mass of wet clay, which he molded about the fish
from end to end. "This fellow," he said, as he added still more clay to
the mass, "we'll bake in a bed of coals. Then when we knock off the
dried clay you'll find that the scales come with it. And baking will
give it a somewhat different flavor. We need that, for we've been
running to fish more than I care for. To-morrow I intend to vary things
by having some Canada grouse."

But it was not Canada grouse with which they varied their diet the next
day. For as they sat in the gathering twilight quietly finishing their
meal Claire was puzzled by a sudden change that crept over her
companion. He stopped short, in the act of lifting a rogan of water to
his lips, and sat staring ahead of him. Then his eyes narrowed, and
with a motion for silence he waited again, moistening a forefinger in
his mouth and holding it above his head.

Claire had no knowledge as to the meaning of this strange rite, just as
she knew nothing of the sound that had crept to his sensitized
woodsman's ears. But she saw a sudden change in his demeanor. She saw
his face harden and his breath quicken as he swung noiselessly about and
caught up the unfinished stone ax, which he studied for a moment with a
look of frustration. He dropped it on the sand again, reaching for his
wooden spear and his knife-blade of pointed bone. Then, crouching low,
and still without a spoken word, he crept along the base of the cliff,
toward the lower river.

Claire stood watching him, amazed by a change in him which she could not
comprehend. She watched him, stunned by the thought of how he had merged
from a companionable human being, quietly talking of how they could boil
water by filling large-sized rogans of birchbark at the spring and
dropping into them hot stones from their fire, merged into a crafty and
crawling animal groping its guarded way through the pale northern
twilight. He looked pre-Adamitic and paleolithic as he crept cautiously
down between the shadowy river-rocks, suddenly barbaric and brutalized,
a prehistoric hunter drunk with blood-lust and intent on a kill. She
watched him as he snaked, silent as a shadow, upon the rough rock-shelf
that overlooked one of the bigger river-pools. She watched him as he
advanced, inch by inch, along the top of this rock. And when he lowered
his body, flat along the rock-top, so that she could no longer catch any
glimpse of him, a thin fear took possession of her with the passing of
the prolonging minutes, and instinctively she looked about for a weapon.
She reached for the lighter spear into which Grimshaw had spliced the
head of pointed flint. Then step by step she followed after him.

She stopped once, as she caught sight of him again. He had drawn back
and risen on all fours, apparently to change the position of his
spear-shaft. She could see that as he advanced stealthily, inch by
studious inch, he held the pointed wooden shaft poised in his right
hand, in a position for striking. She tried to picture the animal above
which that spear swung suspended, the unsuspecting animal in the brown
waters under the out-jutting rock-shelf. She knew, from the intensity of
the hunter's momentary poise, that it was no trivial creature he was
tracking. She concluded, with a small chill of horror, that it was a
black bear or a silver-tip, overtaken as it fished lazily in the quiet
water fringed with lily-pads. She had heard that bears did such things,
recalling broken scraps of talk, of hunters' talk, about the fireplace
of her country club. But she knew, too, that a pointed wooden shaft was
no adequate weapon against any such monster of the wild.

Then all speculation on the matter ended abruptly, for she caught
Grimshaw's hoarse shout as he lunged with his spear, lunged with all his
strength. Before she knew it she was running forward, with her own spear
poised above her head, calling shrilly as she ran. Both her cry and her
movements were unwilled, infected as she was with the excitement of her
mate. Yet for the second time that mate startled her. For before she had
even reached the rock where he stood he had leaped bodily into the water
below him, shouting again as he went, with his bone knife clasped in his
hand.

She heard a guttural sound, half a grunt and half a roar, as she ran to
the rock-edge. And then she realized her mistake. For in the water
already stained with crimson she saw not a bear, but a wide-antlered
head with ugly small eyes and an even uglier thick snout. She knew at
once that it was a moose, a bull moose. And she knew the man was
fighting it, fighting it almost barehanded, as they threshed together in
the bloody water where Grimshaw's ineffectual wooden spear had already
wounded it in the shoulder. She saw the man's sinewed hand close on the
twisting antler as man and beast went together under the surface of the
water. She saw the heave and strain of the huge shoulders as the man
struck and struck again at the thick-haired neck. She saw the striking
fore-paws as the beast lifted itself almost bodily from the water, with
the man tossed aside and the wattled tunic torn from his body, leaving
his back and shoulders white in the twilight as he clutched at the
ruffed neck and again closed in on his enemy.

It made her think of Pleistocene beasts in the twilight of time,
primordial things out of some more brutal age engaged in primordial
combat. She saw a runnel of red on the pumping white arm as the hand
that held the trivial bone knife smote against the thick-hided monster.
She saw two heaving and gasping and grunting hulks, one white and one
dark, writhing and battling in what might have been antediluvian slime.
Then the thing became sickening, for she saw that Grimshaw, in his
desperation, was aiming his knife-strokes at the eyes of the infuriated
bull, who roared again as the thin blade struck deep and a thicker
runnel of blood oozed down his head. But a sudden shake and twist of the
heavy neck sent the clinging white body catapulting through the air. The
watching girl saw that body go under the water. She saw the flailing
pointed hoofs beat down upon it and send it still deeper. She waited,
with her heart in her mouth, for Grimshaw to emerge again.

Then she could wait no longer. She screamed, without knowing she was
doing so, as she clutched her spear closer to her body and dove into the
reddened water, even as the hand holding the bone knife showed above its
surface. And she knew, the next moment, that Grimshaw had not succeeded
in blinding the animal, as he had intended, for she could see the huge
antlered head swing about on the weakened swimmer still gasping for
breath.

She cried aloud for the second time as a strong stroke or two carried
her toward the long-haired wide rump rising out of the water. She caught
at that writhing wide rump, clung to it, drew herself up on the sloping
furred body and sat astride it as it battled with the white-skinned
swimmer now clinging to one of its antlers. Then as she balanced herself
there she grasped her spear-shaft midway in both hands and brought the
pointed flint head down against the ridged backbone directly under her.
She felt the point sink into the flesh, she felt the warm blood ooze up
against her leg. But again and again, with an ever increasing savagery,
she stabbed along the bony spine. She was still vaguely wondering why
she could not strike deeper when a sudden tremor passed through the
grunting body under her. It subsided into passiveness. It lapsed away
under her, an inert mass, as Grimshaw caught at her arm and supported
her to shallow water, where he had to exert all that was left of his
strength to wrest the spear from her hand.

"Is it dead?" she gasped as she clung to him, panting.

"Are you all right?" he asked instead of answering her question.

"Yes, I'm all right," she told him, breathing deep. "But you're hurt!"

"Nothing but a bruise or two," he pantingly assured her. "You--you
struck him through the spine and paralyzed him. And you kept him from
killing me."

"But why, why did you take a risk like this?"

"We needed him," was his brief retort.

"Not as much as I need you," she reproved, conscious for the first time
of the coldness of the water in which she was standing knee-deep. Then
she cried out as he turned and waded into the deeper pool-end with her
spear in his hand: "What are you doing?"

"I've got to finish him off and get the carcass into shallow water," he
called back, once more master of himself. "It's safe enough, after
this!"

She turned away as she heard the sounds of that unlovely execution,
feeling that she had seen enough of blood for one night.

When she looked back she saw that Grimshaw had recovered his tattered
willow tunic and was once more tying it about his wet body. A moment
later he came wading through the shallow water to her side.

"We must go back to the fire," he said as he took her hand and led her
up to solid ground again.

"But your moose?" she objected, glancing back to where the furred dark
mass lay half-submerged in the shallows.

"You're more important than the moose," he asserted curtly enough, as he
picked his way back over the broken rocks, leading her after him as he
went.

"But I don't see how you could do a thing like this," she said with a
glance back at the inert antlered body in the pool-water. She noticed
that he had lost his sandals in the fight and that blood oozed from a
broad scrape along his forearm.

He did not answer her until they were in front of the shelter again and
he had thrown fresh wood on their fire.

"Do you realize what that bull means to us?" he demanded as he seated
her in the glow of the flames and found the unfinished stone hatchet,
which he fell to binding more securely to its roughly shaped hasp. "That
means moose-hide, enough moose-hide for a complete suit for you, and
moccasins for us both. It means warmth and comfort again. And it means
sinew for sewing, and strong cords for our bows, and decent thongs for
our rabbit-snares. It means strings for fish-lines. And from the
gut-walls, properly cured, we can twist threads for gill-nets. But, more
than all, it means meat for us, several hundred pounds of meat which we
can cut up and smoke and dry. It's bull meat, and not the best in the
world, but it's something to know we have that store between us and
starvation, until our other plans are well under way."

"But that great hulk--" she began.

"Yes, it must weigh nearly half a ton. There were two of them, at first,
two bulls fighting. One got away. But we got the other, and he'll keep
me busy enough to-night. For before I turn in I must have every pound of
him up on our _starchigan_. That's why I must have this ax, to hack him
into quarters after I get the hide off him."

"Then I must help," asserted the girl kneeling beside the fire.

But Grimshaw shook his head.

"No, it'll be too wet and too bloody down there for you. And there may
be wolves prowling around, after they sniff the kill. I'll take a
burning stick from our fire here and build a fresh one on the rock above
the pool. These northern nights never grow entirely dark, and a good
blaze will give me all the light I want. It may take me a long time. So
the best thing for you to do, after you're warm and dry, is to turn in
and get your night's rest. You've done enough, it seems to me, for one
day!"

She sat beside the fire watching him as he picked out the sharper flakes
of flint from his store and took up his stone ax and a burning brand
from the fire and made his way once more down the shadowy river-valley.
She saw the light of the glowing brand-end diminish as the distance
widened between them. She saw it, eventually, disappear entirely from
view. But as she stared through the gloom she soon saw an answering
flame leap up along the rocky ledge of the river-bank. She saw it grow
as the shadow moving about it flung fresh wood across it. And she found
something consolatory and heartening in that companioning fire as it
wavered and glowed across the deepening night and the figure that moved
now and then across its radiance reminded her that she was not utterly
alone in that high-vaulted silence which seemed to engulf her.

She had intended to sit there and await Grimshaw's return. But that day
of strange toil had left her heavy with undreamed weariness. Once, in
fact, she fell asleep as she sat there on the sand with her back against
a warm stone.

She wakened, what seemed to her hours later, and sat up in her shelter
couch, to see Grimshaw stagger past the fire with a huge mass of flesh
that dripped red as he walked. This impressed her as occurring many
times, though she was too drugged with drowsiness to keep any conscious
tally of his trips. When she did fully awaken it was to see him with the
last of the gore decently washed from his arms and shoulders in the
river. He was kneeling beside the bed of coals with a long stick in his
hand. The pointed end of this stick was thrust into a red slab of
moose-meat which he held over the coals and watched intently as it
browned in the heat.

Claire also, as she sat up in her couch, watched that frizzling slab of
meat. She watched it with an unwilled and unstudied eagerness, wondering
at the sudden disquieting ache of hunger which took possession of her as
the night-breeze wafted an aroma of cooking flesh in to her nostrils.
She saw Grimshaw draw that flesh back and solemnly inspect it. She saw
him just as solemnly wave it in the night air to cool it. Then she
emerged from the shelter and knelt down on the sand beside him.

"What is it?" he asked, alarmed by that unheralded appearance.

"I'm hungry," she said quite simply.

And they smiled together not unhappily, as he placed the slab of meat
on a stone and divided it with one of his flakes of flint.

"This is the lip I've cooked," he explained as he handed one piece to
the waiting woman. "It's the most palatable part of a moose."

She held the chunk of coal-browned flesh in her hand and sank her teeth
into it.

"It's good," she said with child-like satisfaction as she shredded the
warm meat between her strong young teeth. But her cave-mate did not
answer her. He was too intent, at the moment, on the appeasing of his
own hunger.




CHAPTER X


Grimshaw was up before the sun, the next morning, for he knew his day
was to be a full one. By the time Claire was ready to sit down to a
breakfast of blue-berries, and bannock made of parched bulrush-bulbs
pounded between stones into flour, and moose-meat broiled over the coals
he had rewashed the heavy furred skin and laid it out for scraping. He
had also split the skull of the moose and saved the brains, to be used
in curing his portions of hide, and had washed and stretched certain
sections of the intestines which he wished to steep in lye and prepare
for binding and fishing fiber. He had also worked over the broad band of
precious white sinew which he had dug out along the huge creature's
spine. This tough fibrous tissue, he knew, he could cure and split again
and again until it was as fine as linen thread and many times as
durable. Even Claire uttered a cry of delight as he showed her a strand
of this sinew which he had soaked and shredded and smoked over the fire
and rubbed with fish-fat until it was as pliant as a thread of silk.

"This," he exultantly told her, "is our life-saver. For with it now we
can sew clothes together, and make moccasins, and bind on our
arrow-heads. Some of it, too, we can tie on to the ends of our rougher
fish-lines."

But that was not his only cause for exultation on this particular
morning. For when he was scouring the lower river shallows searching for
stones which might break with a sufficiently sharp edge to serve for
scraping-knives, in cleaning his moose-skin, he stumbled on a find which
brought a shout of triumph from his throat.

Claire, who was carrying bank-clay to a scooped-out hole in the sand
close to their shelter, to make a puddle-basin in which to soak the
green hide in a lye of wood-ashes, looked up in wonder at that sudden
shout. She saw Grimshaw staggering toward her with a ragged triangle of
ribbed planking on his shoulders. She realized, as he came closer, that
what he carried was a pointed fragment of dressed boards with broken
ends; and she thought, at first, that his joy arose merely from the
discovery of something which might serve them as a table. But she knew
different, once he had dropped his burden on the sand beside their
shelter.

"Look!" he cried with shining eyes. "Another life-saver! That's a piece
of my lost york-boat. I found it wedged under a tangle of driftwood!"

The girl stood staring down at it, with an odd fluttering of the heart.
It was all that remained to them, she remembered, of their lost world,
all that connected them with the life they had once lived.

"This is what counts," exulted Grimshaw as he turned the pointed ribbed
planking over on the sand. "See the metal on it there! Thank God, it's
brought us metal!"

Claire gazed down at the converging boards of the bow banded with a
strip of two-inch wrought-iron as thick as a wagon-tire. It met in a
V-shaped angle of metal, twisted together at the point to form a loop
through which a hawser could be passed. But Claire failed to see to what
use this odd-shaped piece of metal could be put.

"I had that forged and bolted on last year," explained her companion,
"for hauling dunnage across the lake. Altogether, there should be nine
or ten pounds of metal there, counting the bolts. And there's the nails,
besides. There should be at least three dozen of them. Do you realize
what that means?"

"But they'll be crooked and rusted," she complained as she stooped
closer over the ribbed planking.

"What difference does that make?" asked Grimshaw, laughing almost
drunkenly. "I'll build a forge and weld them over. That means
arrow-heads, metal-pointed arrow-heads, and all the fish-hooks we want.
And this iron ring means a knife for you, a knife that I can hammer out
and point and whet to the sharpest of cutting-edges. And this heavier
piece means an ax, a real ax for me, an ax into which I can put a haft
and cut trees and shape timbers and fashion boards. Think of it! That
means a house for us, a white man's house made weather-tight and
rain-proof, a house we can be proud of, a house with furniture and
comfort. And there'll be enough metal left over, by using the bolts, to
make us a good-sized hunting-knife, a knife that I can point and temper
and polish and fit a heavy horn handle to."

Instead of staring down at the metal, Claire was staring into her
companion's face. That face, at the moment, was contorted with fantastic
joy which waywardly impressed her as holding a touch of the pathetic. He
was exulting over a few pounds of rusty iron as rhapsodically as though
he had stumbled on a second Klondike. Yet as she watched him while he
fell feverishly to work, with all his older plans for the day forgotten,
she grew into a vague realization of what Grimshaw's find was going to
mean to them. It meant tools for the fashioning of other tools, knives
for the cutting and trimming of hides, for the making of better bows and
arrows, for the gathering of wood and bark, for the manufacture of
weapons of offense and defense, for the blazing of trails, for the
shaping of snow-shoes, even for the making of a boat to carry them away
when the spring break-up came along. At a bound, she began to see, they
had leaped from the Stone Age of man at his most primitive into the Age
of Iron, the age where man stood clearly triumphant over the brutes
which surrounded him, over the forces which had held him in thrall,
which had made him so namelessly afraid of the night and the fanged
things that haunted the night.

Although she failed to see just how this rusty metal was to be converted
to their uses she insisted on a division of labor in preparing for the
task ahead of them. And it was not a simple task. For after finding and
placing a flat boulder which would serve as an anvil, Grimshaw had to
equip himself with a pair of tongs for handling the hot metal and a
hammer for pounding it. The hammer he made from a flat-headed stone
which he chipped about the middle so as to hold firm in a split wooden
haft to which he lashed it. The tongs, which had to be both sturdy and
fire-proof, he fashioned by taking two long and narrow flakes of
slate-stone, which he ground smooth and bound with strips of his green
moose-hide to the ends of two slightly curved pieces of birch-wood, so
that the stone points protruded some eight inches beyond the wood. The
two pieces of wood he then crossed and lashed together, scissors-like,
in the center. When he took this rough instrument in his hands and
closed the slate jaws on a piece of stone lying in the sand, he found
that he could lift the stone up and place it where he wished.

His next task, he explained to his companion, was to build a forge, for
he saw that he could not obtain a fusing heat without a forced draught.
But before he went about this he instructed Claire in the process of
securing charcoal, by piling billets of wood on their ends so as to form
a conical pile, with a central shaft to serve as a flue and an opening
at the bottom sufficient to admit air. The cone was then covered with
wet earth and sand and a fire was started by placing a few coals from
the hearth-blaze at its bottom.

While this was slowly burning Grimshaw set to work on his forge. He
built it of stone carefully chinked with wet clay, leaving a hollow
coal-basin at the top and at the bottom a small vent for his
bellows-pipe.

It was, however, the making of the bellows that caused him the most
trouble. He hoped, at first, to find a hollow bough to serve as a
draught-conductor to the bottom of the fire-basin. But after a fruitless
search for something to fill this need he was forced to go back to the
carcass of his moose. There he hacked away a leg-bone, burned off the
flesh and sinew over his coals, and with Claire's flint-headed spear
forced the marrow out of the hollow shank. Then he rimmed it clean and
ground the ends smooth on chunks of sandstone which the girl carried to
his side. Then after a long search through the piles of river-side
driftwood he found two short slabs of split tamarack, thin enough for
his purpose. These he charred and chipped and ground into a smooth-edged
oval-shape, tapering to a point at one end. Then, while Claire ventured
into the wooded uplands to gather spruce-gum, he reluctantly turned to
his store of moose-hide and cut away enough of the green skin to make a
bellows cover. He resmoked the hide over the charcoal fire, scraped away
what was left of the mack and hair, washed it again, dried it, dressed
it with a mixture of fish-fat and brains, and worked it over the sharp
edge of a near-by timber until it took on some degree of pliancy. He
next drilled holes through the narrower ends of his wooden slabs, ground
away a groove into which to fit the leg-bone of the deer, and lashed one
slab hinge-wise to the other. Over this, after adjusting two handles to
the wider ends of his slabs, he fitted his disks of moose-hide. When he
had them fashioned and trimmed to his liking, he made a narrow vent in
what would be the back end of his bellows, carefully stitching on the
inside of it a flat oblong of slate-stone enclosed in rawhide, swinging
free on its hinged top, so that when the bellows were compressed it
would act as a valve to prevent air from escaping through the vent, yet
when they were expanded would permit air to be sucked in through the
same vent.

When he had made sure this would work with reasonable freedom, he
whetted a fresh point on his bone awl, made ready his strands of sinew,
and with infinite patience sewed the overlapping edges of moose-skin
together. Then, in an effort to render it air-proof, he carefully
covered every awl-hole with hot spruce-gum into which he had stirred a
trace of rendered moose-fat, going over every inch of the seams again
and again and coating the entire surface with a water-proof sizing of
Canada-balsam pitch. Then he just as carefully bound and gummed the
holes through which the handles protruded and also the point into which
the hollow leg-bone had been inserted. While this was placed aside to
set he proceeded to build a framework for holding his bellows in
position at the side of his fire-basin, adjusting to it a rocking-lever
and connecting-rod which could be lashed to his lower bellows-handle.

When he went back to his bellows and took them up Claire, who had been
building a smaller fire under the fragment of boat-siding to set free
the nails and band-iron, promptly stopped her work and joined him.
Together they held their breath as he took the strange-looking
contrivance by its two handles, compressing and expanding them as he
pointed the tip of the leg-bone toward the sand at their feet.

A blast of air blew aside a little cloud of sand-grains and Grimshaw
huskily muttered: "I've got it!"

So his next task was to fit his bellows in place beside the fire-basin,
inserting the leg-bone into the hole he had left at the basin-bottom and
mortaring it carefully up with well-kneaded clay.

"This may look like a heavier and bigger forge than we need," he
explained as he worked. "But by running up these outside walls with clay
bricks, after we've finished our iron-working, I'm hoping to make a kiln
where we can fire our pottery under forced draught. For the next thing
we're going to need is pots and dishes. And if we have heat enough,
after they're fired, we can refire them with sand silicates and get a
glaze on them. I want to get something we can safely cook in. And we'll
need fair-sized storage-crocks. But once we've got our ax, of course, we
can make pails and tubs out of wood."

"You mean _you_ can," corrected the girl, as she carefully pushed the
burning boat-timbers together, where the protruding nail-ends showed her
the harvest awaiting them.

"You'll learn," said Grimshaw as he fashioned a second basin of clay on
the sand close beside his forge-wall. This, when filled with water, was
to serve as a tempering-basin.

When he had finished this he gave his attention to Claire's ash-pile,
from which he rescued the liberated V of band-iron and found it to be
slightly lighter than he had expected. From the ashes, however, he raked
out thirty-three medium-sized nails, most of them bent, and five larger
spikes. He announced, after a study of the latter, that from them he
could make his companion a pair of scissors and two table knives,
reserving one nail for himself. This, he surprised her by saying, he
intended to beat out into a razor-blade, to be tempered in oil, when he
had enough fat saved up for the purpose, and whetted on an oil-stone
until he had given it the right cutting-edge.

But the morning had slipped away, as they worked, and they were
compelled to stop and eat a hurried meal. Then they turned to firing a
second kiln of charcoal, Grimshaw explaining that they must have an
abundance of fuel to keep their metal hot, once they had begun to work
it over on their anvil.

His first difficulty, however, was to get the bolts free from the
perforated band-iron, for the nuts, he found, were rusted tightly in
place and he had no tool for unscrewing them. So he decided that he
would first have to make and temper a chisel from one of these bolts,
which he thought he could heat and cut in two by means of a sharp-edged
stone. The latter he fashioned by taking a pointed flake of flint and
lashing it at right-angle to a short stick, testing it with a
hammer-blow or two to make sure it was strong enough for his purpose.

When all was ready he filled his fire-basin with live coals, piled
charcoal on top of them, and showed Claire how to work the pumping-lever
so as to supply a continuous forced draught. When the forge became an
incandescent mass of coals he thrust into it the end of his band-iron.

Sooner even than she had expected the girl beheld the edges of the metal
turn red, beheld it brighten to a cherry glow. She saw her companion
take it from the forge, bed it securely on his stone anvil, and by
holding his flint-chisel across one of the glowing bolts, pound off its
head. Then, resorting to his slate-tongs, he lifted the freed bolt back
into the forge-coals, reheated it, restored it to his anvil, and with
studied blows from his square-headed stone hammer flattened and pointed
one end. Seeing it was impossible to draw it to a sufficiently fine
cutting edge with his rough hammer, he once more heated his stub of
metal, ground down the point with a slab of sandstone while it was still
incandescent, and plunged it hissing into the water-basin beside the
forge.

When it had cooled there he took it up again, polished its cutting-edge
on a larger piece of sandstone, and with a smile of triumph handed it
silently to the watching girl, who stared at it with curious eyes,
weighing it in her wondering fingers and testing its edge against the
palm of her hand.

"And that's only the beginning," asserted her companion as he made ready
to go on with his work.

Claire, pumping dutifully on the bellows-lever, saw him cut the glowing
band-iron into desired lengths, chisel free the remaining bolts, reheat
two of the larger portions, and gradually shape the incandescent mass
into the rough semblance of a long-bladed knife.

It was not easy to do, and once the brittle point of his tongs broke off
and had to be replaced by a heavier slab of slate. He had to stop, too,
to fashion one of his precious spikes into a metal punch, to make holes
in the hot metal haft over which a heavier horn handle might be riveted.
And even when he had gone as far as he was able with his smithy work,
and had straightened and ground and tempered his tapering blade, it
took a disheartening amount of grinding to reduce it to a satisfactory
cutting edge. But gradually the hollows vanished from the hammered metal
and the long blade took on the polish of completion. Even the
contemplation of it, as Grimshaw stood with his prize balanced in his
blackened hand, seemed to go to his head, like wine, and he turned
exultantly back to his work.

While his metal for the ax was heating he drew out two of the smaller
nails into sewing-awls, fashioning them so that they could be later
fitted with handles of polished bone. Then he turned to the making of
fish-hooks. Finding that he could not work his metal wires fine enough
with his stone hammer, he lashed his flat-topped steel chisel to a
handle and used that for turning the points and welding a rough barb on
their ends. These, after perforating the stems with one of his new awls
and tempering by immersing red-hot in the cooling-basin, he placed to
one side for later polishing and sharpening by hand. And, by the time he
had shaped a dozen arrow-points, the metal for his ax was ready for the
anvil.

It was the making of the ax-head, however, that gave him the greatest
amount of trouble, for here Grimshaw had to face not mere shaping of hot
metal, but its actual welding together. He was compelled, in the first
place, to keep a careful watch on the fire, so that his metal would come
from it in a pasty condition but not over-oxidized by too much heat. He
had also to make sure that his joints were free from scale or ash, and
in uniting his semi-fused fragments it was necessary to see that the
direction of the fiber was so arranged as to secure the maximum amount
of strength. Being without borax to use as a flux, he had to resort to
the expedient of sprinkling his joints with fine sand. And with all his
care it was a rough-looking thing when he had finished.

Yet, when he took it from the cooling-basin, he studied it with a
satisfied eye.

"It's nothing to be proud of," he admitted to his helper. "But we can
grind it into shape at our leisure. It will never be hard enough to keep
a permanent edge, I'm afraid, but with it I can always carry a whetstone
for pointing it up again. And when I attach it to a good stout handle,
to-morrow, it will fell any tree in this forest and shape any timber we
are able to carry."

Then he noticed, for the first time, that the sun had dropped down
behind the pointed firs and day had vanished as he worked. So once more
they were compelled to stop and eat.

Grimshaw took up his long hunting-knife, smiled down at it contentedly,
and with it proceeded to slice thin cutlets of moose-meat. These Claire
broiled over the coals.

They consumed their cutlets and what was left of their berries and
bulrush bulbs, washed down with spring water.

"This is the last day we'll have to stick to an Indian diet like this,"
announced Grimshaw as he inspected their bare bark platters. "After this
we are going to select our fish and game and waterfowl, and we're also
going to have a little more variety in our diet. As soon as I can get my
pottery made, in fact, we'll have hot tea with our meals."

"Ordered up from the corner grocery," suggested Claire, accepting his
last statement as of purely ironic intent.

"No, gathered here in the wilderness," explained the other. "Labrador
tea grows thick in our muskegs, and I've known Ceylon that tasted worse.
And even roasted dandelion-roots make a fairly palatable beverage,
though I suppose we ought to call it coffee rather than tea. Some
Indians use spicebush for tea and the Crees have always steeped green
willow-bark in hot water and drunk it with zest. And it was a nice
instinct drove them to it, since a decoction of green bark like that was
the one thing healthful for a race of steady meat-eaters."

Claire did not answer him, for the twilight silence was broken by the
prolonged and dismal howling of a wolf. Grimshaw noticed her face
shadow, at the sound. But he forced a laugh as he looked out over the
hills.

"And before the week's over, O Seeker of Carrion, we'll be tanning your
hide in one of our stretching-frames," he called out across the
darkening hills. But the sound seemed to remind him that he still had
work to do. For he rose to his feet, threw a prodigal amount of fresh
wood on the fire, and replenished the banked coals of his forge.

"While we're at it," he announced, "I want to get your spear-head made.
When our fire burns up here it will give enough light to work by. And
once you've got a good spear with a seven-foot shaft you'll know you're
protected from prowlers like that."

So he set to work, marshalling what was left of his larger pieces of
metal and selecting the likeliest portion for the spear. But by the time
the fire-basin had been pumped up into a white bed of coals, and the
metal had been heated until it threw off a shower of sparks under the
hammer-blows of the hairy-faced man in the ragged wattled tunic smeared
with ashes and scorched with flame, night had deepened about them.
Claire, as she stood at the bellows-lever and studied the uncouth
figure bent over the uncouth stone anvil, was prompted to think of him
as a prehistoric Vulcan adventuring along earth's earliest paths in
metal-working. She did not know whether it arose from sheer physical
weariness, or from something profounder, but as she abstractedly
inspected that swart figure intent on his labor he took on a ghostly air
of pathos, an aura of wistfulness, which she found it hard to
understand. He seemed the last man left in a lonely and life-forsaken
world, a world which had wandered out of its accustomed orbit and had
gone circling down desolate meadows of space, never to return to the
ways it had once known. He seemed a being infinitely remote from her, as
incomprehensible to her as she herself stood and must stand
incomprehensible to him.

And as this thought crept over her it was followed by a sudden surge of
lonesomeness which swept the warmth out of her tired body and the
gladness of living out of her heart. She drew a sharp breath at the
sting of isolation immeasurable and, for the moment, overwhelming.

Yet when he turned to her, a moment later, with small runnels of sweat
glinting along his heat-flushed face and the light of conquest in his
solemn eyes as he showed her the pointed spear-head in his hands, a
returning surge of hope, as unexpected as it was unwilled, brought
warmth back to her wearied body. She was startled by a great gladness
at the knowledge that she was not as utterly alone as she might have
been.

"It seems odd," she said as they rested beside their fire that midnight,
"but you've never told me anything about yourself."

"We don't seem to have had much time for going into those things," he
acknowledged with a none too encouraging curtness of tone.

"What is your name?" she asked with cool deliberation. "Your name beside
Grimshaw?"

"Shomer," he told her.

"Are you married?" she next inquired, equally deliberate.

"No," was his prompt retort.

"But things must have happened to you," she persisted, "things of
importance. Surely there's something worth mentioning or knowing out of
your past?"

Grimshaw leaned forward to bank his fire. His movements, as he did so,
seemed to take on a touch of the symbolic.

"We have no pasts, out here," was all he said.




CHAPTER XI


"You're killing yourself," averred Claire the next morning as she
studied Shomer Grimshaw's face while he struggled to fit a haft to his
ax-head. She noticed the increased temporal hollows above the
ursine-looking jaw now covered with its growth of beard, the shadows
under the prominent cheek-bone, the stringiness of the thick neck
reddened with sun and wind and mosquito-bites.

Grimshaw laughed, but there was small trace of merriment in his
laughter.

"I'm doing exactly the reverse," he proclaimed. "We've got to make hay
while the sun shines. And until we've made our hay there's going to be
no holiday."

"But you'll overdo it," protested the cloudy-eyed girl, "and get sick."

"People, I've noticed, don't get sick at this sort of thing. They harden
up. And even a wound, in this clean air, heals without infection. It's
your city people who suffer from that, the softlings who have no
endurance because they never endure."

And often, during her work that morning, Claire found that sentence of
his returning to her mind: "They have no endurance because they never
endure." Time and time again she found herself thinking of Hillcrest, of
her home with its unconsidered luxuries, with its bewilderingly
complicated apparatus of service, with its illusory banishment of
actuality. Homes like that had taken the gift of labor away from the
modern woman, had left her pathetically idle and empty-handed. She was
no longer bothered by this frontier business of wood-getting and
water-carrying, of weaving and stitching and tanning, of the grinding of
meal and the gutting of animals. Their grandmothers and their
grandmothers' mothers had done that, she remembered, the pioneers of a
century ago, the sturdier men and women who came to a new country and
built houses for themselves and found ore and smelted it and made plows
and axes and felled trees and cleared their own land and cut their
timber into planks and grew grain and ground it into flour and tanned
hide for their footwear and spun wool and wove it into clothing. Yet
their happier children's children, immured in their latter-day machinery
of comfort, had to turn to play, to play like the play of children, to
keep from going mad. Their toil and their tasks had been taken away from
them and to avoid dying of inertia and _ennui_ they desperately invented
games and fashioned trivial little pastimes and turned to cars and
cards, to games and clubs and clan-rivalries, to the end that they might
not remember their own helplessness.

She thought of those things in a way she had never thought of them
before as she fared forth into the deeper forest at Grimshaw's side, to
help him at his pressing new task of building a bear-trap. It was to be
a dead-fall, he explained to her, and she would be of use to him in
steadying the timbers while he fixed them in place. "They have no
endurance, because they never endured," she repeated as she watched his
corded neck swell under the strain of lifting an especially heavy timber
into position.

Grimshaw constructed his dead-fall, she noticed, by first placing what
he called his bed-log so that it lay a trifle less than knee-high on the
ground. Then on each side of this bed-log, about eight feet apart, he
drove two heavy stakes. In the slots between these uprights, above the
bed-log, he placed the heavy drop-log, as large a piece of timber as he
could possibly handle. One end of this timber he lifted and supported by
a prop, made in the shape of a figure 4, with releasing trigger
attached. Then over the adjusted drop-log was carefully placed half a
dozen load-logs, further weighted with flat stones.

The bait for this huge trap was placed inside and well to the back of
the dead-fall, which was already walled in at the sides and rear by
brush and small timber so that a bear, in looking for a meal, would be
compelled to step in over the bed-log before reaching the jack-fish with
which Grimshaw baited the trigger-stick. And any disturbing of this fish
meant the releasing of the prop and the springing of the trap. And that,
Grimshaw pointed out to his thoughtful-eyed helper, would crush the
invading animal under a sudden descent of weighted logs.

He did not tarry long, however, over that ominous instrument of death. A
few tools of sharpened iron may have somewhat transformed life for him,
but they did not appreciably lessen the tasks awaiting him. And one of
his earliest duties, he explained to Claire, was to finish the work on
their bows and arrows.

This, with the help of metal, he could do more adroitly than before. He
could now refashion the tough wooden bow into a flat "back" and rounded
"belly," with a five-inch handle a little below the center where the
timber was heaviest and where he sought to improve the "grip" by
wrapping the wood with moose-hide. Then he notched the tapered ends and
made a bow-string of fine-cut moose-skin plaited together. It was the
arrows, however, that gave him the most difficulty, for not only was it
hard to find seasoned wood with a perfectly straight grain, but even
after heading and pointing his arrows with nail-iron he found it no easy
matter to feather the ends, since wind-feathers with a natural curve
were needed to impart the required rotary movement to the loosened
shaft. His supply of these was still limited and as he was without the
utensils for making a proper fish-glue he was compelled to fix the
divided heron pinions in place by indenting the wood, covering the
countersunk feather-rib with hot spruce-gum and wrapping the end with a
few turns of fine sinew while the gum was still warm.

When he had completed this none too easy task he called Claire from her
work and led her to a second cove farther down the river where a small
cut-bank of soft clay provided them with a target which threatened no
injury to their arrows. On the face of this clay he marked a rough
"buffalo-eye." Then he showed Claire how to fit the notched arrow-end
into the bow-string, how to hold the bow firmly in the left hand and
pull back with the right until the arrow-head was drawn up to the stave,
how to take aim by varying the position of the back-drawn left hand, and
how to release the bow-string and deliver the bolt, once the target had
been determined.

She cried out, in astonishment, at the trueness with which the feathered
arrow sped through the air and buried its head in the moist clay. When
Grimshaw pointed out to her, however, that she was only twenty paces
from her target and that most of her shooting would have to be done at a
distance almost ten times as great, she grew more solemn-eyed over the
new toy which had seemed to balance itself so pleasantly in her
outstretched left hand.

"It can never be done," she announced with decision.

Grimshaw, without answering her, took up his longer bow and fitted an
arrow to the string. Then he walked back forty paces, turned, and drew
the arrow back to its full length.

It sank deep in the clay, a little more than a foot away from the outer
ring of the "buffalo-eye." And a small gasp of admiration broke from the
watching girl.

"No, it's not wonderful," countered her fellow archman. "It's not even
respectable. But we'll improve with time, for every spare hour we have,
now, we must put in practising archery. It was with a thing like this,
remember, that the Plains Indians used to bring down a buffalo. And over
two thousand years ago the Cretans could send an arrow through an
ox-hide shield at a hundred and twenty paces. Even the earlier Welsh
archers could put an arrow through a four-inch door of seasoned oak, and
I remember reading about some Japanese bowman of the seventeenth
century, whose name I can't remember, who in one day shot over eight
thousand arrows down a test-corridor four hundred feet in length. Even
in ordinary sporting archery, I know, they think nothing of a range of
three hundred feet and there are recorded shots of a thousand feet. We
can never expect to match that, naturally, but day by day we'll grow
better at the trick, and before a month is gone you'll think nothing of
knocking over rabbits and waterfowl at fifty paces."

He paused to watch Claire place another arrow, draw back the string, and
send the head into the wet clay, a little deeper than the first.

"Even that is better," he said as he watched a third and a fourth, with
the girl dropping back a pace or two at each shot.

"It _seems_ vicious enough," acknowledged the brown-armed figure with
the bow in her hand, "but I can't help feeling it would never be
effective against bigger animals."

"Against what, for instance?" he asked as he studied the Artemis-like
poise of the little lean body, with its one coffee-tinted shoulder
thrust back and its rounded arm stretched out to the slowly flexed
stave.

"Well, against a bear or a bull moose," she said as she let the arrow
fly toward its target. "Or even a wolf. What chance would I have against
a wolf with only a wooden bow like this?"

"I once saw a Chippewan boy of eleven kill a wolf that was robbing a
cache. He did it with a bow like yours, and he did it at fifty paces.
You'd scarcely believe what you can do with that bow, even in one week's
time. But, on the whole, I'd prefer that you left the bigger animals to
me."

She stopped short, at that, and turned to him.

"Then you expect them to find you?" she queried.

"No," he retorted, "I expect to find them."

This seemed to puzzle her.

"And you'd face a bear, in the open, with nothing more than a bow and
arrow?" she demanded.

"Yes; with that, backed up by my spear, I'd face anything in these
northern forests. I'll be compelled to face them, in fact, for that's
how we're going to live. We've got to have bear-skins before snow flies.
And before the moon changes I want another moose-hide. And before the
week is out I want to see a pot full of Canada grouse stewing over our
fire."

Instead of bringing any touch of relief to the studious brown face
confronting him, his words merely deepened the solemnity of the girl's
abstractly unhappy gaze.

"There's one thing I want you to promise me," she said, apparently
speaking with difficulty.

"What is that?" he asked as he gathered up the arrows and tied them with
one of his withes of willow-bark.

"I want you to promise me that you'll always be careful," she quietly
responded, without meeting his glance. "I want you to remember that if
anything happened to you there--there would be no hope for me."

He laughed shortly as he took up the bows and turned back toward camp.

"There's certain things I'm not likely to forget," he said with a
self-protective bruskness which seemed scarcely necessary to the
occasion. For the brown face beside him deepened in color at the thought
that his thrust was possibly designed to be a double-edged one.

She remained silent for the rest of the morning as she helped him
complete his tests with the different samples of firing clay. She was
equally withdrawn when he took the remaining portions of moose-skin and
schooled her in the long and laborious task of dressing such things. She
helped him, after the skin was thrown over a flat timber, to scrape what
was left of the "mack," the fat and flesh, from the inner surface. She
worked beside him at the still harder task of removing the hair from the
outer side. It would have been easier, Grimshaw explained, if they had
left their hide to soak for a week. But they were too much in need of
footwear to wait that long, and moose-hide, properly dressed, made the
best possible moccasins. The wood-ash lye, however, had helped to break
down the fiber, and, by following the grain of the hair, the larger
pieces of skin were finally scraped clean. They were thrown over the
smooth log again and the fleshy surfaces rescraped and worked until they
took on a semblance of pliancy. But the rawhide was still far from
perfect. It required, in fact, first repeated washings and later an
almost incredible amount of twisting and stretching and massaging and
working over a sharp timber-edge to break down the fiber and leave it
sufficiently soft for the application of mixed moose-brains and fat
which Grimshaw proceeded to rub into the hair-side of the skin. This
malodorous concoction, he explained, would be absorbed by the hide and
after a day or two of drying in a cool place would show no slightest
evidence of grease.

The rest of the day they devoted to attaching their fish-hooks to lines
of rawhide, to fashioning rabbit-snares, and to the completion of their
firing-kiln for the pottery making. And with Grimshaw's efforts to
achieve dishes and pots of earthenware began a long and at times a
disheartening struggle.

He found, by experiment, that a darker blue clay from a lower cut-bank
gave him the best material for his purpose. It baked as hard as
fire-brick and took on a reddish gray tone that was not unpleasing to
the eye. But imbedded in this clay, unfortunately, were troublesome
fragments of slate which all had to be removed before the moistened mass
could be made ready for molding. And it was a long and tiring portage
from the cut-bank to the kiln-side. His feet, illy protected by their
worn-out sandals, began to trouble him, and even Claire, engaged in the
lighter task of cleaning and working up the wet clay, found an
increasing ache of weariness creeping into her overtaxed finger-flexors.
But she knew that it was a battle against time they were waging, and no
complaint escaped her.

It was Grimshaw, in fact, who looked up with startled eyes at the
declining sun and realized that another day was slipping away.

"This," he suddenly announced, "is work which can be done by firelight.
While the sun's still up I want to go out after food, for we've been
skirting the margin of safety a little too closely."

"Then I'll try my hand at fishing," suggested Claire, "while you're
away. That's one of the few things I know something about."

His eye met hers, for one short moment, and then he looked away. She
detected, or thought she detected, yet another deliberate effort on his
part to maintain an impersonality of relationship which tended to reduce
every accidental contact to the commonplace. But he, after all, was the
master and she was still the incompetent help-mate.

Yet, when he had left her to her own devices and she had found and
hacked down saplings for her lines and baited her crude hooks with
moose-meat and taken up her position beside one of the more
promising-looking river-pools, she could not keep her thoughts from
wandering back to other and happier fishing days, to the care-free and
indolent days when gay-sweatered groups fished for flounder and snapper
from the burnished fore-deck of Milt Bisnett's cruiser-launch as they
drifted along the pale green shallows of Fire Island Inlet. It seemed a
long time ago. And the thought of it brought a tightening of self-pity
to her throat as she anchored her shorter poles and cast her baited
hooks one by one into the shadowy pool beyond which a bittern was
calling forlornly through the twilight.

Then her thoughts scattered, like frightened birds, at the sudden tug on
the longer pole which she kept in her hand, the tug that sent an
electric thrill through her arms and reminded her that the teeming life
in those northern waters was hungry life, ever ready to snatch at its
passing meal. She felt the pole bend perilously and she held her breath,
fearful that the line would part under the strain. All she could do was
to keep it taut, surrendering a few feet when the pull became
threatening again, recovering a few feet when her straining captive once
more rose toward the surface. She was experienced enough at such things
to know she could never safely land a catch of that size from where she
stood, so with her left hand she reached for the stone hatchet with
which she had cut her poles and circled slowly along the lower
rock-ledge until she came to a gravel-bar at its end. Then, still
holding her line taut, she slipped down from the rock and waded
knee-deep into the chilly water, shortening the hold on her pole and
drawing in her line foot by foot until the threshing and tugging life on
its end floundered about her knees.

She refused, now, to surrender an inch of line, tightening her hold on
him until he gaped wide-mouthed before her. She waited, with her stone
hatchet poised and a fantastically fierce scowl on her small face, until
the flashing long body was in a position for striking. Then with a
little cry of ferocity she brought the sharp-edged stone down on the
widening green head.

The blow fell true, for the next moment all struggle ceased. With a gasp
of triumph the girl dragged the huge body up through the shallows and
lifted it to the rock-edge, where she stood over it with a glow of
conquest in her chilled body. She was no longer lamenting the past. She
was functioning too busily in the present even to remember that past.
For with her own skill and her own cunning she was reclaiming food from
the wilderness. She was accomplishing something of moment. She was
playing her part in wresting her living from nature, in demanding her
essential human share in the bounty of Providence. And for the first
time since her deliverance from the rapids she felt that she was an
integral part of the newer scheme of things, that she was doing
something to justify her existence.

This feeling was temporarily checked when she had the ill luck to lose
not only one of her bigger fish but also one of her hooks and lines, in
making a landing. Yet even in the face of this loss, at the end of an
hour, she was the proud possessor of two larger fish which she
recognized as muskalonge, six flat-bodied black bass, and a
needle-toothed pickerel as long as her forearm.

Two of the larger black bass, once she had tugged her load back to the
shelter, she scaled and dressed and washed with her own hands. And by
the time Grimshaw came panting wearily home through the ghostly light
his meal was broiling over the coals of the camp-fire. Claire looked up
in wonder as he came, for over the arm of her hunting-mate hung the
bodies of five limp rabbits, two muskrats, and the trailing gray skin of
a larger animal.

She noticed Grimshaw's nod of approval as he knelt beside the fire and
warmed his chilled body in the grateful glow. She caught his sober smile
as he inspected the array of fish and sniffed appreciatively at the two
trussed bodies broiling over the coals. Then he looked down at the
furred mass which he had dropped on the sand beside him.

"We're getting this stuff none too soon," he said as he unbound what was
left of the tattered sandals from his wet feet. "Even now the night air
is getting a chill in it which shows we must have clothing and must have
it right away. But what I've seen to-night convinces me there's fur
enough all about us, once we can get possession of it. Only, I've got to
range farther and shoot stronger. This lynx I knocked over when he was
trying to get a rabbit still kicking on one of my tossing-poles. The
skin will be the best thing possible for a pair of leggings. Three of
the rabbits I brought down with arrows, the fourth put his head through
one of my snares half an hour after I'd set it up, and the fifth I got
from the pole where the lynx was watching it."

"This means six rabbit-skins," said the girl appraisingly, as they began
to eat.

"We'll need them!" ejaculated Grimshaw. "I had a shot at a fox, but he
got away with one of my arrows in his shoulder. I've also spotted a
beaver colony, but it was too late to go after any of them. But the most
important thing I've seen are the evidences of caribou. Hundreds and
hundreds of them, perhaps thousands of them, seem to have the habit of
crossing our river a mile or so below us here."

"Will we have a chance at them," asked the girl, "without a rifle?"

"If we're clever enough," was the other's matter-of-fact reply. "If we
can match up with the Indian, who used to build his teepees out of their
hides, we ought to have all the caribou skins we can handle. And their
meat will dry better and make a trifle better eating than this bull
moose of ours."

Claire, having finished her meal, leaned against the heavy timber at her
back, watching the fire. About that fire, with its wide bed of coals and
its crackling birch-wood, was both a compact sense of competence and a
sustaining sense of comfort. Her eye followed the line of the red-tinged
smoke as it floated upward in the cool quiet air, followed it until she
saw the high-arching dome of the northern heavens; and the magnitude of
the vision once more brought to her troubled spirit its recurring sharp
ache of desolation. Then, as she turned and abstractedly watched her
camp-mate as he set to work on the puddled clay, she began to realize
how step by step they were stubbornly advancing out of their nakedness,
how day by day they were slowly pioneering into a miniature and
hand-made civilization all their own. They were confronting life, life
at its rawest and wildest, and out of the knowledge housed in a human
brain and out of the cunning and strength of a human hand they were
fabricating their fragile barriers against want and death.

She had no knowledge of what the future held for them, just as she had
no knowledge of how long they were to keep up their blind fight against
the blind forces of nature. But as she sat in the light of the great
fire Grimshaw had built in front of her to fling back the night which
sought to engulf her, that island of warmth in the chill immensities of
silence seemed to her a symbol of all her newer existence. She knew a
sudden deep but indeterminate surge of gratitude at the thought that the
man she was destined to face the wilderness with was so truly a man. And
as she went to his side, where he stooped swart and sinewed over his
rough potter's wheel, she startled him by placing a small hand on his
shoulder and saying, in a voice slightly tremulous with incommunicable
feeling: "I want to be worth it all!"

He sat back, at that, with a slightly barricaded look on his face as he
stared, not at her, but at the light of the fire.

"_You are!_" he said, in a somewhat thickened voice, out of the silence
that had swung between them.




CHAPTER XII


It was in his efforts to make pottery for their household use that
Grimshaw realized, more than ever before, how he and his camp-mate had
been flung back into the very childhood of the world. Man, he
remembered, had been forced to become a potter even before he became a
smith, had left behind him in trivial yet timeless shards of earthenware
his first groping steps up toward civilization.

But Grimshaw, with all his knowledge of woodcraft, had never ventured
into the field of ceramics. So every step of his advance into that new
territory was more or less in the nature of an experiment. Yet out of
the crowded store-house of half-knowledge, as he worked, crept hearsay
memories and pallid ghosts of facts, so that before he had been long at
his new labors he was groping less erratically in the dark than he had
expected. After finding a clay with the proper amount of plasticity,
easily kneaded and molded while moist, and also capable of kiln-baking
into a ware that was both hard and tough, he even imagined that the
greater part of his troubles were over. But in this he soon saw his
mistake. For his first models, simple as they were in design, betrayed
a uniform tendency to sag out of shape, if molded with too moist a
batter, and to crumble under his hand, if formed with too stiff a
mixture.

He made a distinct step forward, however, when he fashioned a block of
wood which could be made to revolve on a pivot, to serve him as a
potter's wheel. And he achieved still another advance in the discovery
that it was expedient, especially in his larger pieces, to work his clay
into long ropes and then build up his desired form, layer by layer,
puddling and welding the fabricated wall together by the use of "slip"
as he centered the piece on his wheel. He also blundered into the
knowledge that it was profitable, when he advanced into designs beyond
those simple cups and saucers and plates, to support his side-walls with
withes of rawhide or braided bark while standing apart to be sun-dried,
before facing their final ordeal by fire.

This final ordeal by fire, he soon discovered, was the one uncertain
feature of his process. Being over-impatient to get a glimpse of his
first dishes, he opened the kiln too soon, with the result that his
pottery, deprived of the slow cooling essential to toughness, betrayed a
disheartening tendency to crack. Most of it, too, was stained a dull
ashen-gray by smoke which had seeped through to his oven. A great deal
of it was warped out of shape.

But Grimshaw did not give up. He renewed the battle, with additional
courage, when he found a silicate sand which under test showed the power
to impart a surface glaze to his earthenware. He even collected felspar,
which he reduced to a powder between stones, and mixed this with the
fine sand which he sprinkled over his models of clay. When this was
fired he found, to his joy, that his pottery came from the kiln coated
with an iridescent and water-proof shell. When Claire, busy with the
twin task of burning charcoal and carrying molding-clay from the
cut-bank, came and stooped over the array from the opened kiln, she gave
a little shout of delight.

"Dishes! Real dishes!" she cried as she turned the handleless glazed cup
over in her fingers. "Thank heaven for at least a tea-cup!"

But Grimshaw wanted more than dishes. He wanted tough-bottomed pots
which could be swung over the fire without cracking, pots in which meat
could be stewed and water could be boiled. He wanted baking-dishes and
wash-basins. But most of all he wanted large crocks with close-fitting
tops, crocks to hold their winter's supply of food-stuffs, crocks for
their fruit-pemmican, crocks for their stores of wild rice and
starch-bulbs, for their dried berries, for their smoked fish, for their
jerked deer-meat, for the high-bush cranberries which he intended to
stew down into a jelly mixed with boiling marrow-fat, for the green
lichen and Iceland moss which he proposed to dry and stow away, in place
of vegetables, against the lean months of their forest year.

He found, as he worked on these heavier containers, that it was best not
to build up such high-walled vessels all at once, but to advance them
five or six inches at a time, let them sun-dry, and then add another
section to the ever rising walls. And as he did this he became more and
more expert at "coiling," at turning his thin ropes of well-kneaded clay
round and round upon each other in the desired form and then smoothing
them down with "slip" into a compact whole. He discovered, too, that his
binding withes left permanent indentations in his fired pottery, so he
fell into the habit of deliberately distributing these binding fibers,
fashioning them into simple patterns more or less pleasing to the eye,
so that the finished product took on a touch of the ornamental. And as
he garnered his elementary lore as to glazing mediums he learned that
some sands gave a certain tone to his pottery and other sands still
another tone, so that by combining or contrasting these he could roughly
determine the coloring of his utensils. He even found a lighter-toned
clay which, when fired, burned into almost a cameo-white, and by
imposing this on his walls of duller clay he was able to produce a
naively ornamented vessel which brought a smile of admiration even into
the eyes of the woman who had once handled Coalport and Sèvres.

But he had to turn away from the more decorative phases of his work, for
time was still a vital factor in his plans. And later on, he explained,
they could indulge in the luxury of climbing up to a porcelain-finish in
their pottery and a Grecian contour in their water-jugs. For, as he
pointed out to his wondering-eyed companion, security must be achieved
before beauty could be pursued.

While waiting for his kilns to cool, in fact, Grimshaw had already
completed the curing of his moose-hide. This had been done, since he had
neither salt nor saltpeter, by repeated smoking over a green fire, by
tedious manipulations to break down the tissue, and by patient rubbing
dry after immersion in river-water thickened with powdered punk-wood,
until the different portions of hide were as soft as Shetland wool and
as pliable as home-spun cloth. Then, putting the coarser and heavier
pieces of skin aside for moccasin-making and reserving a narrower strip
for withes and binding strings, he handed over the best of the hide to
Claire for the conjuring together of clothing.

She decided, after much study over the problem, to make herself a
two-piece garment, a short-sleeved war-shirt that laced up at the
throat and knee-length breeches looped for a draw-string at the waist.
After much measuring and adjusting she marked out the required pattern
with a piece of charcoal. Then Grimshaw with his knife cut the skin as
directed. And while the intent-eyed girl with awl and sinew laboriously
stitched her seams together, her companion set to work on the making of
their footwear.

He designed their moccasins after the Ojibway model, with a puckered
front, using the heavier portions of the hide for his double-ply soles
and stitching tying-straps to the front corners of the uppers. To the
tops of the smaller pair, which he made of softer hide for the girl, he
stitched leggings of cured rabbit-skin capable of reaching to her knees,
and, when laced on her legs, protecting them both from the brambles of
the woods and from the mosquitoes that still swarmed about the swampier
lowlands.

Grimshaw found it hard to share in his companion's strange joy in this
acquisition of apparel. He found it hard to understand her hunger for
such things, a hunger which kept her at her sewing until her fingers
ached and even when darkness ended her day brought her close beside the
camp-fire so that she might continue her work in the light of its
flames. And when he returned from one of his hunting-trips, the next
day, and found her arrayed in her aromatic moose-hide tunic and her
loose-legged gray-brown breeches and her close-strapped leggings and
moccasins, he detected in her a minute yet unmistakable difference of
bearing. She seemed mysteriously removed from him. She was, in some way,
no longer impersonal and sexless. This simple gift of clothing, he felt,
had at one stroke swept her back to womanhood, had barricaded her off
into a domain of her own, had reestablished some indefinite privacy of
life beyond which it was no longer his prerogative to trespass.

She was doing her best, he could see, to accept the change without
comment. But there was an exceptional luster to her eye when his
moderated glance of admiration met her half-timid glance of inquiry,
just as there was a flutter in her voice as she explained that she
intended to sew longer sleeves of rabbit-skin on her tunic and add a
fringe of buckskin to its bottom. And later on, when they could kill a
porcupine, she proposed to ornament her coat-front with quill-work and
attach rows of dyed quills to her moccasin-tops. And still later, when
they could afford the skins, she intended to sew together enough
rabbit-fur to make a _capote_ to throw over her shoulders.

It was then, for practically the first time, that Grimshaw became
directly conscious of his semi-nudity. And what he regretted, oddly
enough, was not this nudity itself, but his newly acquired
consciousness of it. He resented this discovery, just as he
indeterminately resented the air of remoteness which a couple of roughly
made garments had thrown about his camp-mate.

So obsessed did he become by some vague new sense of incompetence, of
uncouthness, that that night beside his fire he took what was left of
his tanned moose-hide and, instead of sewing it into quivers and
carrying-bags as he had intended, fashioned it into a sort of Chippewan
coat-shirt and a pair of fringed trousers that reached almost to his
moccasin-tops.

"This means," he said, as he sat over his sewing while Claire attended
to the smoking of the last of the cut-up moose-meat, "that we've got to
bring down some big game before the end of another week. For we must
have extra moccasins before there's a change in the weather. And before
the nights grow cold we must both have sleeping-robes."

Claire complained that she found her buckskin clothing almost too warm
for comfort. She even confessed a fear that she was already partly
Indianized in the matter of her resentment toward too much skin
covering.

"Buckskin," explained Grimshaw, "for its bulk and weight has more warmth
than any cloth in the world. And even when wet through, if you take
ordinary care in the drying, it will rub as soft as a glove. But
nothing is quite as delicate and fine as a summer-killed fawn. That is
what we'll make your under-clothing of, when the winter weather drives
you to the wearing of furs. And that's what you'll make your hand-towels
of, when we get it, and your pillowcases that I'm going to stuff with
Canada-goose feathers for you."

Yet it was not Claire alone who changed with the accession of clothes.
Grimshaw himself, once shod and clad in skins, found himself less
anchored to his camp-fire locality. He became impatient for exploration,
eager to look over the remoter areas of their forest neighborhood. If
there was a limit to the time he could spare for such wandering, he took
advantage of his camp-keeping periods to tutor his mate in the trick of
setting tossing-poles and rabbit-snares, in archery and animal stalking.
When Claire bowled over her first snow-shoe rabbit, with a well directed
arrow, Grimshaw looked for some revulsion of feeling as she stooped to
gather up the still kicking animal. But he was surprised to see nothing
more than the casual triumph of the hunter on her intent young face. For
that limp body, she remembered, would not only give them a stew for
their brand new boiling-pot, but would also provide her with the needed
skin for her arrow-quiver. She had made a kill; and she would make
others, as her newer mode of life demanded.

Grimshaw remained slightly perplexed by this seeming strain of hardness
in her. He had further evidence of it when, the next day, they ventured
deeper into the lower river district and he pointed out to her the
"blind" of jack-pine which he had already built there at the
caribou-crossing. She was unexpectedly interested in his proposed plan
for lying in ambush behind his screen of pine-boughs, to wait there hour
by hour, until the first timid traveler should venture within
arrow-shot. When he told her that the caribou herds of the Barren
Grounds sometimes numbered ten and fifteen thousand animals, making a
spectacle which, once seen, was never to be forgotten, Claire asked him
if there was any reason she could not join him in his ambuscade.

"Only that it is tiring, and may keep you up all night," was Grimshaw's
answer.

"I'd rather be where you are," she said with a directness which left him
slightly nettled.

So he changed his original plan as to hunting alone. But while waiting
for a favorable wind, for it was essential that the wandering caribou
should not scent them from the opposite shore, Grimshaw and his
slender-bodied helper went busily on with their camp-work. While the man
built a rain-proof covering of bark over their temporary shelter and
another rough roof over his forge and kiln so that he could still work
there in wet weather, the girl polished the rough spoons and forks he
had fashioned out of bone and wove for herself and her mate
carrying-hampers of tough basketwork. They made hide slings for holding
their spears and bows across their shoulders and arrow-quivers that
could be strapped to their sides. They smoked a huge salmon which
Grimshaw speared at the foot of the rapids, and then turned to gathering
a more ample store of both raspberries and the farinaceous rhizomes of
water-lilies, to be dried and stored away for the future. Grimshaw also
wove gill-nets of split moose-gut, washed clean and twisted and cured
over punk-smoke, and prepared night-lines for the river-pools, and even
concocted a box-trap with a rachet door for the snaring of smaller game.
Then, having resharpened his ax and his spear-heads and put his arrows
in shape, he went scouting along the lower river and returned with the
news that it seemed a favorable night for their deer-hunting.

So they set out side by side through the pale green twilight of the
northern dusk, man and woman dressed alike in gray-brown moose-hide,
each with spear in hand, each with filled quiver at side and long-bow
strapped to back. Silently they picked their way through the shadows,
keeping as well under cover as they could. Once Grimshaw stopped and
unslung his bow, sending an arrow into a porcupine which he cached high
in a jack-pine, well out of the reach of wolverines. Once, too, Claire
stopped to shoot at a rabbit, but missed, startled by the second arrow
which her companion sent through the running animal's ribs.

It was not until they were secreted in the "blind" above the lower
river-bank that the beauty of that prolonging summer twilight came home
to the wondering woman. Before her lay the open reach of the river, with
no outward sign of the oily current sweeping along its bed, with
blue-green shadows framing its opalescent center in gloom. And beyond
the river lay lightly wooded hills, lonely tier by tier, stretching away
into the illimitable distance and overhung by a thin rind of opal light
which assured her that the twilight about them would never, even in the
dead of the night, be complete darkness. Somewhere, out of the gray
silence, a fox barked, and then, from regions still more remote, came
the thin howling of wolves.

Grimshaw moved uneasily, as that far-off chorus increased in volume,
then stood up in the shelter.

"That sounds like a run," he said as he peered across the gray slopes
beyond the water.

He remained there for several minutes, staring off into space. Then his
eyes narrowed and he touched Claire on the arm.

"They're coming!" he said quietly enough, yet with a note in his voice
which brought the woman to her feet.

"What is it?" she asked, following the direction of his gaze across the
ghostly reaches of the river.

"Caribou," he said as he placed his spear and then his bow and arrow
carefully in position. "Watch for them! It will be a sight rather worth
seeing!"

He turned back to show her how she could stoop at one of his sight-holes
and see without being seen. And as she kneeled there, staring across the
wide valley with the dividing river-bed that looked like pooled
quicksilver at its center, she saw what seemed to her still another
river. It was a river of flowing fawn and gray, mingling and changing as
it advanced out of the wooded gloom into the ghostly light of the open
hills. It was a river of moving bodies, of crowding bodies, of surging
bodies so pressed together that they advanced in one mistily pulsating
army of movement. They came on, not by the dozens, not by the hundreds,
but by the uncounted thousands, fretting the sky-line with the forest of
their prong-like horns, coloring the long slope of the hillside down
which they surged until it became only a dun-tinted tideway of movement
stippled with tawnier neck-markings as the rhythmical avalanche narrowed
and slackened while it poured down the trampled bank-slopes toward the
water's edge.

The watching woman could even make out the leader as with uplifted head
it looked to the left and the right and then plunged into the river. She
could see it wading out across the shallows until the current caught it
up. She could see its outthrust nose and its back-thrust horns as it
swam with churning fore-feet across the beguilingly mercury-like
channel, heading up-stream as it went. Then she saw it followed by
others, and still others, as that compact army continued to roll down
the trampled hillside in one loping and crowding mass which broke at the
water's edge and merged into a cloud of spray as the impatient polished
hoofs swept out on the deepening bars. And as they came the entire
valley was filled with an intermingling confusion of sounds, with the
echo of churning fore-legs, with the hog-like grunting of straining
throats, with the flatted cries of frightened fawns calling to the does.
And as the countless antlered host poured down the opposing hill and
crowded after the hundreds already threshing the twilit waters the sound
grew in volume until it became like the continuous roar of a rapid. But
there was no stop. On and on those surging battalions of swimmers came
until the threshing hoofs struck gravel again, until their writhing
backs emerged from the flood, until their hurrying feet once more
trampled the shallows and their crowding horns clashed together and
threw a sharper volume of sound against the nearer valley-side.

Then the watching woman no longer thought of the strange noises ringing
in her ear as she noticed her companion, crouched low in his blind,
fitting an arrow to his bow. She saw him, as the first pair of tawny
shoulders climbed the hill-path that led close beside their shelter of
jack-pine, draw back the bow-string until it touched his ear. She saw
him wait until the leader, suddenly arrested in its ascent, threw an
inquiring nostril up in the air and half wheeled on its haunches. And at
that moment she realized that Grimshaw had loosened his arrow. She saw
the flying shaft half bury itself in the tawny body, followed by a
second arrow that struck deep into the startled shoulder.

Three times the stricken deer leaped, without sense of direction. Then
it fell sprawling along the ground, where its mates stood for a moment
arrested and bewildered. While they still sniffed and trampled about in
disorderly half-circles the unseen killer behind his screen of jack-pine
loosened another and still another arrow. And as a second and third body
leaped in the air and fell heavily to the earth Claire herself caught up
her arrows and let them fly, one by one, into the near-by startled
bodies that came trampling and crowding to their destruction.

She had no knowledge of how true her shots were striking. But she drew
back her arrows with every jot of her strength. She shot grimly,
mercilessly, infected with her comrade's primordial lust to kill, to
possess while the power to possess was still in their grasp.

When a wounded buck charged blindly into a stunted spruce on the right
of their screen she leaped after it with her spear in her hand. Without
being quite conscious of what she was doing, she thrust the pointed iron
spear-head deep in the rebounding body. Against that body, after her
stroke, she had to place her moccasined heel before she could withdraw
the shaft. And as she turned she beheld Grimshaw spring from the blind
and hurl his own spear head-on into the neck of a second buck which had
fallen to its fore-knees, wrench free his weapon again, and plunge it
into the flank of a doe that blatted like a malleted steer as it went
down. And the handle of the spear, she noticed, was wet and crimson to
its hilt.

But the army of tawny-colored bodies had broken by this time. The
advancing river of antlered heads had wavered and recoiled on itself,
had dispersed through the wooded hills and vanished in the twilight,
with a threshing of tree-branches as it went. And two panting figures
stood in the gray light confronting each other, two hide-clad figures
stained with blood, leaning on reddened spear-shafts as they stared
about at the strange battlefield strewn with flat-lying bodies mottled
with widening blotches that looked black in the uncertain light.

Grimshaw, peering about him, saw that it had been a good kill. He took a
deep breath and mopped the sweat from his bearded face splotched with
red. Then he stopped to unbind his long-bladed knife from the grooved
shaft to which he had fitted it.

"Are you all right?" he called out to the woman above him, as he bent
low to cut the throat of a pale-bellied calf lying beside a jack-pine.

"Yes, I'm all right," she said with a quick shudder at the gush of blood
from the knife-slit. "Are you?"

He did not answer her. He was too busy cutting throats and bleeding his
carcasses.

"We've got seven o' them!" he called triumphantly out to the woman
leaning on her spear-shaft and staring down at the dun-colored bodies
about her. "Seven in one kill!"

Then he stopped short in his task of gathering up what he could find of
his arrows. For clear and ominous out of the forest silence echoed the
howl of a wolf.

"It was a good kill," he repeated as he wiped the blood from his
thick-sinewed forearms.

And the girl who had lost her world remembered, as she stooped to take
up a handful of moss to wipe away the red fluid thickening between her
own fingers, how it was only by killing they could survive.




CHAPTER XIII


There was much more than mere killing, however, before Claire and her
companion could be assured of the fruits of their victory. For,
obviously, there were other killers in that northern wilderness, killers
with the aroma of blood already drifting to their nostrils. And the
increasing wolf-howls out of the surrounding forest reminded Grimshaw
that he would soon have to prepare to defend what he had won.

So without further loss of time he and Claire talked the matter over.

"It's out of the question," he explained to her, "to do anything with
these carcasses before morning. We can tug and roll them together here
on the hillside, but that's the most we can hope to manage. And to
protect them I've got to have fire. And that means one of us has to go
back to the camp and fetch coals and my ax."

Claire listened to a long-drawn-out howl that echoed dismally out of the
midnight stillness.

"What would you like me to do?" she asked as quietly as she was able.

"That," he told her, "is what I want to figure out. I'd prefer that you
did the thing that's less dangerous. There's a chance you might get lost
by night, even with the river to mark your way, if you go back. There's
also the chance some wood-prowler might startle you, though I don't
think it would be more than that. On the other hand, these carcasses are
going to draw here any wolves that are about. They mightn't bother you
much but they could very easily destroy a lot of our meat and skins
before they were driven off. So, after all, it simply comes back to
which you'd rather do, go or stay?"

"But you could protect these caribou bodies better than I could?" she
inquired.

"I think I could," he admitted. "It's only in mid-winter, when hunger
makes them desperate, that these gray wolves could be really dangerous
to us."

"Then I'll go back to camp," she asserted without further hesitation.

"I hate to ask this of you," said the man at her side. "But it seems the
only way out."

He showed her how best to follow the broken river-trail and explained
how she could safely carry fire-coals buried in a handful of their own
ashes. But he watched her with a frown of anxiety on his face as she
slipped away through the vague light, a disturbingly slender figure with
an iron-headed spear in her hand.

Claire herself, for all her showing of bravery, picked her way along
that intimidating forest-fringe with her fingers clenched and no joy in
her heart. It was a different story, that night forest, when one was
alone in it. Her blood curdled at the sudden screech of a night-owl. A
thousand unformulated fears horripilated through her body at the sound
of a soft tread over dried brush. As she felt her way through a darkling
grove of spruce the sudden vision of two fiery eyes set in a framework
of impenetrable gloom, of two coal-like eyes staring at her through the
momentary midnight silence, brought her heart up in her throat and her
poised spear into position for striking. But the luminous eyes vanished
in the darkness and she started suddenly at the snap of a twig under her
own moccasin-sole. She was grateful when she was again in the open,
closer beside the river, though still again her blood chilled at the
sudden scramble and splash of what must have been a muskrat and nothing
more.

Her heart lightened, however, when she again found herself in the
familiar neighborhood of their camp. The bark of a fox beyond the
opposite river-hills no longer sent small chills up and down her spine.
She groped her way toward the dark shadow of the shelter, before which
she knew their banked fire to lie, grateful for the gift of light which
she remembered that fire would hold for her.

Then she stopped short, arrested by a prolonged and pulsating whine not
unlike the _meowing_ of a cat, magnified many times. She stared in
wonder toward the source of this sound. From beneath the farther end of
their meat-stage she beheld two baleful green eyes staring at her out of
the uncertain light.

As she stared more intently back at those eyes she made out a crouching
bob-tailed body, with a four-cornered face, striped and whiskered and
surmounted by pointed ears set well to the rear. Between its fore-paws
lay the ghostly gray body of a rabbit which Grimshaw had that evening
brought back to camp and which in the excitement of the hunt had not
been cached beyond the reach of forest trespassers. A wave of resentment
even swept through the staring girl as she realized that this midnight
marauder was robbing them of their precious stores. She made no effort
to advance farther. But quietly she unslung her bow and drew an arrow
from her quiver. Quietly she placed the arrow in position and drew back
the string. She made her aim a deliberate one. She shot straight for the
staring green eyes and with all her strength.

There was a sharp yowl of pain followed by a sudden circular movement of
the bob-tailed body. Claire, under the impression that the wounded
animal was about to escape from her, ran forward with her spear ready
for striking. But as she did so a snarling body catapulted against her,
a cluster of keen-hooked claws tore away the rabbit-skin sleeve of her
jacket, and she felt a sharp sting of pain in her forearm as she swerved
and wheeled about.

Her first impulse was to fling her poised spear, javelin-like, at the
motionless glaring eyes so low on the sand. But on second thought she
realized this involved too great a peril. So slowly she backed away,
retreating toward the spot where she had dropped her bow. When she felt
it under her moccasined foot she stopped, still watching the baleful
green eyes, and took it up in her hand. Then guardedly she fitted a
second arrow to the string and still more guardedly she took aim,
creeping forward step by step with her spear trailing loose from her
quiver-strap. She advanced on the snarling crouched body until she
feared the margin of safety might be overstepped. Then, with a little
shout of defiance that mingled with the cry of the springing animal, she
shot her iron-headed arrow straight at the tawny throat.

She leaped back and to one side as she did so, snatching up her trailing
spear as she recovered her balance. And this time, with some strange
wine of combat running hot in her veins, she charged on the body before
her. Then she stopped short, awakening to the fact that its movements in
the sand were merely the tremors of its death struggle.

She could see her second arrow buried deep in the furred shoulder. And
an ancestral sense of triumph crept through her body at the thought that
she had been able to defend her threatened hearth against invasion.

Deliberately she recovered her arrows, cleaned them, and restored them
to their quiver. Then she went to the shelter-end where the spare
willow-thongs were kept, took enough of these to tie the dead animal's
fore-feet together, and remembered that this new kill would give her
enough fur for heavier leggings and a shoulder-cover. Yet she was
astonished at the weight of the thing she had killed, as she lifted it
up to loop the tied fore-legs over a cross-timber on their meat-stage.
And she realized, as she felt the needle-points of the long relaxed
claws, how easily that frenzied wild thing might have torn her to
pieces.

But she gave little thought to the matter, for she still had her night's
work to finish. Already, too, she found herself reacting less acutely to
these side-issues of bloodshed which seemed an essential feature of her
newer existence. She even disregarded the still bleeding scratches along
her forearm as she half-filled a bark rogan with wood-ashes, nested
therein a dozen live coals from the banked fire, and carefully covered
them with another layer of ashes. Then she took Grimshaw's ax from its
keeping-place in the shelter, drank from the spring, and started back to
her companion.

She made the return trip with less trepidation, persuaded that she had
touched bottom in the matter of wilderness night-ordeals. But when she
arrived at the blind she discovered, with a renewed chilling of the
blood, that Grimshaw was no longer there. She saw the heaped-up bodies
of the caribou and close beside them a pile of dry wood, apparently
thrown together for a fire. She called and listened and called again,
but no answering sound came to her straining ears. Then, with a ball of
lead where her heart had been, she remembered her coals and decided that
her first duty would be to build a signal-fire. So she gathered dry moss
and birchbark and spruce twigs and bedded her coals in the center of the
little pile she made of the bark and moss, blowing on them until the
bark burst into flame. On that flame she piled the dry twigs, and on
that again the fire-wood which Grimshaw had left behind him. Then with a
burning brand she went to the river bank, calling through the night air.
When no answer came to her call she climbed the long slope up into the
wooded country beyond, with a great fear growing up in her as she
called and called still again through the echoing night. Her frantic
mind even fell to dramatizing strange contingencies that might have
swept Grimshaw away from her side. She pictured him as lying bleeding
and helpless in a thicket of jack-pine, with green-eyed shadows skulking
about him in the shadows. She imagined she could see him groaning under
the brutal fore-feet of a bull-moose. And just as the terror of this
picture was imparting a shriller note to her call she caught an
answering call from the remoter regions of the lower river-valley.

A minute or two later she saw the dun-clad figure swinging up the slope
with a limp gray mass suspended over his shoulder. She heard his
repeated reassuring shout as he advanced toward the fire and she was
once more able to breathe without that sharp pain of utter horror
tightening about her heart.

"This fellow led me a fine chase," he said as he flung the fresh skin of
a wolf down beside the flames. "He tried to get away with two of my
arrows in his hide. But I couldn't afford to lose them. So I had to keep
after him."

He stretched the still warm skin out beside her.

"Look at the size of him! No wonder he died hard!" exclaimed Grimshaw as
he lay back against a tree-trunk and rested his tired body in the glow
of the fire. It had been a long day and a full one, and fatigue showed
plainly on the lean face with its darkening fringe of beard. The woman
beside him also sat momentarily passive before the solace of the glowing
timbers. It was not until she looked up and saw his eyes studying her
that she ventured to speak.

"I thought that something had happened," she said with an inadequate
small movement of the hand that lay nearest him.

"I'm sorry," he told her. "But I intended to get that skulker if I had
to follow him all night."

She sat silent for a space of time, with her eyes on the fire.

"If anything should happen to you," she said, with her eyes still on the
flames, "what would be the best way of ending things?"

He looked up sharply, at that quietly uttered question.

"But nothing," he protested, "is going to happen to me!"

"But simply supposing it should."

"We've troubles enough, without sitting up and imagining morbid
possibilities."

"But, as you admit, it _is_ a possibility. And I'd like to know the
simplest way out."

"Out of what?"

"Out of my misery."

He pondered this with a shadow on his firelit face.

"You'd have to keep on, until they came for you. And day by day the
keeping on is going to make itself easier and easier."

He blinked a little at the vehemence of her sudden small gesture.

"But I wouldn't want to keep on!" she told him.

"Where's all this courage we were talking about the other day?" he
demanded.

"There wouldn't be any left," she responded, "if I were alone here."

"That," he asserted, "doesn't sound like you."

"But it's the truth," she protested, for the first time finding the
courage to face him.

"Then we'll make it a truth that never needs to be dug up," he replied,
slightly abashed by the intensity of her gaze. His color even deepened
as she reached out a small brown hand and let it rest on the muscled
firmness of his forearm.

"In that case you must always take care of yourself," she said with a
quiet wistfulness of tone that brought a wayward warmth about his
troubled heart. "Whatever happens, you must always be careful, for if
you go, remember, I must go too!"

That was the end of their talk on the matter. But it was not the end of
his thoughts on it, nor of those of the brooding-eyed woman who sat at
the edge of his wilderness fire wondering what the future held for her.




CHAPTER XIV


When Grimshaw, the next day, failed to return from his trap-line
inspection at noon, Claire, who was both tired and hungry, waited for an
hour and then ate her meal alone. She suspected that her camp-mate's
absence was a deliberated one, for she had been ungracious enough, that
morning after Grimshaw explained to her how they might keep free from
the nuisance of mice and flies by abolishing a kitchen-midden and doing
away with all refuse, to ejaculate "Yes, teacher!" in a tone of
unmistakable mockery.

His face had hardened at that one small word of derision.

"What I'm trying to teach you," he slowly proclaimed, "is the knowledge
that may some day save your life."

"From mice?" she demanded, with her innocent wide eyes on his darkened
face.

"From conditions you weren't faced with when you were merely an idler,"
he promptly retorted.

"_Mushwa!_" she called out after him as he turned away. That, she
remembered, was the Indian name for bear.

So she worked alone that morning, scraping mack and smoking hides and
digging spruce-roots. The latter, after being soaked for an hour in hot
water, were barked and scrubbed clean and carefully stored away for
future use as fiber. And as she lingered over her open-air meal she
studied her tired and reddened fingers. They ached in every overtaxed
joint and strained flexor. They were growing stronger, she admitted, but
they were not built for the tasks that had been imposed upon them. They
were too small, too civilized, too characteristically the property of
what Shomer Grimshaw had denominated as an "idler."

A spirit of restlessness crept over her as she sat thinking of her older
life. That spirit prompted her, after she had absently tossed some
meat-scraps to the whisky-jacks that hopped about the sand, to wander
westward along the river that had so abruptly spewed her into a new
world. She climbed the broken rocks as far as she was able toward the
lower rapids, where she watched the boiling water and found her spirit
quieted by the roar of power that filled her ears. And there the
somewhat perturbed Grimshaw found her, standing immobile on a great
rock. About him, as he joined her, was an air of concession, a hint of
penitence, which left her thinly and perversely relieved.

"No bucking _that_!" she shouted above the roar of the water.

He nodded understandingly.

"It's insurmountable," he called down to her.

"As destiny," she added, stirred by the mist-shrouded tumult confronting
her.

"As ours, anyway," was her companion's curt-noted comment.

"I rather like it," contended Claire, laughing a little as she stretched
herself above the cataract-edge in a convulsive small movement of
ecstasy. "It's like the _Second Rhapsody_ being played to you by
water-power!"

He stood silent a moment before speaking.

"I'm going to harness that, some day," he proclaimed. "And then it'll be
singing to some purpose."

"Then you still think there's a chance for us?" she asked in a forced
lightness of tone as she turned back toward camp at his side.

"I've always thought that," he said as he helped her over a break in the
rock. "But it never pays, out here, to toy with one's troubles. And I've
something more important to talk about: We've got a black bear in our
dead-fall."

She stopped short, remembering that this meant fur and meat and fat.

"Then you'll want me to help," she said, recalling the length of the
carry from the dead-fall to their camp.

"If you don't mind, fair pupil," he retorted. There was the faintest
trace of humor about his eyes as he spoke. And the girl at his side was
tempted to accept this as a sign of great promise.

It was three days later, after another of their campaigns of toil from
sun-up to sun-down, that Claire stopped in her sewing to ask a question
of Grimshaw.

"What day is this?" she surprised him by inquiring.

He was of the opinion it was Sunday, but he could not be sure.

"Then how long have we been in this wilderness?" she demanded, startled
by the manner in which old habits had fallen away from her.

Together they made an effort to count up the days, but one seemed to
have merged mistily into another and their final tally remained a thing
of uncertainty.

"What difference does it make?" asked Claire as she gazed down at the
sleeping-bag of elk-skin she was sewing together. Grimshaw, in one of
his rambles, had discovered a many-islanded lake which had served as a
moulting-ground for wild-fowl, and blown up along its reedy shore he had
found drifts of the finest and softest feathers. These, after being
washed and sun-dried before their camp, she had stuffed into fawn-skin
pillows, and with what was left of them she was making a warm
inter-lining for the two double-skinned sleeping-bags which would be
called for with the coming of colder weather.

"It makes every difference," he protested as he paused in his labor of
pouring hot fat over the dried deer-meat which he had pounded to shreds
and mixed with dried berries. About him, in an orderly row, stood a
semi-circle of earthenware crocks filled with this solidified pemmican,
ready to be stored away for the winter. "And to-morrow I'm going to make
a calendar out of birchbark. I'm also going to cut some goose-feather
pens and concoct some ink out of berry-juice and stitch together a
journal so that we can write down in it day by day those things that
ought to be recorded there."

"For whom?" asked the girl, waywardly opposed to that methodical
instinct of his which was calculatingly turning their days into days of
ceaseless toil. Yet that same cold-blooded method, she knew, was day by
day widening their margin of safety.

"For ourselves," asserted Grimshaw, refusing to be stirred by her
passing note of protest. "We ought to know exactly what our season is
and how ready we are to face it. For in this territory the freeze-up
comes some time in October and we've got to be prepared for it. Among
other things, before the snow flies, I've got to have a cabin built, a
home where we can live in comfort."

For several minutes the brooding-eyed girl sat staring at the fire.

"How cold does it get up here in winter?" she finally asked.

"It will probably go to sixty below zero," announced her companion,
"perhaps more." He smiled, however, at the shudder that passed through
her stooping body. "That sounds much worse than it will really prove to
be," he went on. "I don't even believe we'll need to face an hour of
actual discomfort, because of the cold. It's not the sort of cold, in
the first place, that depresses one. I've always found it, in fact,
rather exhilarating, dry and tingling and invigorating. But it calls for
proper clothing--and that we're getting. It also calls for strong food,
for heat-giving food--and that too we're getting. And it demands, of
course, adequate shelter. And that we'll have when I get the cabin I'm
figuring on put together."

"But what sort of a cabin can you put together?" she asked as she went
on with her sewing.

"It's going to be of trimmed logs, dove-tailed together and chinked with
moss and blue clay. It will have two windows, made of oiled deer-skin
to let the light in. And since clay that makes earthenware can also
make bricks, at one end it will have a bake-oven and an enclosed
fireplace. It will be roofed with overlapped split spruce and floored
with the same, held in place with wooden pegs. We can have curtains and
rugs of elk-skin and later on I can put together what furniture we need.
One end of the cabin will be divided into two small sleeping-rooms, so
that you can have the privacy every woman has a right to, and directly
back of the cabin I intend to build a store-house of stone. If I do that
we can abandon the idea of a stockade."

Claire listened quiet-eyed as she went on with her sewing. She had long
since given up the tendency to amazement at either the magnitude or the
minuteness of his plans.

"But what," she asked, "will hold your stone together?"

"There's limestone all along our river valley here. We also have sand.
So we'll make a bigger kiln, burn our stone, and have the best of
mortar. As for stone, we have it in abundance. And once our four walls
are roofed and shelved and floored we'll have a cool-cellar that will
hold all we need and nothing can get into. And that will leave us set
for the winter."

Claire, as she stared into the companionable glow of the fire, was moved
to admiration at the placid and unpretentious valor of the man. It was
through two things, she saw, that life was being won back to them, that
a promise of safety was being coopered together about them. And those
two things were thought and toil. They were the two things, she began to
feel, of which all existence was compounded. Yet she had never thought
of life in that light. Never before these last few days, in fact, had
she even thought of life fundamentally. She had forgotten, as she rode
about in her suede upholstered landaulet, that grimy men had delved in
the bowels of the earth for iron for her, that forges had clanged for
her, that oil had been sucked up through rock for her, that the gum of
tropical trees had been molded into tires for her, that skins had been
dressed and dyed for her, and cunning tools had been devised for the
creation of still more cunning machinery, all for her, all that she
might ride at her ease and from behind sheltering glass view an army of
workers who seemed as phantasmal as ghosts in a world of ghosts.

She stared down at her hands, with a small frown of meditation on her
tanned brow. They were stained and reddened hands now, hardened and
roughened by labor. They were calloused and checked and covered with
small scars. They could no longer lay claim to beauty. But they were now
capable of accomplishment. They had learned to do things. Their appeal
was no longer a pictorial one. But through service they were achieving a
new significance, a new dignity. And as she gazed down at her
toil-roughened fingers she wondered if she too had not undergone, was
not undergoing, somewhat the same insidious alteration. In a day all
life had changed for her. And now that the initial shock of that
fundamental readjustment had worn slightly away she fell to wondering if
she too had not changed as her hands had changed. Her woman's final gift
of dignity had been swept away from her. Her body, like her hands, had
roughened and coarsened. Yet at the same time, through the sanities of
sun and wind and open air, it had snatched up some perverse spirit of
well-being, of abundant and sustaining vigor. It had become stronger and
more competent, more adroit and more adaptable. It stood important now
through what it could accomplish and not through what it appeared to the
eye. And, whether it implied a coarsening process or not, she had also
grown more courageous, more self-reliant. In the beginning she had
recoiled at the sight of blood, of fresh-skinned carcasses, just as she
had sickened at the thought of killing. Such things took place, she had
always vaguely realized, but they had taken place comfortably remote
from her sight. Once, during a childhood visit to her uncle's farm, she
had seen a spring lamb killed, and for years the thought of roast lamb
had been distasteful to her. She had seen fowls killed and had watched
fish die, but never without some momentary physical aversion at the
sight. But now, she found, an odd but essential process of brutalization
had armored her against these earlier reactions. It was necessity, she
assumed, which was day by day remodeling her to its uses. A dead rabbit
dangling from a tossing-pole no longer seemed revolting to her. She
could cut up a bloody loin of caribou, or gut a fish, or lift aside a
steaming doe-skin trailing raw tendon and flesh, without a quaver of the
nerves. There was, in fact, eagerness in her step and expectancy in her
eye as she now set out, day by day, to go over some particular portion
of their trap-lines, just as there had been exultation in her midnight
hour of slaughter at the caribou crossing. She bowed to the need to
acquire. Man, through his cunning, was the one over-lord of all nature;
all else was his prey. The passion to possess, to accumulate reserve
against the threat of want, to commandeer at a stroke the garnerings of
humbler forest workers, fixed in him his tradition of mastery. For only
through such mastery could he survive.

And all life had begun to impress her as a game, a gigantic and grimly
fought game, to survive. But, with all its grimness, it was singularly
engaging. It had carried and still carried her thoughts into the future,
where, at the end of all speculation loomed a great Perhaps. It
fortified her with the knowledge that she was functioning, and
functioning to the full, so that labor became a sort of narcotic and she
no longer openly fretted about the softer things that had been swept out
of her life.

Yet the fact that she no longer winced before what she once would have
considered degradation, that she no longer felt concern over duties that
bore an aspect of barbarity, prompted her to question the source and
sincerity of her older world's civilization. More and more she fell to
wondering if it stood for anything more than a mere veneer of manners,
an inherited habit of outlook, a passing expediency dignifying itself as
finality. Man, after all, had to be a law unto himself. And his actions
and his relations with others were governed by tribal conditions and
tribal demands. For here in the wilderness, Grimshaw had told her, there
was no need to respect the Game Laws. Such laws did not even extend to
them. They were answerable only to themselves. They were man and woman,
working out their own destiny. They were two forlorn units of life, lost
in the night under the immitigable stars, afraid of the cold and hunger
and loneliness, swayed by the same forlorn hunger for happiness.

She looked up, with still abstracted eyes, as Grimshaw, with his work
done, came and settled himself on the other side of the camp-fire. The
actuality of their relationship came home to her sharply, as it did only
in her moments of idleness. She and a man of whom she knew so little
were there, alone in the northern twilight, handcuffed together by
accident. And she wondered, as she gazed at him, if he too was troubled
by any such consciousness. She also wondered if conditions would change
with the building of their cabin. For that, she remembered, would be an
actual home, with an atmosphere of permanency about it, a home into
which they would have to settle and withstand the prolonged siege of
winter, together, most intimately together. They would at least know
each other, at the end of that winter. They would have time, then, for
thought and speculation--perhaps even for _ennui_. And, remembering the
life she had left behind her, she was wordlessly afraid of _ennui_. A
little of the exhilaration of triumph would be lost; the question of
survival would not be so acute; and with the coming of bodily comfort,
of even comparative comfort, would come unrest, would come the awakening
of things which daily toil, like an anesthetic, had drugged into
slumber.

Yet as she studied the man confronting her she found something
fortifying in the thoughtful solemnity of his face. It was unlike any
face she had ever before known or studied. About it were the barricades
of a reserve which she thinly resented even while she found herself
without the courage to override them. But it was a face to be trusted.
It was without guile, and, with all its animalizing environment, it
seemed without animality. There was, too, a slightly disturbing sort of
strength about it. This puzzled her even while it disturbed her, for her
earlier experience with men had tempted her to divide her friend the
enemy into two classes, the strong who were bad, and the good who were
weak. Yet this man who had saved her from the rapids, who was saving her
from the wilderness, was neither weak nor bad. And an unexpected wave of
gratitude welled up through her body at the thought that she was exiled
with a camp-mate who would never shake her trust in him.

She colored perceptibly as she looked up from the firelight and found
Grimshaw taking his own turn at studying her face.

"What," he surprised her by asking, "are the things you miss most?"

She smiled a little at that question, it seemed on so much a lower plane
than the line of her earlier thought.

"Sugar and salt," she coolly replied, determined to meet his own
carefully deliberated pose of impersonality.

He nodded his head understandingly.

"Yes, we need both of them," he acknowledged. "And in time we'll have
both. No animal can live without salt. And where there are so many of
them about us, there must somewhere be a salt-lick or a salt-spring. In
time we'll find it, and that will make our food more palatable. As for
sugar, I'm hoping to stumble on it in the form of honey, for bees live
and work as far north as the Arctic Circle. In the early spring, of
course, we can do as the Indian does and get it from tree-sap. We're too
far north for the sugar-maple, but I've noticed a few box-elder in some
of our valleys up here and from that we can get a fine whitish sugar
almost as good as the maple. The Indians also tap the birch and the ash
and get a dark and rather bitterish sugar. But there'll be no flow of
sap, of course, until our winter is over."

"It seems odd," acknowledged Claire, "that I've never really wanted
coffee or cigarettes here. I tried to reason it out, the other night,
and I concluded that the closer you get to nature the more natural your
appetites are. The artificial stimulants seem to belong to artificial
life."

For the second time she colored under his quietly appraising eye,
disquieted by the discovery that she was being less impersonal than the
occasion called for.

"I'd give a good deal for a frying pan," she announced with a protective
air of flippancy. "In fact, I can think of nothing more tremendously
important than a frying-pan."

If he fathomed the source of her levity he made no acknowledgment of
that discovery.

"I think you'll have one, before the winter is on us," he solemnly
asserted. But she paid little attention to that promise, for she was
wondering, at the time, just how much of her older life he had recalled
to mind.

"Isn't it odd," she finally ventured, "that you should know so little
about me?"

He smiled at that, with his first assuaging show of warmth. "I have
known you a great deal longer than you imagine," he quietly
acknowledged.

"In what way?" she asked almost sharply.

"Through your father," he said as quietly as before.

She studied the fire for several moments.

"Then I was right," she ventured, "I was right in feeling from the first
you--you didn't respect me?"

"I have a great respect for your father," he acknowledged. And she
stirred a little at his obvious evasion of the issue.

"And for me?" she exacted.

It was his turn to color a little under her candidly questioning gaze.

"I know of no man I like more than your father," was the clumsily adroit
evasion of her camp-mate. "I am very fond of him."

"Why?" asked the girl confronting Grimshaw.

"Because he is one man in a million," was the reply. "And also because I
am under a great debt to him."

Again a momentary silence swung between them.

"I understand," finally acknowledged the wistful-eyed woman.

"Understand what?" he challenged.

"Why you've done what you have for me," she said with a slight _vibrata_
of bitterness in her voice. "But there are certain things I want you to
remember. I want you to remember that always, before this, I'd only
lived life at second hand. I'd never thought about things from--from the
down-to-earth side. I'd never been asked to, for some reason. I don't
think women in my position ever are. And I can see, now, there's so
little I know. So little, outside of Wells and Shaw and Brieux and
Heywood Broun! Yet I don't think it's altogether my fault, for nowadays
life, the sort of life I've always lived, seems to shut women away from
reality. And when they haven't the real things to confront them they
try to save what's left of their self-esteem by building up a
make-believe world of their own, a world that drugs them into thinking
they're getting their human share in this tangled-up business of
living!"

He stared at her, with a vague wonder in his eye, a wonder like that of
a drinker at a spring catching glimpses of depths he had not imagined
there.

"Don't look at me like that!" she imperiously commanded. "I've at least
got a thought or two of my own!"

"Do you mean you didn't find existence as comfortable as you'd like it?"
he asked, ignoring her little outburst.

"It wasn't comfort I wanted," she more decorously acknowledged. "It was
something beyond comfort--at least beyond comfort of the body. It was a
sort of comfort of the mind, which in some way or other I always just
seemed to miss."

"Don't you think we've all been daubed by that same brush?"

"You had your work," the woman reminded him.

"But very little else," he said in a slightly hardened tone.

"It has at least made you strong," she found the courage to assert. "But
I've been wondering if it didn't also make you a little hard."

"Have I impressed you that way?" he demanded.

"To be quite frank, you do."

"Perhaps I'm not so much that way as you imagine."

"I hope you're not," she said with a candor that brought a small
movement of unrest from him.

She saw it, and was able to smile at its source.

"Whatever I may be," she went on with a studiously achieved quietness,
"or whatever I may have said, I don't want you to think I'm so
empty-headed I'm afraid of realities. I haven't altogether escaped
knowing a little about at least one side of life. I've had it beat in on
me, with all its littleness, the same as it must beat in on any human
being who has a brain and a well-fed body. And I've known men, a great
many men, though never one of your type before."

"Then I'm to be regarded as a curiosity?" interpolated Grimshaw, ill at
ease before the meditative and impersonal gaze with which she regarded
him.

"No, I mean that you're a type that seems unknown in that world of
idlers I used to live in. I suppose I ought to thank God that you're a
thoroughly good man. And I do, remembering what that means to me. But,
to be quite frank, you rather frighten me."

"I'm afraid," said the swart-faced man in the firelight, "that you'll
find I have many redeeming weaknesses."

She smiled at the acidulated note in that statement, but her face
quickly sobered again.

"Out here," she proceeded, following a line of thought essentially her
own, "one is apt to think of this sort of thing as life in the raw. But
I can't see that it's any more pagan, any more barbaric, than the life I
used to live. It was pagan because it was so purposeless. And it was
barbaric because it was so cynically self-centered. But don't imagine a
week or two in the wilderness has made me over. For even when I was in
that old life, in it up to the ears, I knew it wasn't exactly what it
ought to be. It seemed a machine that couldn't be stopped, a machine
going too fast to be studied and understood. And all along there seemed
no way of simplifying things, of getting down to bed-rock, as I heard
you express it the other day."

"But the situation still has its--its complications, even though we are
down to bed-rock," he reminded her.

"That," she said after a moment of thought, "is why I feel we ought to
be entirely honest with each other."

"I have tried to be that," he said, without meeting her gaze.

"But besides being honest we ought to be candid and open. And also kind.
I realize what we're confronted with. And I'm ready to play my part.
I'm willing to work, as the squaw of the Indian has always had to work.
But there are certain conditions where this sort of thing could
be--could be unbearable."

"I don't think I quite follow you there," admitted Grimshaw, screening a
vague constraint by throwing fresh wood on the fire.

"You believe, don't you, that somebody will eventually get through to
find us here?"

"Or we'll eventually fight our way back to civilization," amended the
other. "Yes, I'd never give up the hope of that."

"But supposing neither of those things happens?"

"That," asserted Grimshaw, "is a bridge I refuse to cross until we come
to it."

"But we're here, alone, utterly alone, in a world of our own. And
there's every likelihood that we may have to stay here a long time?"

"That's quite true," he admitted.

"Then it seems to me we're losing something out of what's left of our
lives," she proclaimed as her level gaze met his.

"In what way?" he asked.

"In a way that reminds me existence like this can be either a heaven or
a hell. And I'm terribly afraid we're going to make it more like the
second than the first."

Stronger even than before the look of constraint crept over his face.

"It won't be so hard," he protested, "once we're properly housed. And it
won't be such slavery, once we're sure of our food and shelter."

"No, no," she cried. "It's not the work I'm objecting to. That's been a
sort of blessing. It's kept me from thinking. It's the other thing I'm
afraid of, the idleness that gives me time to remember I'm only an
empty-headed woman without much hope of ever being much else."

"You are proving that you are something else," asserted her companion.

"Then we'll say an empty-hearted woman," amended the buckskin-clad
figure in the softening glow of the camp-fire.

"There are certain things," Grimshaw said after a moment of silence,
"that we must not even approach."

"Why do you say that?"

Grimshaw looked from the fire to the wistful face confronting him, and
then back at the fire again.

"I wonder if you remember in _Marius the Epicurean_ how the Roman youth
there regarded his soul as a white bird which he must carry unsullied
through the market-place of the world? Well, that is what we must do.
When we go back to the world we must go clean-handed."

Slowly she moved her head up and down.

"But we may never go back," she murmured, without looking up at him.

"Of that, of course, we can never be certain. But until we _are_
certain, we must remember what we still owe to life."

"I'm afraid I was thinking of what life still owes to us," ventured the
woman beside the camp-fire, with her face turned away from her
companion.




CHAPTER XV


So studiously impersonal was Shomer Grimshaw's attitude toward his
wilderness companion, during the next few days, that Claire found
something provocative in his quietness.

"Isn't this spiffy?" she flippantly demanded of him after making a jelly
of fawn-knuckles and tinting it pink with raspberry juice.

"It's very good," he conceded.

"And I'm not altogether a bone-head, am I?"

"You are a very wonderful woman," he acknowledged as his cogitative eye
met hers.

"In what way?" she inquired. And if beyond her mask of flippancy he
detected a deeper human craving for approval he betrayed no evidence of
that discovery.

"You have a quick and restless mind," he told her, "and you learn things
easily. And inside your burr of audacity you still have the milk of good
breeding."

She swept him with a quick glance. Then she sat silent, for a full
minute.

"I wish you wouldn't be so stilted," she suddenly announced, with an
unlooked-for touch of sharpness.

"It's hard," was his deliberated reply, "for an old dog to learn new
tricks."

"You don't impress me as overpoweringly old."

"But there are times when you impress me as devastatingly young,"
asserted her solemn-eyed companion. He seemed impervious to her
raillery.

"That's something time will cure," she asserted with mock meekness.

"Along with other things, I hope!"

"Are you lecturing me?" she demanded, letting an indolently hostile eye
meet his. She had the satisfaction of seeing his color deepen, though he
remained silent. And she resented that silence.

"I wonder," she said with an achieved dreaminess of tone, "if you are
really nursing a broken heart, or if that solemn manner grew out of
being a camp-boss for so long?"

When he spoke, he spoke very slowly.

"It's going to be hard for us to get along out here, even by observing
all the rules of the game. And if we keep up this sort of thing and get
on each other's nerves--"

"It'll be just plain hell," she cut in, her solemnity once again touched
with insolence. And it was not until she saw that his fingers were
trembling, for all his quietness, that she grew repentant. "I don't want
to gum the game, of course, but I do wish you'd warm up a trifle."

She did not altogether discard her mask of flippancy, during the days
that followed, but she did her best "not to gum the game." For
conditions soon justified Grimshaw's impatience to see his cabin built.
A change came in the weather, bringing with it a cold northeast wind and
a steady downpour of rain. And during this downpour the two castaways
found themselves practically confined to their shelter. Grimshaw, it is
true, worked steadily enough on the smaller tasks before him, such as
regrinding his knives and fitting a better haft to his ax-head and
fashioning for Claire a cross-bow which, he concluded, would be more
effective in the shooting of small game. As for Claire herself, she
found plenty to do in the patching of torn footwear and the shaping of
fresh moccasins and the sewing together of rabbit-skin clothing. But it
was work done under difficulties, for the slanting wind drove the rain
in under their inadequate bark roof, filling the shelter with a
continual drip of water. It was only by the most prodigal use of wood
that they could keep a fire going in the open.

So, even before they went scouting for further supplies, with clearing
weather Grimshaw fell to work on his log _karmak_. Following a plan he
had drawn with charcoal on a plaque of birchbark, he measured out his
distances and prepared his site. Then he felled spruce along the upper
hill, laboriously cut the logs into desired lengths, trimmed them, and
hauled them bodily down to his river-cove. Some he split, and split
again, with the aid of hardwood wedges, and some he roughly squared and
shaped for dove-tailing at the ends. But it was not easy work. His ax,
he found, was not heavy enough for the purpose before it and to keep a
cutting edge on its blade required constant whetting. The smoothing of
the split floor-timbers, too, was a matter of infinite labor, and the
burning of holes for the binding-pegs took much longer than the
house-builder had first reckoned.

Yet after the base-logs had been set in position and Claire had helped
as best she could in placing timber after timber in its allotted place,
she cried out in open admiration as she saw the walls rising foot by
foot above the ground and the compact little house taking on to itself
definite outline. From dawn to dusk they worked together, startled at
the unrecorded flight of time. When, after finishing his roof of split
spruce, Grimshaw decided to make it doubly warm and doubly water-proof
by covering it with a heavy thatch of muskeg reeds held in position by
lashings of braided willow-bark, Claire maintained the balance of toil
by carrying in moss and clay and carefully chinking the vents between
the wall-logs. About two small frames which her companion had prepared
for her she later stitched oblongs of deer-skin, well oiled with
bear-fat and marrow to make them translucent. These, when fitted into
the apertures which Grimshaw had left in his side walls, made
weather-proof window-frames which admitted an unexpectedly agreeable
amount of light. A door was fashioned by lashing and pegging ax-smoothed
boards of spruce to a "Z" of cross-pieces, two pivot-pins protruding
from the outer edge of the last board, to serve as hinges when fitted
into two holes burned in the top and bottom corner of the frame into
which the door was finally set. And while Claire sanded and rubbed
smoother the floor her companion proceeded to work on the bake-oven and
the fireplace chimney. This meant the tugging and lugging of stone, the
carrying of clay from the river cut-bank, the molding and baking of
brick, the burning of limestone and the mixing of mortar.

But again Claire cried out in delighted astonishment as she beheld the
rough bricks shape themselves into a double-chambered bake-oven on
either side of a half-enclosed fire-hearth hooded by an arch of
roughly-made tiles. This narrowed into the throat of a brick chimney
which in turn raised itself day by day to a yard above their
roof-timbers. Into the lower neck of this chimney Grimshaw fitted a
draught-control made of a flat slate-stone chipped into shape and
pivoting on one end so that it could be raised or lowered at will, by
means of a crotched stick. Across the deep maw of the hearth, capable of
holding large-sized pieces of fire-wood, was fitted a temporary
cross-bar from which their boiling-pots could be suspended. And when the
structure was completed the interior was incredibly brightened and
lightened by the application of a coat of whitewash, made from slaked
lime dissolved in an embrocation of fish-glue and applied with a brush
fashioned from moose-neck hairs tightly lashed and glued together and
bound to a birch-wood handle.

Yet, oddly enough, it was the woman more than the man who seemed stirred
by the acquisition of an adequate abode, of a structure that could take
on the semblance of a home. A strange light of exultation shone in the
woods-girl's eyes as Grimshaw carried in coals from their open camp-fire
and on these threw a handful of kindling and on this again placed an
armful of wood. An odd look of triumph touched with gratitude showed on
her intent face as she stood in the doorway and watched the smoke curl
up the chimney-vent and the mounting flames lighten up the spotless four
walls which housed in her tiny domain from the rest of the world, which
so completely and so compactly walled her off from the wilderness
without.

"We live again!" she said with a little gasp of emotion which her
companion, for some reason, preferred to let pass unacknowledged.

"To-morrow," he said, "I'll put a table together. And when I have the
two sleeping-rooms partitioned off we'll be ready to move in. But after
this we can only give a part of our days to such things. We've got to
get into the open again and build up our supplies. And there's not much
time left to us now for gathering what we'll need of raspberries and
wild fruit. And above all things I want to start exploring for a supply
of salt."

"I think there's something quite as important as salt," objected his
companion. "And that's a name for our house."

"That's something I'll have to leave to your finer judgment," asserted
Grimshaw, not unconscious of some faint ring of reproof in her voice.

"I'm a trifle tired of being nameless myself," she surprised him by
saying. "Would you mind calling me Clannie when it's possible?"

He smilingly agreed to call her Clannie, and the matter ended there. Yet
he stopped short the next day on returning from building a fish-wier on
one of the lower tributaries of their river, to find a broad band of
birchbark pegged above their house-door. Carefully printed on this band
with elderberry-juice were the words "CAMP RELIANCE." And the more he
thought over that name the more he liked it.

But even the new _karmak_ soon receded out of the foreground of
attention, for once again they became nomads. This time, however, they
scouted into the forest with the knowledge they had a firmly established
base behind them, so that their reconnaisances became more and more
extensive. They even marked trails by blazing trees as they went and at
certain outpost points established small caches of food. And their
wanderings were rewarded by both a better knowledge of the territory
about them and unlooked-for accessions to their larder. Grimshaw failed
to find, as he had hoped, a grove of birch trees big enough to supply
him with canoe bark, confirming his fear that they were too far north
for the true canoe-birch. Nor did he succeed in tracing out a salt-lick.
But blue-berries and raspberries they still found in abundance. The
latter in some places grew so thick that the berries, ripened and fallen
from the stem, crimsoned the ground with a carpet of odorous fruit.
Along some of the marshlands they found Indian tea, the flower of which
Grimshaw carefully picked for later infusions. They found bracken-fields
thick with partridge and Canada grouse, and a secluded lake already
noisy with swan and geese. They also found a thicket of wild plum trees
laden with small red fruit which proved very pleasant to the taste and
promised a valuable addition to their winter stores. And still later
they stumbled on a beaver pond, where Grimshaw pointed out to his
companion the dome-shaped homes of this most industrious of animals, the
cunningly built dam to hold back the water, and the gnawed stumps of
poplars felled for their food supply. When winter came, he explained,
they could return to that pond and without great difficulty possess
themselves of a supply of fur which would prove invaluable against the
cold. And even as Claire stepped closer toward the pond-edge her ears
were startled by the sudden slap and plunge of a beaver taking to the
water.

So, tired and hungry, evening after evening, they returned to the new
_karmak_, loaded down with their wilderness harvests. And after
replenishing their fire and cooking and eating they sat before the glow
of their hearth, patching and sewing, weaving and curing, joining and
carpentering, working side by side in strangely contented silence until
weariness crept over them and the fire was banked and the door barred
and the balm of sleep built up their strength for another day of effort.

Day by day, in fact, Claire found herself grow more resourceful and
self-reliant. On returning to camp one night after an especially lucky
day when Grimshaw had stumbled on some outcroppings of copper and a
supply of brown hematite which he felt confident would give him metal
for further tools and weapons, they found that the depredations of a
wolverine had played havoc with an unprotected portion of their stores.
This prompted Grimshaw to set about the completion of their stone
storage-room. And with her camp-mate so engaged Claire set out alone to
bring in a further supply of wild rice and berries and starch-tubers and
cranberries from a neighboring valley. She went well-clad in furs and
leather, with a knife in her belt and her spear and bow strapped to her
shoulder, with a newly made wolf-skin turban on her head and a
carrying-hamper under her arm. She went with a singularly light step,
oddly exhilarated by the clear sunlight that warmed the hillsides and
the beauty of the birch-groves through which she passed and a persistent
sense of freedom from all human restraint. She wandered by reedy tarns
noisy with the cry of waterfowl and threaded game-trails that wound
through silent parliaments of spruce and mounted rocky crests from which
she could see the laughing silver of little streams that widened into
lagoons and narrowed into tinkling falls and broadened again into
beaver-meadows fringed with poplar.

When she came to a spring she stopped and drank from it and when she
caught signs of partridge in a bracken-field she rushed into the
waist-high growth, knocking over two of the birds with her spear-handle.
When she came to a raspberry patch she ate the ripened fruit, ate with
the honest and healthy appetite of the young animal she was, until she
could eat no more. Then she put down her hamper, made a rogan of
birchbark, and began picking her store of berries for home purposes.
When her rogan was full she carried it to the hamper and emptied it,
picking her way deeper and deeper down the broken rock-slopes.

By midday her hamper was almost filled. She stopped, in the midst of her
picking, to watch a varying hare scuttle through the bushes. She
wandered on again, at the lip of a lazy little stream to gather a supply
of what was unmistakably watercress growing in the limpid shallows. Then
she started back to where she had left her hamper.

She stopped short, as she pushed her way through the bushes, at the
sight of a heavy black form bent over her wattled basket. She knew, the
next moment, that it was a black bear, a black bear with his hog-like
snout rooting greedily down into her carefully gathered berries. A feral
flash of resentment went tingling through her startled body and without
being quite conscious of what she was doing she caught up an arrow from
her quiver and fitted it to her bow.

She let the arrow fly, with a cry of anger as she shot. But the
metal-tipped bolt missed its mark. Quickly the pointed snout was lifted,
a pair of intent small eyes studied the fur-clad huntress with the bow
in her hand, and then the lumbering big body wheeled about and went
scurrying off through the bushes. And it was then, and only then, that
Claire realized her good luck. For if she had wounded the brute he would
surely have showed fight. He would have charged and attacked her--and on
the result of that attack she had no desire to meditate.

She had escaped all injury, it was true, but the thought of that bulky
black shadow took the careless joy out of her wanderings. She
surrendered to an impulse to put as much distance as possible between
her and the scene of that casual encounter, promptly gathering up her
belongings and pushing on through the scattered shrubbery for higher and
more open territory.

She came out on a narrow plateau overlooking a series of sunlit
"hog-backs" with a limpid blue lake in the distance. She decided to
examine that lake and detoured into a game-trail that led her westward
through clean-floored groves of black spruce where, at the forks of a
runway, she came face to face with a deer. She was too startled to use
her bow, merely standing there and staring after the flying animal as
it went bounding off over blow-downs and barriers. Her bow was still in
her hand, however, when she debouched from her smaller trail into a
still wider one and caught sight of a marten dodging into the shadows.
She shot promptly and with all her power.

She thought, at first, that she had brought the animal down. But when
she reached the spot where it had so suddenly leaped and circled about
on the trail she saw by the showing of blood that she had merely wounded
the marten. It had bounded and threshed away, leaving a thin trail of
red behind it. It had escaped, with her arrow embedded in its body.

So she started after it, resolved that her arrow at least should not be
lost. She followed the trail through a slashing of brush, over
spruce-tuck and brakes, along a rocky hillside, across a divide stubbled
with jack-pine, down a narrow valley-side and up another. And in the end
she found it, quite dead, in a tangle of willow growth, with the arrow
trailing from its torn flank. So without hesitation she cleaned and
restored her arrow to its quiver and removed the stained skin from the
carcass.

It was not until she had tied this together and put it away in her
hamper that she became vaguely conscious of the fact that the earlier
flood of sunshine which had been bathing her wilderness landscape had
thinned to a cool wash of light with a touch of the ominous in its
quietness. She realized, as she stood up and looked at the sun, that the
afternoon was slipping away, that before the passing of many hours night
would be falling along those northern slopes.

The knowledge of this surprised her, but did not greatly alarm her. She
had familiarized herself with the conspicuous landmarks in the
neighborhood of their camp and it would not be long, she felt, before
she could beat back into territory where she could once more get her
bearings. But she realized, as she looked about from a hilltop that
stood strangely desolate in the waning light, that she had been less
conscious of trail and direction during the latter part of her
wanderings. She was persuaded, however, that the general trend of her
advance had been eastward. So she turned her face toward the setting sun
and struck valiantly out through the forest.

She remembered, as she went, certain admonitions of Grimshaw. One was,
in case of uncertainty, always to keep cool-headed. Another was, when
one had missed the way, always to travel down-hill, for this customarily
brought one to running water, just as the smaller stream in time brought
one to a river. But the most important thing, she remembered, was to
keep from traveling in a circle, and to do this one must, wherever
possible, keep two trees in line as one travels. Or if trees could not
be made to serve this purpose, then rocks or any other conspicuous
landmarks should be made use of. But the great thing, she reminded
herself, was to keep up one's spirits and not lose confidence. Grimshaw
had told her that no man lost his way in the woods without losing his
nerve first. And she intended to be a worthy pupil of her tutor.

Yet her heart sank a little as she emerged from a ghostly stretch of
black spruce and found herself overlooking a valley that held nothing
familiar to her eye. The sun had already swung low along the serrated
rim of the world. Purpling tiers of woodland stretched off into the
distance, indescribably lonely, indescribably forlorn of all life. And
along the twisted trails she had pursued was no familiar ax-mark, no
stone cairn, no sign that a human being had ever before passed along
those ghostly aisles of shadow. She felt like a wanderer on a
prehistoric earth. She seemed alone in infinite and unfathomable space,
as alone as though she stood the last point of life on a burned-out
planet swinging about its orbit in a burned-out universe. She stopped
short, with her breath catching in her throat, choking back a cry which
was as unexpected as it was unwilled. For she knew now that she was
lost, hopelessly lost in a wilderness that was without limit and without
succor.

She thought of the cabin in the river-cove, the sheltered and home-like
room lighted by its glowing hearth, filled with its companionable odor
of dressed furs and its sharper smell of game-meat broiling over the
coals. She wondered if Grimshaw would be worried by her absence, if,
later on, he would venture out along the familiar trails to meet her. He
was a good tracker. It was almost uncanny, the manner in which he could
trail an animal or read the record of what had gone before him along a
woodland path. Perhaps he was already pushing through those gloomy
valleys in search of her.

This prompted her to stand on the rocky brink of her hilltop and call
aloud, call at the top of her voice. That call seemed to fill the
twilight with a choir of shouting voices as her cry echoed cavernously
across the valley and rebounded and was caught up and tossed on from
woodland to woodland, with an accompaniment of still remoter echoes as
though the sound had been taken up by a roll of drums and spread like
signal-fires from lonely peak to peak into the greenish-gold horizons
that finally drank it up. Then, cupping her hands to her mouth, she
called still again, sustaining the note until it grew shriller in her
throat, until it cut the twilight, sharply, like sword blades, with a
deeper urgency in the countless echoes that ricochetted along the
glooming valleys and the spruce-tops that bit like teeth into the thin
rind of the afterglow.

She listened, intent and motionless, but no answering sound came to her
ears. The silence of the windless dusk seemed supernatural. It seemed an
arch of desolation that ached for noise, that must crumble of its own
enormous nothingness without the relief of sound. And as though in
answer to that demand, leagues away across the darkening hills, a lonely
wolf-howl rose and widened and died away on the quiet air. And then the
silence and the night deepened together about the listener on the
hillside.

She realized, as she stood there, that she must spend her night in the
wilderness. She saw, too, that darkness would soon set in about her. And
before everything else, Grimshaw had once told her, she must keep her
wits about her. It was essential, in such a predicament, to remain cool.
She must drink and eat, she remembered, and then she must make for
herself a shelter for the night.

She recalled, with a slight chilling of the blood, that a camp-fire
would be out of the question, since she carried none of the implements
for the making of such a fire. It was her mate, she remembered, who now
always carried at his belt the little "fire-bag" of moose-hide, the
precious little pouch holding a piece of iron-pyrites, from which to
strike sparks with a knife-back, and a handful of powdered punk and a
clump of shredded birchbark to catch the tiny flame blown from the
smoldering wood-dust. She recalled that her companion had suggested
equipping her with such a fire-bag, but in her brief wanderings about
camp there had seemed small use for it. And now she would be without the
protection and comfort of fire. She would have to sleep alone in the
forest.

She did not quail, at the thought, but she was conscious of a small
tightening of the throat as she remembered the far-off wolf-howl and the
shaggy-haired wanderer that had thrust a nose into her berry-hamper. So
she decided, even before stopping to eat and drink, to make sure of her
sleeping quarters. Yet it was not until she came to the upthrust roots
of a blow-down that she found a place that seemed in any way suitable to
her purpose. Under the protecting arms of these roots stood a narrow
recess against which she could easily build her _pukivan_. When she had
walled and roofed this recess with as heavy pine-boughs as she was able
to cut away with her knife, along it she made a bed of smaller branches
and moss, fortified by the knowledge that her den could be approached
only from the front. And this front, she decided, she could further
protect with a screening of boughs, so placed as to shut her completely
in from the night.

The twilight had deepened into night by the time her _pukivan_ was
completed. So, with her spear in her hand, she made her way down to a
small stream beyond a grove of poplars, where she drank deep of the
running water. Then, returning to her wind-break, she took one of her
partridges from the hamper and ate it raw, saving the second bird for
her breakfast. When she had picked the bones clean she devoured handful
after handful of her sadly crushed raspberries, eating until her hunger
was gone. And then she crept into her narrow _pukivan_, closing the
doorway after her and placing her spear and bow so that they would be
ready, if need be, for immediate use. She nested her tired body deep in
the dry moss, assuring herself that she could sleep there both warm and
safe until daybreak.

But she did not sleep. Her mind, for all her weariness of body, remained
painfully alert. The silence of the forest seemed to weigh down on her,
like something ponderable. It impressed her as odd, as incredible, that
she of all women should be immersed in a life as barbaric as that lived
by prehistoric man. Yet all men and women, she remembered, had sprung
from that common ancestry, had derived their power and cunning from
those countless generations of savage bodies pitting their strength
against the strength of nature. She herself housed the ghosts of them in
her own bones. Her own bosom was the abiding-place of dormant savageries
which could never be completely kept under cover. And during all the
days of her wilderness life there had been an odd impression of return,
of return to something she had once known beyond the mists of time.

Then she thought no more on the matter, for her blood curdled and her
hand went out to her spear as she heard a near-by thump and flutter of
feathers followed by a small squeak of pain. It was a horned owl, she
concluded as she lay there listening, descending on a deer-mouse. And
that brought back to her the thought that all the trails of the open
were tragic trails, that the Nature from whom man expected mercy and
justice was immitigably savage at heart, with tooth and talon eternally
at war with fang and beak, with the stronger forever preying on the
weaker, with the never-ending battle going relentlessly on, by day and
night, by summer and winter. The children of civilization talked glibly
enough of the great clean spaces of the open. But life in the woods was
not clean of murder and rapine and savagery. It teemed with such things.
It demanded its harvest of the weak and the unwary, sweeping them away
with the casual claw of hunger. Yet it was not altogether malign, she
insisted as she lay there listening to the minute small noises of
midnight, for these creatures of the open, after all, knew their
careless span of living in the sun, knew the joy of sharp appetite and
sharper conquest, and went to their death promptly and in the prime of
their lusty strength. And wasn't that, in the end, quite enough to ask
of life? Perhaps. But there was that perplexing something beyond. There
were those precious moments that came into the lives of men and women,
lifting them, in some way, above the muck of savagery, the hope of being
exquisitely happy, the craving for crowding into life something which
life could not easily contain.

She asked herself what, of all the things she had lost, would at that
moment bring the deepest happiness to her heart. And it startled her a
little to find that her fancy, in this connection, continued to paint
one picture, the picture of Grimshaw's buckskin-clad figure striding
toward her through the filtered light of a spruce grove. She tried to
recall the intonations of his voice, the movement of his lips as he
spoke, the lines of strength about the mouth which had the trick of
always leaving her slightly perturbed. She was not afraid of him. But
there was something about his habitually barricaded eyes, the eyes that
could be both honest and clear and yet retain a touch of hardness,
which vaguely intimidated her even while it vaguely stirred her. And
there had been times when she felt that he was in some way afraid of
her, that during all their days of intimate contact he had been holding
himself under a strong leash. Perhaps, in his secret heart of hearts, he
still hated her. Perhaps, remembering what her thoughtlessness had
thrust upon him, he had nothing but contempt, generously concealed
contempt, for her and her folly.

But that she could not entirely believe. He had fought and toiled for
her. He had guarded and shielded her. He had bluntly respected those
reservations which most men would have left unremembered. Tenderness she
had not asked for, she had not dared to ask for. He himself, she felt,
had been afraid of that, had abstained from it with all the strength of
his will. And in that respect he stood unlike any other man she had ever
known. He was bigger and nobler than all the rest of them. She needed
his strength, to make her forget her own weakness. She was alone in the
night, and she could not go on without his guidance. He had not failed
her in the past; and in the future, surely, he would not fail her.

She nested deeper in the rustling moss, reassuring herself that he would
soon be out in search of her, that he would find her and save her. She
tranquillized herself with the thought of his resourcefulness, his
stalwart pertinacity, consoled with the conviction that he would patrol
those lonely forest trails until he came upon some trace of her. For
she, after all, was his one and only comrade. She even fell to
wondering, as drowsiness crept over her, if he were missing her, if he
were finding his wilderness hours more empty without her. And she fell
asleep, warm with the thought that with the coming of light she might
hear his friendly _halloo_ along the hilltops that engulfed her in their
immensity.

She woke early, startled by the strangeness of her surroundings,
oppressed by a sense of deprivation which she could not quite define.
Then like a drenching wave the knowledge of her predicament broke over
her and her teeth chattered in the morning chill as she emerged
animal-like from her narrow-walled sleeping-lair. She sat on the needled
ground staring listlessly at the checkered light of the rising sun above
the valley mist. She sat there for a long time, staring across the
hill-tiers, without the strength of will to rise to her feet, benumbed
by the consciousness of her puniness in the midst of such uncharted
immensities, devastated by the thought of her remoteness from all human
contact. Nothing in all her earlier career had prepared her for
isolation such as that. It was like death in life. And without
companionship she could not go on, she could have no wish to go on. Yet
the only companionship that could come to her, she remembered, was
Grimshaw's. And if he was to find her, if they were ever to meet again,
she still had her part to play in that effort.

Slowly she rose to her feet, with her teeth set. She went down to the
stream and washed and drank. Then she returned to the _pukivan_ and
devoured the remaining partridge, after which she ate what was left of
her raspberries. Fortified by this meal, she set about planning her next
move. As she had no knowledge of her whereabouts, or the whereabouts of
their camp, she nursed a dread against blind travel in any one
direction, knowing that every step might be taking her farther and
farther away from deliverance. There was no need to starve to death, at
such a season, for even though her bow failed to bring down a rabbit or
a waterfowl during the day she could live on berries and birch-buds and
rush-roots. And if need be, by carefully marking her trails of
exploration, she could return to the _pukivan_ which had already seen
her safely through the night. She could thicken and strengthen its walls
and make it practically impervious to weather and marauder. And if
Grimshaw did not get to her, before the end of the second day, she could
fashion a fire-drill, as her camp-mate had once done, or find quartz
from which she could strike sparks with her knife-back. Then she could
go to the different hilltops and set signal-fires alight, signal-fires
which could be seen for miles around. And that surely would bring some
answering signal from the man who would be seeking her through the
night. That surely would bring to her listening ears the _Halloo_ which
would float in to her as the sweetest music ever sounded.

So she tightened her belt and gathered up her belongings and started out
on her journey. She was methodic about it all, carefully marking the
site of her bivouac, carefully leaving a periodic tree-blaze behind her
as she went, carefully piling a cairn of stones where a tree-trunk was
not near-by to scar with her knife. At times she stopped at a higher
point along her path and called and called again through the morning
quietness. But she remembered Grimshaw's injunction about always, under
such circumstances, trending toward the lower land. So she shunned the
upward slopes as much as possible and worked her way along the deeper
valley bottoms. When she came to a noisy brook studded with rocky pools
she studied one of these pools and saw fish darting about in its amber
depths. They were not large fish, but she knew that she would need food
before the day was over. So she once more followed the course of the
stream, hoping to find a point where she could divert it by building a
dam of stones.

But in her search for this she stumbled on a small beaver pond, without,
however, any sign of beaver still living in it. So she made her way to
the dam of mud and sticks and laboriously tore a vent in the barrier
that held back the water. She stood with spear poised as the water
rushed through the opening. Again and again she struck at the
white-bellied bodies of fish as they went hurtling past her. But each
and every stroke was a failure. It was not until the pond was drained
and she beheld half a dozen finned bodies struggling helplessly in the
muddy shallows that she realized an ample supply of food had still been
given to her. Each of these fish she killed and captured, after which
she dressed and washed them, packing the largest in her hamper and
stringing the remainder together and caching them high in a jack-pine,
knowing only too well that a mink or marten or wolverine would very
quickly rob her of her store if left within reach of such hungry
prowlers.

So she took up her journey again, fortified by the knowledge of her own
resourcefulness, reassured by the thought that she had the power of
obtaining food for herself. But along with food, she remembered, she
must have fire. And before she could have fire she must have quartz or
flint or pyrites. So she followed the brook that sang beside her,
persuaded that it would lead to some larger waterway where she would
find gravel-beds. It was rough going, at times, and she realized she had
been injudicious in letting her rabbit-skin leggings and moccasins get
wet through. She could feel the draw of the moistened fur and hide on
her skin, leaving her feet disturbingly tender. And she saw, to her
added consternation, that holes were appearing in her moccasin-soles.
But she kept on, solacing herself with the promise that she could cure
the marten-skin in her hamper and with it patch her shredded footwear.
And she could procure fresh stockings, if need be, by shooting a couple
of rabbits and wrapping the green pelts about her feet, to shape
themselves there inside her tightly laced moccasins and to keep her
protected for at least another three days. When her brook widened to a
reedy pool she approached it in silence and studied it with care, warned
by a splash that some amphibian was sporting along its surface. She was
rewarded, a minute later, by catching sight of a muskrat swimming along
the rush-lined shore. So she quietly unslung her bow and fitted an arrow
to the string.

She shot carefully, at short range, sending the arrow through the short
furred neck. Yet she had to wade hip-deep through the soft-bottomed
bank-mud before she could recover her arrow and her quarry. She did not
stop to skin the wet body, but stowed it away in her hamper, to be
disposed of later. Muskrats, she remembered, were eaten with relish by
Indians. And she was now little more than an Indian.

She plodded on again, troubled more than ever by the tenderness of her
feet. She stopped, from time to time, to drink from the brook, and once
she stopped to dig bulrush-roots, which she washed and ate raw as she
walked. She saw few signs of life. The silence of the valley oppressed
her. And her spirits rose as the wooded hills above her widened and
flattened and her quieted brook merged into a brawling and noisy stream
that went churning and whitewatering over gravelly shallows. It was a
stream she had never seen before. About it she could find no sign of a
familiar trail. But its movement and its briskness consoled her. It made
her feel less alone in the world.

She worked her way down its occasional small rapids, searching along
their edges for her essential fragment of flint or quartz. She even
caught up some of the dry stones about her feet, striking them oblique
blows with her knife-back. But from none of them could she obtain the
spark that she needed. So when she came to a quieter reach of the stream
she waded out into the shallow water, remembering that both quartz and
pyrites were heavy and likely to bed lowest in a channel such as that.
She grubbed and puddled along the shallows, like a clam-digger, peering
down at the worn fragments of rock as she held them to the light. Then
she dug still deeper, determined to find any heavier-bodied pebbles that
lay there. When her crooked fingers brought up three or four bean-shaped
objects that shone yellow in the sunlight she gave a gasp of relief. She
had found, she felt, some fragments of iron pyrites. She noted the
heaviness of these bean-shaped metallic pebbles, and the dulled luster
of the rounded corners. She remembered what Grimshaw had once told her
about pyrites sometimes being spoken of as "fool's gold." And she could
quite see the reason for it, she acknowledged, as she grubbed and pulled
about for some larger fragment of her fire-bearing compound. She was
successful, at last, bringing up to the light a large yellow crystal
with abraded edges, angled like a moose-horn and almost the size of her
thumb. And this, she felt sure, would be large enough for striking.

Yet when she carried it to the bank and held it up to the sun to dry she
was again impressed by the luster of the metal. But fire was the one
thing on which her mind was set. So she sat down and held the metal
fragment between her thumb and forefingers, resting on her knee, and
struck it repeated slanting blows with her knife-back. She found, to her
disappointment, that no sparks flew from it. She even saw, to her
annoyance, that the metal was much softer than iron pyrites, more
impressionable and malleable, for where her knife had struck the worn
edges she had left slight bruises in the bright yellow surface. So she
turned it over in her hand, trying it with the point of her knife. She
stared down at the mark which her knife had made in the metal, she
stared down at it with perplexed and narrowing eyes. And then she
understood.

It was gold, pure gold. What she held in her hand was a nugget of native
gold, the same gold that in a far-off world she had once worn as rings
and chains and bracelets. As to that, she knew, there could no longer be
any mistake. There, in the heart of the wilderness, she had found gold.
Already, with her own bare hand, she had dug up enough of it to make a
dozen watch-cases, rings for a hundred fingers. And that was not an atom
compared to what must be about her. If it was in one place, it would be
in another. The promise was that the entire stream-bed would be yellow
with it. And she knew what men had suffered and endured for such gold as
this. She knew that it meant wealth to the finder, exorbitant wealth,
ridiculous wealth. It meant wealth, that was to say, in most cases. But
in this case it meant nothing. It was of no value to her. It was, in
fact, a disappointment, for above all things she wanted pyrites, a
precious spark or two that might fall into dried moss, to be blown into
a flame against shredded birchbark, to be nursed and fed into a
camp-fire, so that in the end she might have a bed of coals over which
to broil her fish and satisfy her hunger and dry her damp clothing. It
was not a gift; it was a mockery. She had asked for pyrites, for quartz,
for flint. And all she had found was gold, ironically useless gold.

Yet it was metal, she remembered, and there were many things for which
they needed metal. Out of such stuff, she knew, her camp-mate could make
buttons and rivets and buckles, spoons and arrow-heads, hinges and
mack-chisels. It was a metal incredibly ductile, unimaginably malleable.
They might even find enough of it to fashion the frying-pan of which
they were so sorely in need. And she stopped in the midst of storing her
nuggets away in one corner of her hamper, to smile at the thought of a
frying-pan of pure gold. She could keep it well burnished, and it would
cook their river-fish to a turn. That yellow metal for which men slaved
and fought and died might become something more than ornamental. It
might even become useful.

So she marked the spot where she had found the placer nuggets by
building a cairn of stones on the stream-bank, well above the high-water
mark. She made it a big cairn, discernible from every side. And as she
started on her way again she looked back at it, from time to time, to
make sure it could be seen by the casual eye. But she forgot about it
before she had traveled far, for a bend in the stream confronted her
with an over-flow swamp fringed with rush and willow. And along the
edges of its watery center she made out a flock of mallard noisily
feeding. So she strung her bow and crept up on them with infinite
caution. She hid patiently in a blind of rushes while they rose and
wheeled and returned to their feeding. And one of her arrows buried
itself in a heavy drake before the startled flock finally rose and
circled off.

Her need for fire, however, only increased with the acquisition of this
additional food. So she kept testing the stream-side pebbles as she
went. Then she sat down, foot-sore and weary, and listlessly took up a
fragment of mottled quartz that lay between her heels. She looked at it
for an idle moment or two and then struck at it indifferently with her
knife-back.

She cried aloud, the next moment, for distinctly she had seen a small
spark of fire fly from its rough edge. And she forgot her weariness in
the sudden revival of spirits brought about by the knowledge that a
camp-fire was no longer an impossibility. But before she could have
that, she knew, she must have wood, and wood in abundance. So after a
careful scrutiny of her surroundings she decided to leave the stream and
cross the wide lowland on her left to where the farther hills were
thick-wooded with spruce and birch. There, she remembered, she might
come upon a patch of cranberries. But as she advanced into this tangled
level she found the going more difficult than she had expected.
Shrub-willow barred her way and the ground became spongy under her feet.
But she pushed on, picking a trail where the marsh-grass grew thickest.

She realized, when she came to small tussocks islanded by mucky-bottomed
pools, that she was in the midst of a northern muskeg. She thought, at
first, of turning back, but she could see the higher woodlands before
her and the worst of her journey already seemed over. So she pushed on,
seeking for a footing along the soggy tundra which grew spongier and
spongier under her guarded steps. Instead of walking, she was finally
compelled to leap from hummock to hummock of wire-grass, to veer from
sustaining willow-clump to willow-clump, stepping over open water which
bubbled with marsh-gas at the weight of her body. She stooped over one
of these black-bottomed pools and tested it with her spear-handle. The
wooden shaft, she found, sank into the ooze as far as she could reach
with it, sank into it with no promise of coming into contact with
anything solid. This filled her with a momentary small horror that
sharpened her eagerness for solid ground under her feet. She knew, as
she started forward again, that she could get none too soon out of that
floating and bubbling quagmire which was more treacherous than open and
honest waterways. Her advance even took on a touch of the frantic, her
close-bound hamper pounding on her shoulders as she leaped and dodged
from sedge-tuft to sedge-tuft. With another hundred feet, she could see,
she would be safely on wooded ground. But she was less deliberate, by
this time, in her choice of stepping-spots. She landed on a larger
island of turf which subsided slowly under her weight, as a raft might.
She could feel it go down, sickeningly, as she ran across it. And as it
went she leaped from it to a smaller hummock which seemed to dissolve
like a melting chocolate _mousse_ under the impact of her feet. She went
floundering down through it, knee-deep in the ooze which blackened with
her struggles as she fought to release herself. That ooze received her
and held her in its velvety softness, drawing her deeper inch by inch as
she fought to free herself from it. Then terror took possession of her.
Her wolf-skin cap fell from her head in her struggles. She shouted aloud
as she gave way to wildness, lashing the muck with her flailing arms and
churning it with her foolishly struggling legs. But slowly, inch by
inch, she continued to sink. She went down until she was thigh-deep,
waist-deep, in a batter that sucked at her as greedily as quicksand
might have done. And her struggles against it resulted in nothing more
than exhaustion. So she rested there, panting, forlornly trying to
marshal her scattered lines of reason. She rested, momentarily passive,
with the chilling marsh-liquid rising almost imperceptibly along her
heaving body, rising slowly, rib by rib, but rising inexorably. And she
knew that the end, whatever it might be, could not remain long an
uncertainty.

Her eye fell on the end of her spear-shaft, which she had dropped in the
struggle. That, too, was slowly going below the surface. So she withdrew
it from the sucking batter. Reaching out with it, she was able to pole
closer to her body the floating island of turf through which her feet
had first broken. Across this she placed her arms. But when she
attempted to impose her weight on it the sodden mass invariably sank. It
supported her shoulders, however, so that she could lean forward without
being sucked entirely under the surface. And when she held the end of
her spear-shaft in her outstretched right hand she found that she could
just reach a clump-willow on a soil-knoll ten feet in front of her. She
anchored the lashed spear-head in a crutch between the willow-withes,
and on testing it found that it held true. It held in place as she
pulled and tugged on it, slowly working her way through the sucking muck
toward the knoll. She had not the strength to pull herself free. But her
shaft was a life-line which kept her in touch with something stable. And
inch by inch she maneuvered her way toward the willow-clump. By the time
she had clasped at the withes with her muddy fingers she found an
approach to solidity in the slime under her feet. She rested her tired
body on the root-bound knoll. When sufficient strength returned to her
she dragged herself, first by one freed foot and then by the other,
still farther up out of the slime. With her body fallen forward across
the tangled wire-grass she made a supreme effort to get free. But to
liberate one foot meant the imprisonment of another. So she was
compelled to hook her spear-head into a still more distant clump of
willows, take a fresh hold on the shaft, and pull with all her strength.
Slowly, reluctantly, the engulfing muck yielded its clasp, released her,
left her free to clamber up on the matted willow-stalks and lie there
drinking in deep breaths of reviving air.

She rested until she felt a chill creeping into her wet body. So she
started on again, advancing more cautiously this time, using her
spear-shaft as a support, as a pike-pole, as a harpoon to link her with
anything substantial. Through the remaining dank league of the muskeg
she fought her way, scarcely daring to breathe until she had left the
last of the bog behind her and she was able to fling herself exhausted
upon a slope of gray caribou-moss across which the afternoon sunlight
slanted its yellow beams.

She lay there for a long time, indifferent to the slime that encased
her, indifferent to her wet clothing, indifferent to the lengthening
shadows cast by the yellow sunlight. But the returning chill that crept
through her stiffened body reminded her of the need for action, of the
need for the fire she must make before nightfall. So she staggered to
her feet, dragging her mud-covered hamper and quiver, her bog-stained
bow and spear, after her. She climbed past willow and alder until she
came to stunted jack-pine and then to clean-floored groves of poplar and
birch and spruce. She stopped before a rocky barrier from which a spring
went tumbling down between mossy boulders. From this spring she drank
deep. Then she took her knife from its moose-hide sheath, and the
fragment of quartz from her hamper, cleaning them on a handful of
caribou-moss and leaving them in the sun to dry. And while they dried
she searched and found a dead tree-trunk, at the core of which she
discovered quantities of the powdery punk she required for her ends.
Then she gathered dry moss and equally dry bark from fallen birches,
which she shredded fine. Then she circled about the neighboring
wood-slopes, carrying twigs and branches and tugging dry timbers to the
shelter of a high-shouldered rock against which she had decided to build
her second _pukivan_. When she saw she had all the wood she required she
prepared a layer of twigs and branches, spread out her punk-dust and
shredded birchbark on a flat stone and took up her knife and
quartz-fragment.

Her first blow sent a small spark into the waiting punk, but it went out
as it fell. So she struck still harder, until small showers of fiery
particles fell into the dust. But each time they failed to bring fire,
blow as hard as she might on the scattering dust. So, after resting a
minute or two, she deepened her punk layer and struck a more vicious
slanting blow on her quartz-edge. A heavier spark flew into the waiting
powder, nested there, crowned itself with a tiny spiral of smoke as she
blew on it.

She covered that smoking fragment with a deeper pinch of powder, fanned
it with her breath, saw the smoke reissue from its blanketing small
hillock, nursed it as a jewel-setter nurses a precious stone, fed it
with shredded bark, and saw it smolder higher and finally break into a
tiny flame. And with that flame she knew that she had conquered. Alone
and unaided, by her own human wit, she had achieved the transforming
gift of fire, she had emerged from the prehistoric into the modern.

By nightfall she had washed and dried her clothing, had built and bedded
down her wind-break, and had dressed and roasted her mallard. After
restoring her strength with a substantial meal, she washed and scraped
and smoked her animal skins over her camp-fire, knowing that she could
no longer go without material for the mending of her moccasins. And when
utter weariness put an end to her labors she added fresh wood to her
fire, crept into the shelter of her wind-break, covered her tired body
with an aromatic mattress of pine-branches, and fell asleep, with her
weapons at her side. That sleep was both deep and dreamless, and out of
it, at sunrise, she awakened with an indeterminate feeling of depression
which ebbed away from her, however, as she listened to the singing of a
white-crowned bunting from a near-by spruce-tree.




CHAPTER XVI


Grimshaw, impatient to complete the roofing of his store-room, paid
little attention to Claire's absence. He worked solemnly and
unceasingly, unconscious of the passing of time, startled to find, when
he looked up, that the afternoon sun was already low in the west. He
stopped short at the discovery that so little of the day was left,
vaguely depressed by the quietness about him.

He revived the hearth-fire, with a frown of perplexity on his weathered
face. Then he ventured along the river-trail as far as his first
fish-traps, scanning the higher land for some sign of his returning
camp-mate. He even climbed to the first muskeg, cupping his hands and
calling aloud through the twilight as he went. But no answering call
came to him through the cooling woodland shadows.

He made his way morosely back to camp, struggling to revive his drooping
spirits with the belief that he would find her there beside the fire.
And when he found she had not returned, he argued with himself that her
excursion had been an unexpectedly rewarding one, that she would come
back overladen and belated, with her habitual small smile of triumph
lighting up the weariness of her tanned face. She would come back,
hungry and eager, companionable yet quiet-eyed, ardent yet strangely
composed, and the gloom would go out of the evening silences and
desolation would vanish from his cabin.

He waited for another hour, eating cursorily between his repeated visits
to the cabin door. When he finally looked out and saw that night was
falling over the black-valleyed forest he became genuinely alarmed. He
tied his knife and fire-bag to his moose-hide belt, put on his wolf-skin
cap and outer hunting-jacket of caribou, looped his bow and spear across
his shoulder, and started out in search of his missing companion.

He knew, by this time, that something was amiss. He had no definite
knowledge of the direction in which she had wandered. He had no light to
help him in trailing her through the wilderness. But he consoled himself
with the claim that she could not have penetrated far into that _terra
incognita_ of the wooded winterland, that she must be somewhere within
hearing. So he called, from time to time, with all the strength of his
lungs, stopping and straining his ears for some echoing faint call out
of the silence. Once, a bobcat screamed within a biscuit-toss of where
he stood. And again a wolf barked back an answering cry from beyond the
lower reaches of the river. But he caught no sound of the one voice he
most wanted to hear.

But he did not give up. He struggled on, from divide to divide, from
hilltop to hilltop, calling and listening as he went. On a balder height
of land he even stopped to build a fire, hoping that this might serve as
a guiding-light to any one wandering about the lower levels. He waited
until the fire burned low again, his hopes subsiding with the flames.
Then he tightened his belt and once more started on, studying the stars
over his head and making a mental note of each change of direction as he
altered the line of his advance. He went on, until he saw the first opal
glimmer of light along the eastern horizon. Then he turned wearily back
toward his river-side camp, once more struggling to console himself with
the belief that the familiar gray-clad figure would be there when he
returned, would be waiting to fling this deadening weight of despair
from his shoulders.

The sun was up by the time he had fought his way back to the cabin under
the cliff. Its low walls took on a look of strangeness in the early
light, a look of aloofness which sharpened into desolation as he
staggered in through the cabin door and saw that Claire had not
returned.

He sat down on the ax-hewn door-step, saying her name over again and
again, moaningly, as his mind busied itself with tabulating the
different possible calamities which might have overtaken her. Then he
slumped forward, with his head in his hands, shaken by the thought that
through his carelessness he had lost her. A treble call from the river
brought him to his feet, at a bound. When that call was repeated he saw
that it was nothing more than the shrill cry of a blue-jay. In it was
even a note of mockery which angered him. So he pulled himself together,
with an effort. He coerced himself to calmness, deliberately cooking and
eating his breakfast and reminding himself to accomplish his ends he
must conserve his strength. And having eaten, he surrendered to the
brief luxury of resting for ten minutes on the sun-warmed sand outside
his cabin. He told himself that it must be for only ten minutes. But his
eyes drooped and the toxins of fatigue dulled his brain. He fell asleep,
without knowing it, and when he awoke dreaming that he had heard
Claire's voice calling to him he started up in alarm. He had slept for
three hours, too exhausted to remember the task confronting him.

"I must find her--I must find her!" he kept muttering to himself as he
thrust a supply of pemmican and smoked meat into his hunting pockets,
took up his weapons, and once more started out on the open trail. He had
the advantage of daylight, this time, and he could plainly see her
moccasin marks in the loose soil as he followed the path she had taken
the day before. He could see where she had stopped to drink, where she
had stepped aside to pick raspberries, where she had clubbed and killed
two partridges in the heart of a bracken patch. He found himself
fortified by this evidence of her ability to supply herself with food.
But his optimism withered away as he studied the bear-tracks so
perplexingly intermingled with the moccasin prints, to revive again as
he followed her trail out on a narrow plateau and about a blue lake into
clean-floored groves of spruce. Clearly he read where she had
encountered and wounded and trailed a marten. And with equal
definiteness he could decipher along the path she had taken the precise
point where she had hesitated and started about, plainly conscious of
the fact that she no longer knew the way home. Then he lost her trail,
lost it completely, where she had crossed a series of rocky ridges. But
he did not give up. He searched until darkness overtook him, and camped
in the open, and resumed his search at the earliest break of day. When
he came to a clump of white birch he wedged as wide a section of the
bark as he could from one of the larger trees, shaping and binding it in
the form of a huge megaphone. This horn, he found, amplified his voice
many times, and again and again, during his wandering, he put it to his
lips and hallooed through the forest stillnesses. But no answering call
came back to him. So he took up the search again, beating systematically
back and forth, threshing through the forest for some sign of the lost
trail.

His food gave out, at the end of the third day, and he was compelled to
divert a stream and capture what fish he could from the half-emptied
brook-bed. On the fourth day he brought down a rabbit with his bow. And
on the fifth day, when he came to a noisy stream boiling down over
fan-shaped rapids he turned eastward along its course and came
unexpectedly on the stone cairn which Claire had built beside its bank.

That brought new life to him. He dropped to his hands and knees and
studied the sand, the soil, the moss-patches through which the
moccasined feet had passed. He followed the broken trail down through
patches of shrub-willow. He saw where it advanced to the edge of a
muskeg. He noticed the sunken foot-prints, still filled with
marsh-water. And his heart sank as he saw that those foot-prints led
only in one direction. He could see where she had hesitated and turned
momentarily back on the soggy tundra. He could see where she had so
frantically leaped from hummock to hummock, where she had veered from
willow-clump to willow-clump, even where she had tested marshy islets
with her spear-shaft. And when he found he could advance no farther in
that bubbling quagmire he beheld tell-tale fragments of torn wire-grass
floating on the open pool water. And lying sodden against a small
sedge-hummock he caught sight of a wolf-skin turban.

Hope went out of him as he saw it. He knew, in that black moment, the
fear that day by day he had been unable to face, the horror that he had
been unwilling to articulate. She was lost to him. For all time, no
matter what the turns of destiny might be, through the useless days or
the empty years that stretched ahead of him, she was lost to him.

He could not reach the cap of wet skin with his hand and he dare not
advance farther along that quaking bog. So he was compelled to reach for
the sodden gray turban with his spear-end.

He shook the water from it and turned it over in his hands. He held it
there, staring at it for a long time. He noticed the ptarmigan-feather
that had been stitched into one side of it. It still carried a forlorn
air of jauntiness. He remembered her smile as she had added that touch
of ornament to her headgear. "Here's where I show the white feather,"
she had said with a laugh. He recalled also, her equally companionable
laugh as she had sat decorating her moccasins with dyed porcupine
quills. "This, I suppose," she had said as she held the worked
moose-hide up before her scrutinizing eyes, "is really the birth of
art."

But that, now, all belonged to the past, to the irrecoverable past.

He stood, clutching at a willow-withe, with his eyes closed. Then he
took a great breath and turned away. His mouth was grim as he folded the
banded fur up and put it in his pocket. He had lost her. He was alone.
For all time, after that, he would have to face life alone,
inexpressibly alone.




CHAPTER XVII


When Grimshaw went back to his cabin in the river-cove, at the end of
the next day, he found the hearth cold and the fire out. It was dead, he
saw as he stirred the ashes, dead as the fire that had once burned in
his own heart.

He ate a savorless meal, slept the deep sleep of exhaustion, and awoke
to a purposeless day. From force of habit he made the rounds of his
traps, carried in an unexpected amount of flesh and furs, and stopped
suddenly in the midst of his work to demand for whom and what he was
laying up such altogether unnecessary stores. It was only slowly that he
awakened to the extent to which life had changed for him. He wandered
disconsolately about the cabin, oppressed by its quietness. He stopped
short before the small earthenware vessel that held Claire's hand-soap.
It seemed a symbol of his wilderness achievement. He had made that soap
for her with his own hands. He had leeched the wood-ashes and mixed the
lye with rendered animal-fat and solidified that emulsion with ground
pipestone, as fine as talc, from a cut-bank on the lower river. He had
even scented it with the oil of pounded winter-green leaves. And as he
took up the rough cake and sniffed at it he found something faintly
feminine emanating from it. That bitter-sweet aroma prompted him to turn
to Claire's garments that hung on their orderly wooden pegs along the
wall. He touched the soft rabbit-skin and doe-skin with his hands. He
lifted the folds of them up to his face. Beyond the vague creosotic
aroma that clung to them he could smell a subtler perfume, the fragrance
of the vital young body that had worn them, that had left with them
something poignant and precious, something unimaginably mysterious.

It would be impossible, he suddenly realized, to live in the midst of
such things. Instead of being a consolation, they would prove a mockery.
They would stand a never-ending reminder of what had been lost out of
his life, of the emptiness that surrounded him. And there was nothing,
now, to hold him to this wilderness camp. He no longer had that frailer
lost body to think of. He had only his own meaningless life to gamble
with. And since the winning or losing involved only his own fate, he
would hurl himself against the Barrier and see if he could break through
to civilization. And if the Barrier flung him back he would stake his
last throw on the river and let it carry him through the unknown, toward
the great bay where white men sometimes trafficked. He would hazard
what was left of his life to get out of this wilderness that had grown
hateful to him.

He would have to travel light, he knew, just as he would have to be
prepared for defeat. There were reasons more substantial than
superstition why generation after generation of red-men, who so
sedulously parceled out their hunting grounds, had been held back from
this untraversed corner of the North. They had found it inaccessible.
And to escape from it would be no easy matter.

His first decision was to leave a letter of explanation in his cabin,
addressed "To Whom It May Concern." But on second thoughts he saw little
use in any such message. He pictured it as lying there, moldering with
dampness, paling into nothingness with the passing of time. It concerned
only himself, now, whether he won or lost. And, winning or losing, he
could not see that it would make much difference to him....

Claire Endicott, marshalling the fragments of woodcraft she had gleaned
from her camp-mate, made her rock-side _pukivan_ a headquarters from
which day by day she blazed trails at different directions into the
forest. On the sixth day of her exile, advancing along a trail which
looked the most promising, she came unexpectedly out on a river where
she saw a moose standing knee-deep in the water. She paid scant
attention to this animal as it fed on the lily-pads about it. She was
more impressed by the fact that the river before her was reassuringly
similar in size and appearance to the stream on which she and Grimshaw
had built their cabin. So she turned sharply to the left, making her way
up-stream along the broken timber-slopes, sometimes skirting the
stream-edge and sometimes circling about cut-banks that rose sheer from
the current. She fought her way on, mile by mile, torn between hope and
fatigue. When she felt that she could go no farther she sat wearily down
on a boulder of granite. Her morosely roving eye, as she sat there,
wandered on to the stump of a small birch, which had plainly been cut
off with an ax. She stared at it heavily, remembering that she herself
had not passed that way of late. It came home to her, slowly, that that
timber must have been cut by Grimshaw. And in that case she must be
within striking distance of their cabin.

Her lethargy vanished, at a stroke. She started up, with a crazy
quickening of the pulse, running from point to point where she saw
evidences of her camp-mate's activities. He had cut timber there-about,
to build one of his lower river fish-traps. And along the trail, near
by, were a number of rabbit-snares, with a dead hare swinging from one
of the twitch-ups. That meant she had blundered back into home
territory, that she was within striking distance of one of the forest
trails leading to the cabin, to the comrade awaiting her there, to
delivery from loneliness that had threatened to take her very reason
from her.

She started to work her way up the broken river-path, oddly revived,
almost light-footed again. She called aloud, from time to time, not
despairingly, but elatedly, jubilantly, making the wooded hills reecho
with her triumphant halloo. She got no answer to that challengingly glad
call, but silence did not depress her, remembering as she did that
Grimshaw was probably out on the trail in search of her. She could see
still further signs of his labors along the shore, his foot-prints in
the bank-mud, his tree-blazes at every turn in the narrow path. She came
to a heap of ashes where on one of their wider excursions they had once
built a fire. She came to the blind he had built at the
caribou-crossing. And she knew then there could be no mistaking the way.
She was heading for home. She was once more on familiar ground. She was
no longer a forest wanderer uncertain of her way. She was winning back
to her mate.

She no longer called aloud as she pressed on. She had a longing to hug
the secret of her return, to treasure it to the last moment, to taste
the savour of it to the full. She dramatized that final moment when she
would appear suddenly before Grimshaw as he stepped heavy-eyed to the
cabin door. She pictured a moment of disbelief on his face, followed by
a cry of gratefulness. She even imagined him as reaching out his two
great arms to her and enclosing her, contentedly, in their clasp, as
crushing her tired body to his leather-clad breast and surrendering to a
feeling which he had so long and so studiously repressed.

Her heart beat high as she came to a turn in the path and caught a
glimpse of the cove-sand that held their lodge. Her knees became
slightly tremulous as she half-ran down the sloping trail, worn smooth
by the coming and going of his moccasined feet. A pain grew about her
heart as she came within sight of the cabin itself. There was no smoke
going up from its squat stone chimney. There was no movement about the
dooryard. But everything stood there as she had left it, the bark-roofed
forge, the fuel-pile, the stretching-frames, the smoke-racks, the stage
for holding furs, the stone store-room under the shoulder of the rock.
They were there, the same as ever. They lay before her, crowned with a
misty halo of loveliness, blurred in outline by the foolish tears which
she could not keep from her eyes.

She stopped for a moment, to obtain better control of herself. Her
camp-mate, she remembered, was not given to emotionalism. And she must
be self-contained, quiet and self-contained, as he himself would be at
such a moment. So she swallowed hard, trying to get rid of the lump in
her throat as she rounded the path into the cove and stepped across the
trodden dooryard. She could hear her own heart beating as she raised her
hand to push open the door. A great deal had happened to her, in that
immediate neighborhood. She had been close to death there, and had been
snatched back by a timely hand; she had forgotten all her own world, and
had learned to look with steady eye on a new one; she had been humbled
by her uncounted weaknesses, and had learned to take pride in the
gathering of a new strength; she had been confronted by desolation, and
had found that loneliness was not a thing to be afraid of.

She held her breath as she opened the door, which swung back heavily,
creakingly, in answer to her weight. Then her breast filled and emptied
itself as her widened eyes stared about the narrow room.

It was empty.

She crossed to the hearth, and thrust her fingers deep into the ashes
that lay there. They were cold, cold to the core.

That, she knew, meant that no fire had burned there that day. Her heart
sank, in spite of all her resolution, as she turned and once more
inspected the room. It was as neat as a ship's cabin, with everything
orderly, everything in place. But about it was an air of the valedictory
which she could not quite decipher. She crossed to the door, and looked
out. Twice she called aloud, before turning back to the shadowy room.
Then she remembered that perhaps there might be a message for her, so
she went over the cabin, point by point, in search of some sign that
Grimshaw might have left. But there was none.

She sat down, tight-lipped, to think things over. There was, after all,
nothing to become tragic about. Grimshaw, naturally, was out on the
trail in search of her. He was where any real man would be, under such
circumstances. And in due time he would return. He was a
master-woodsman, sure of himself in any such surroundings, and even that
night, or the next, or the next, he might head back to make sure if she
had returned or not. So, in the meantime, it was her duty to carry on.
She must maintain their lodge as he would like it maintained. She must
do her part, no matter what happened, she reminded herself as she set
about making a fire on the hearth and proceeded to cook her solitary
meal. She had much to be thankful for. She was alive and well, as
hardened and resilient as a track-runner, as capable of providing for
her wants as any girl of a Chippewan tribe. And here she was protected;
she was insured against cold and hunger; she had little to fear beyond
her own morbid thoughts. She tried to laugh, as she banked her fire and
made ready for bed, at her own timidities. She made an effort to
ridicule herself back to fearlessness. But loneliness weighed heavily
upon her. And she missed, more than she was willing to acknowledge, the
camp-mate who had failed to return to her.

But she carried on, as best she could. She made the round of Grimshaw's
traps, the next morning, and brought in what fur and flesh she could
find along the game-trails. She scraped hides and smoked meat, she
scaled and gutted fish, she gathered fuel and swept clean the dooryard
of their lodge. Remembering that their sleeping-bags had proved
unsatisfactory, showing a tendency to gather dampness and presenting
difficulties in the matter of their proper ventilation, she took them
apart and restitched them into open robes, to which she added blankets
of plaited rabbit-skin, incredibly warm and appealingly light in weight.
A sort of terror of idleness grew up in her, for when she was idle she
found thought most active. And when she fell to thinking she found her
spirits ebb low and her courage subside. There was a great want in her
life which she found herself afraid to dwell upon. There was an
unanswered and unanswerable question which she dared not even
articulate.

Then unexpectedly and unmistakably the great question was answered for
her.

It was at high noon, on the fifth day after her return to Camp Reliance,
when Claire was carrying her hamper filled with starch-bulbs back to the
store-room. She had stopped to rest at the edge of a hilltop grove of
white birch which dappled her with its spotted shadows. She was gazing
with abstracted eyes at an eagle circling languidly over the
black-topped hills, ruminating on the ease of its flight, speculating on
how readily such wings could reach and mount the Barrier which hemmed
her back from the world she no longer knew. But as she watched the
planing bird she became vaguely conscious of movement of another nature
and in different direction.

She thought, as she turned quickly and stared across the narrow valley,
that she saw a wild animal slowly making its way along the open trail.
Yet as she looked again it seemed like no animal she had ever
encountered in those northern woods. It moved slowly and painfully, like
a wounded bear. It crept forward on all fours, and rested for a time,
and crept forward again. It took on a grotesqueness, in the shadow,
which both perplexed and alarmed her. When it emerged into the open
sunlight, crawling still closer to where she waited, she leaned forward,
with a quick cessation of breath.

For the thing that crawled toward her, on all fours, was a human being.

It was a battered and bloodstained human being, with matted hair and
tattered clothing and trailing footwear, with one leg dragging oddly
behind it as it lumbered forward. It fell forward on its face, and lay
panting there, from time to time, flattening down on the forest trail
until it seemed to merge into the soil about it. And as the woman stared
at it with widening eyes she became conscious of still another movement
behind it. This was the furtive advances and recessions of a gaunt
timber-wolf which slunk about and circled from side to side behind the
crawling figure that rested and crept on and rested again. A chill crept
through her blood as she watched that companioning shadow which advanced
and waited and advanced again. Her first impulse was to string her bow
and hold an arrow ready for that hateful faltering shadow that trailed
after the other. But a vague inertia held her there, spellbound. A
benumbing mingling of horror and happiness kept her from moving. For she
realized that the battered figure creeping closer and closer to her was
Shomer Grimshaw's.

She wanted to cry out to him, but she seemed without the power of
speech. She was swept by a desire to run forward and raise him to his
feet, but her legs, for the moment, were without the power to support
her. She merely sat there on her shelf of lichened granite, with her
hamper fallen between her knees, staring helplessly at the man who
moaned a little, from time to time, as he advanced quaveringly along the
winding trail.

She called out just once, in the end, with a cry that seemed stifled in
her throat. The crawling figure sat up, at that sound, and blinked
abstractedly through the tangle of hair that matted the mud-stained
forehead. Then, with a dubious movement of the head from side to side,
he fell to advancing once more along the trail. But for the second time
he stopped, staring directly at the dappled figure against the dappled
granite, the figure that looked so phantasmal in the filtered light of
the fluttering birch-leaves above it. A look of perplexity crept into
his lean face, followed by a look of incredulousness. He passed the back
of his bloodstained hand across his brow, and shook his head from side
to side. Then he looked still again, and he saw the two half-helpless
arms outstretched in a mute gesture of appeal, of welcome, of gratitude.

Slowly he rose to his feet, with his eyes still fixed on that gray-clad
figure in the uncertain gray shadows.

"_Clannie!_" he cried in a husky quaver which brought a gush of tears to
the waiting girl's eyes.

She ran to him then and fell to her knees beside him on the trail. For
he had sunk down again, with a return of weakness, a singular look of
pathos in his eyes as he studied her.

"I thought you were dead!" he muttered, thickly, heavily, as his hand
reached out to touch her. His groping fingers closed on her arm, as
though he hungered to make sure a material and tangible woman leaned
above him. "I thought you were dead!" he repeated as his tremulous hand
clung to her shoulder.

She subsided slowly toward him, under the weight of that clinging hand.
She sank down, with a small cry of helplessness, until her cheek was
pressed against his and she was clasping his matted head against her
bosom. She held him there, in an attitude oddly maternal, murmuring, "My
dearest! Oh, my dearest!" She held him hungrily, repeating foolishly as
she felt his arms tighten about her stooping shoulder, "My dearest,
you've come back to me!"

Then her arms fell away from him and she sat back, with a brief quiver
passing through her body. She stared into his face as though she had
viewed it, closely and comprehendingly, for the first time in her life.
And in the lines of that face and in the shadows about the stricken eyes
she saw the plow-share of pain had cut deep. She saw there a great
loneliness and a great weariness, a look of revolt that made her breath
catch in her throat.

"You're hurt?" she said, as her eye wandered on to the ragged-moccasined
foot that lay inert along the trail.

"It doesn't matter," he protested, disturbed by the tears that still
welled to her eyes. "Nothing matters any more!"

"Why do you say that?" she asked, struggling against a recurring impulse
to enclose him in her arms.

"I've found you again," he said as he recaptured her hand. "And that's
all that counts, now."

"Then you thought I was lost?" she inquired forlornly, perversely happy
at the misery in his face.

"I thought you were _dead_," he amended. "So I saw no use in staying on.
I tried to get through the Barrier. I took what food I could carry and
tried to fight my way back--back to that other world. But there is no
way back."

"There must be," proclaimed the woman beside him, disturbed by his
dulled note of hopelessness.

Grimshaw shook his head from side to side.

"It can't be done, by way of the Barrier. There's a sea of sink-holes,
two days of mire and muskeg. And beyond that are rock-cliffs, walls that
only something with wings could get over."

"Something with wings!" repeated the girl, remembering the eagle she had
so recently watched above the western hills.

"I fell from the face of one of the cliffs," the man beside her was
saying. "It seems to have broken my ankle. I crawled back. But my food
gave out."

"Poor boy!" she said, unconscious of the hand that reached out to his
shoulder.

"But nothing matters now," he repeated, with a faint grimace of pain as
he moved his body. "Nothing matters--but us."

Never before had she seen him thus given over to hopelessness.

"But they'll come for us," she averred, staring up at the pale blue sky
that thinned to opal along the lonely reaches of the spruce-tops.
"They'll come--in the only way they can come. They'll come with wings!"

"With wings?" he repeated, apparently not following her line of thought.

"Yes; in one of their air-ships," she maintained, with her eyes still on
the lonely hilltops.

"They're being a long time about it," countered Grimshaw. He spoke in a
note of complaint that was foreign to him.

"My father will come," asserted Claire, remembering that her companion
was not quite himself. "I have infinite faith in my father. He'd never
give up, so long as he was alive."

Grimshaw did not seem to be listening to her.

"We can't get through!" he repeated to himself, with his hands fallen
between his ragged knees, bloodstained where the rawhide no longer
covered them. This man with the stricken eyes, Claire remembered, was
sorely in need of food, of food and warmth and rest.

"We can at least get back to the camp," she asserted as she rose to her
feet. "Could you walk, if I helped you?"

"I might," he conceded, "but I'd be too heavy for you."

"Try me," she retorted with her quiet smile.

"All right," he finally agreed, fortified by a new note of authority
that hung about her. "I can manage, I think, if I get an arm over your
shoulder."

She helped him to rise, holding him up with her hard-sinewed young body,
sustaining his weight as best she could while he adjusted himself to a
method of advance which strongly reminded him of a three legged race.
She staggered a trifle as he limped along at her side, with his
briar-scratched arm half-circling about her neck. But spell by spell
they hobbled their way toward the cabin, limping forward and resting and
limping forward again. She left him, once, to bring water from the
spring, and twice he emptied the birchbark rogan which she held up to
him. Then they moved forward again, in silence, until they circled about
into the sandy-floored cove where their lodge stood.

"Does it seem like coming home?" she asked as she waited at his side
while he stood studying the low-roofed cabin under the dwarfing shadow
of the cliff-face.

"It's all we have," he said with a _vibrata_ of feeling she had in no
way expected from him.

"We have each other," she contended, resenting that estranging tide of
impersonality which his utter weariness was once more throwing between
them.

"Have we?" he demanded almost gruffly, as he startled her by taking her
thin face between his two hands and staring almost savagely into her
eyes.

"Haven't we?" she countered, wondering what that stare of appraisal was
trying to unearth from her inmost soul of souls.

"If we're not afraid," he said, with his hands falling limp to his side.
And still again she was impressed by the silent misery of his
listless-eyed face.

"I'm not afraid," she told him very quietly, as she lifted his fallen
arm and placed it across her shoulder and directed him, slow step by
step, in through the cabin door.




CHAPTER XVIII


Claire, during the week that followed, was disturbed more by Grimshaw's
apathy of spirit than by the injury to his foot. For the latter, it is
true, they together made a pair of crutches and a cast of brick-clay
which they baked and hardened in the forge-fire. And after a few days of
rest and forced feeding he was able to be about again. But with his
return of strength there was a return of his earlier impersonal attitude
toward his camp-mate. Claire fretted in secret over this sense of
withdrawal. His studied coolness left her with the impression of being
cheated. She sat beside him, during two days of autumnal driving rain,
stitching together the moccasins which he had cut out of rawhide, sewing
on the fresh caribou clothing which he had fashioned, waiting for him to
reveal something which obviously lay on his mind. She showed no
excitement when he explained to her he had found a salt spring on his
journey toward the Barrier. They could make evaporation-pans, he went
on, and obtain sufficient salt for curing all the fish and meat they
might need. It would give an added savor to their food, he pointed out,
and would even help in tanning their hides and hardening their soap. He
could bring her back a supply of it when he went out for his spear and
bow and quiver, which he had lost along the trail.

"When _we_ go out for them," she corrected, without looking up from her
sewing.

"Aren't you going to trust me alone again?" he asked, with a slightly
embittered note in his voice.

"It's not that," she protested. "But after this I think we ought never
to separate again."

He looked up sharply, at that, only to find her barricaded eyes bent
placidly over her sewing.

"I wasn't exactly myself, the other day," he remarked, after a prolonged
silence.

Her color deepened a little.

"Are you sorry, for anything you said?" she finally asked.

"I'm sorry, if it's going to make our being together more--more
difficult."

"I was hoping it might make it just the opposite," she found the courage
to tell him.

His face grew hard.

"There are certain things we can't afford," he announced in a flatted
voice.

She looked up from her sewing at that, studying him with slightly
luminous eyes.

"Are you afraid of me?" she quietly demanded.

"I'm afraid of myself," he proclaimed, preferring not to meet her gaze.

She looked at him long and steadily. If she accepted his speech as a
rebuff, she gave no outward sign of having done so. She drew back into
her shell, it is true, but in her eyes remained a vague light of
patience touched with triumph. It was to escape this, she suspected,
that he finally hobbled out of the lodge and seated himself on a rock
down by the river. A late afternoon sun broke through the scattering
rain-clouds, throwing a pale shaft of radiance across the cool autumn
air. She could see him distinctly as he sat on the rock, with his chin
in his hand. She at once thought of Rodin's _Thinker_, of man troubled
by an awakening soul, of the jungle-fighter confronted by conflicts
which must be won by something beyond mere muscle and sinew.

She betrayed no surprise, the next day, when Grimshaw spent an hour in
carefully honing his roughly-made razor-blade. Patiently he passed it
back and forth along a flake of slate-stone oiled with fish-fat. Then,
having cut his beard as close as he could with his companion's scissors,
he lathered his face and scraped and dragged at it until he was once
more clean-shaven. Then he made an effort to cut his hair, which now
fell almost half-way to his shoulders.

To do this without a mirror, however, was no easy task. And Claire
stopped before him, laughing a little at his struggles.

"Couldn't I do that for you?" she asked, watching him as he stopped to
hone his scissors-blades.

"Could you?" he inquired, trying to dislodge hair-ends that nested under
the neck of his rawhide jacket.

"Of course," she replied, as she put down the crock of smoked meat she
was carrying to the store-house.

Her eyes were solemn as she brought out a towel of fawn-skin and tucked
it carefully about his neck. They were equally solemn as she took the
scissors from his hand and thrust them into her belt while she passed
her rough wooden comb through the thick mat of his hair. Then she stood
close over him as she held clumps of this thick hair between her fingers
and snipped at them with the inadequate scissors which seemed without
the power of keeping their point. His face remained equally solemn as
she stood off to inspect her handiwork.

"That's going to look more civilized," she said, as she turned his head
a little and started work on the other side. She was standing so close
over him that her slender body was pressing against his shoulder. She
even held his head firmly against her ribs as she trimmed the thatch
that shadowed his sunburnt forehead, so intent on her work that she
remained unconscious of his wince as she stopped and blew the loose
hair-ends from the hollow of his throat. Then she fell to clipping
again, squinting a little as she studied the effect of her slowly
repeated strokes.

She put the scissors down, with a small sigh, blew the loose hairs from
the bronzed column of his neck, and shook out the skin of fawn-skin.
Slowly and meditatively she replaced the towel about his shoulders and
with her bare hands she just as meditatively brushed down the uneven
thatch of his head. Her movements became slower and slower, until the
passing of her fingers through his sun-bleached hair became as gentle as
a caress. Then she closed her eyes, and with a little gasp of
abandonment pressed his head close in against her cheek, straining it
there in a momentary hunger that was neither willed nor understood.

He turned about where he sat, at that, and the hands with which he
imprisoned her wrists were unsteady. So savage was that clasp that she
thought, at first, it was anger that was about to break from him. For
one moment he held her back, staring into her face. Then the cry that he
uttered was as uncontrolled as her own had been.

"It's no use," he said in a husky whisper. "It's no use," he repeated
almost mournfully, as his arms crept about her and he drew her close in
to his side.

"Do you care?" she murmured, shaking a little in his clasp, her breast
rising and falling sharply against the fringed roughness of his rawhide
jacket.

"I love you," he cried as he thrust back the dark mass of her hair and
stared into her eyes. "I love you," he repeated as he drew her upturned
face slowly toward his own, closer and closer, until their lips met and
locked together.

She opened her eyes at the sound that broke from his throat. It was
almost a sob.

He was once more holding her away from him at arm's length, with his
tragic eyes intent on hers.

"What is it?" she asked, disturbed by the bitterness of his face. But it
was her arms this time which clasped about his neck. And it was she who
drew his unhappy face down to her own.

"Are you afraid?" she murmured as she stroked his hair. But her second
question, like her first, remained unanswered. He took her in his arms
again, more quietly this time, and once more his lips were pressed
against her cheek stained brown with wind and sun.

"I've fought against this," he said with a sudden gesture of
helplessness, of surrender. "I've fought against it blindly, from the
first. But I know now that it's no use. It's no use because there's
nothing else in the world that counts. It's all we have left to us. Oh,
Clannie, Clannie, I've wanted you all along. My heart has ached for you.
But I was afraid to show it."

"Why should we be afraid?" she asked with her hand attempting to rub
the frown from his stooping forehead. She spoke quietly, but the color
had almost gone from her face.

"Because we are so entirely alone. And being alone leaves us so
defenseless. And there are so many things we have to remember."

"My beloved," she said with her repeated gesture of hunger as her hands
once more clasped his stooping shoulder. "There's only one thing, now, I
want to remember. You've said you loved me. And I love you more than you
could ever love me. And we've a right to our happiness. They've taken
everything else away from us. But they can't take that."

She lay warm in his arms. He was about to stoop and kiss her again. But
he stopped short, studying her with his troubled stare.

She suddenly drew away from him, her gravely assessing eyes intent on
his.

"It's _me_ that you're afraid of," she cried out, with a slight
deepening of color.

He tried to deny that, but she stopped him with a gesture that was
almost imperious. "You think that I'm nothing but a child, a child that
accident has entrusted to your care. But I'm more than a child. And I've
thought more about life than you imagine. I know more about it than I
ought to. I know men much better than you know women. I think it's
because I've come to know them so well that I love you for your bigness,
for that strange gift of purity that has kept you what you are."

"Don't say that," he contended. "It's not true. It's--"

"But I must say it," she interrupted. "We've shied away from these
things and left them unsaid for too long. And truth isn't going to hurt
either of us. In all this world, I don't suppose a man and a woman have
ever been thrown together as we've been thrown together in this
wilderness. Everything, everything was taken away from us. We were given
a new life, a life of our own, an earth of our own to walk in our own
way. But we haven't had the courage to live as we wanted to live. We've
carried along with us the ghosts of all the old things that used to
surround us. We've--"

"They are more than ghosts," said the man at her side.

"No, no; they are only real in the world where they belong. It's as
foolish to carry them about with us here as it is to carry a
police-whistle about with us in these woods. There's nothing behind them
now, nothing organized to come to our protection when we need that
protection. We are answerable only to ourselves. Whatever we do, God
will understand and forgive us. Knowing what I know, God will forgive
us: I've no fear about that."

"But there's a world of men and women back there that might not be as
charitable as God," he quietly reminded her.

"When we face those men and women we can face what they demand of us,"
said the thoughtful-eyed girl with her brown hands clasped over the
leather-clad knee of her camp-mate. "And I'm not thinking of them. For
we've found, now, that there's no way of getting back to them. You've
said that yourself. But I don't think I could endure what we'll have to
face here, week after week and month after month, without the thought of
your love to keep my soul alive."

He took her clasped hands from his knee and held them firmly in his own.

"That's exactly what I want to do," he told her. "I want to keep our
souls alive. We are more than animals. I too know something of life. And
I know there must be beauty and truth in love if it's to last, if it's
to be what it ought to be."

She looked at him with her face shadowed with wistfulness.

"Then can't we keep beauty and truth in it?" she asked.

"Only by being strong," he reminded her. "By being stronger than I could
without your help."

"I don't understand what you mean by being strong," she said as she rose
to her feet after a moment of silence. "After this, I'll always want to
be near you. I'll want to touch you, to feel your arms about me, to know
that you care for me. Is to deny all that--being strong?"

"No, no, Clannie, we can't deny that now," he cried with his arms about
her knees. "It's not love that I'm afraid of. It's only what love, in
our blindness, may lead us into."

She drew back a little, with a wintry smile on her face. Then, for the
first time, she laughed.

"We really ought to be married, oughtn't we?" she said with a quiet
candor which struck him silent. "Oughtn't we?" she repeated, after a
meditative moment or two.

"That's impossible!" he said almost harshly.

"Would you marry me, if you could?" she asked with child-like
directness.

"God knows I would, if I could," he cried out in a tone so embittered
that she fell to studying his unhappy face once more.

"Did men and women really marry, ages and ages ago, away back in the
Stone Age?" she surprised him by asking.

"They mated," conceded Grimshaw.

"As you and I have done, in this little inland Stone Age of our own?"
she suggested.

"Life is not so simple for us as it was for those savages," he reminded
her.

"But the Indians of this country, the Indians of to-day who live as
we've been compelled to live--do they marry?"

"Yes, they marry, after their fashion. They have tribal rites they go
through, that make them man and wife."

"And it's only where they're in touch with the white man's world that
they adopt the white man's way of saying they belong to each other, of
having a priest or a minister read some different form of service out of
a little book?"

"Yes, since they still live a great deal like animals they still mate a
great deal like animals."

She smiled at the note of reproof in his voice.

"But aren't we all really more animal than anything else?" she solemnly
demanded.

"I can't help wondering if your father would care to have you regarded
only in that way," he said, bringing her up short.

"You don't seem to be able to get the thought of my father out of your
head," she said with a softness of voice which took the harshness out of
her charge.

"Perhaps that is because I know you are always in his thoughts," he
reminded her. And her eyes, at that, grew shadowy with thought as she
once more sat down beside him. She sat there without speaking, for a
long time. Then, with a gesture of infinite tenderness, she placed her
sun-browned hand on his shoulder.

"I love you for that," she told him. "For that loyalty. And I can see
it's loyalty to something more than a mere man. And I want to help you
to keep it. The only thing I'm afraid of is that life may leave us
nothing but ourselves to be loyal to. Oh, my dear, my dear, what can we
do if we have to stay on here, just you and I, as utterly alone as we
are now? Just you and I, growing older and older in this awful northern
silence, with life escaping us day by day, with the hope for anything
else sinking lower and lower?"

She crouched against him desolately, with a shiver going through the
entire length of her body. The forlornness of her uplifted face
frightened him. And responding to a sudden impulse of protection, he
placed his arms about her and held her close to his side.

"But I can't let hope go out like that," he protested. "That would be a
sort of suicide, the suicide of our souls, something as unspeakable as
the suicide of our bodies. They'll come for us, Clannie! You'll see,
they'll come for us yet. And until we know the world has forgotten us,
for good, we can't afford to forget the world."

She drew a great breath, comforted by the sustaining arms about her.

"But if they should never come? If, for some reason, we should never go
back?"

His voice, as he spoke, quavered in a momentary clutch of passion as he
held her unhappy head close against his breast.

"Then we'd have to remake our own world, in our own way."




CHAPTER XIX


Claire was never quite sure what marked the beginning of the new era in
her wilderness life. There were times when she identified it with the
coming of a strangely poignant period of Indian summer weather after a
fortnight of wind and sleet and frost that crusted the northern pools
with ice, a stretch of tranquil days with the echo of quiet migrations
in the windless air, with a wash of tawny gold over all her world, with
deepened color along the thinly wooded slopes, and hazy afternoons that
veiled hill and valley and muskeg with a softening mist of unreality.

There were other times when she identified it with something growing out
of Grimshaw's final confirmation of their exile, a surrender to the
inevitable, a quietude of spirit born, not of her soul's struggle up
toward some sustaining idea, but of her resignation to a fate accepted
as unalterable. And still other times there were when she felt that this
new mood of hers was born of the newer understanding that had grown up
between her and Grimshaw. It was an understanding not completely
understood--but it was enough. She loved and was loved, and there
seemed little else to ask for. It could bring, she knew, no altered
condition in their actual relationship, no outward change except those
oblique results born of candor touched with tenderness.

Yet that alteration seemed enormous enough. In the midst of a loneliness
no longer drugged by labor she seemed to have found an emotional refuge,
a shelter and a habitation for her soul as definite as their cabin of
tree-logs stood a habitation for her body. With their earlier mad
scramble for sustenance already a thing of the past, with a more
leisured outlook on the life into which she had so abruptly been tossed,
she seemed for the first time to taste the full savor of their strange
isolation. Like her race before her, she emerged into an era of
self-consciousness. She was no longer unable to see the forest because
of the trees. She speculated less about the future and was more
preoccupied with the present. She struggled to drain from each passing
hour all of its fulness that she could harvest. She loved and was
beloved; she lived and walked and had her being side by side with the
man she loved. And that, surely, was enough.

There were times, it is true, when she thought of the past. In some
unexpected gush of memory the color and warmth and crowded movement of
her earlier life would return to her, arresting her with a chilling
sense of its remoteness, arrowing her with the thought of its ease and
opulence. She saw it, at such times, more sharply than she had been able
to see it when she stood immersed in its trivial intensities, its
purposeless and crowded complexities. But its memories brought with them
no enduring pain. She thought, occasionally, of crowds and crowded
places; she recalled the Plaza at the tea-hour, with its mingled odors
of furs and Turkish cigarettes and hot-house violets and cinnamon-toast
shot through with the softly wistful sobbing of violins. She thought of
the carriage-entrance of the Metropolitan at the end of a Jeritza night,
with the crush of cloaks and sables and white necks hung with whiter
pearls, and the slap of landaulet doors closing on laughing figures in
cream and gold. She even thought of the Grand Central concourse of a
Saturday afternoon, that incredibly gigantic and ceaselessly humming
beehive of interweaving humanity coming and going on their tides of
uncomprehended desire. She thought of that crowd as hungry children
think of a confectioner's window. Yet if she regretted the loss of such
things, it was a regret so pale that it refused definitely to color her
present existence. And that newer world, with all its restrictions and
wants and deprivations, eventually by some trick of thought turned into
the larger and freer of the two worlds. She remembered herself in her
city life as being in some way smothered in clothes and clan
prohibitions. Her forest life, on the other hand, seemed more and more
to take on the dignifying values of a splendid crudity, of a strangely
adventurous hazard, of something fantastically complete in itself. She
moved about with an odd impression of having been reborn.

She attributed this feeling of wonderful newness, however, less to the
magic of a splendid adventure than to the magic of a splendid
companionship. Twice over, she felt, this strange friend of hers had
saved her. He had saved her bruised body from the rapids; and from a
turbulence equally menacing he had saved her unstable woman's soul. He
had restored her faith in strength. And she knew moments of exaltation
when life itself seemed a small thing with which to repay such a debt.
Sometimes, when walking through the opaline northern air at Grimshaw's
side, she would stop on the trail, with an impulse she could not
control, and crush his leather-clad arm against her side.

"I love you!" she would say with her abandoned little side-movement of
the head. "Is it wicked for me to tell you that?"

The bronzed face above her would soften.

"I love to hear you say it," her fellow-vagrant would admit.

"But is it wicked?" she would insist.

"Not when you say it."

"But _you_ never do!"

"I would, often enough--if it wasn't against the rules."

"But _would_ you, if we didn't have to remember rules?"

"I'd do more than say it; I'd prove it."

She would think that over, solemn-eyed. Then her hand would seek his
arm.

"You _are_ proving it, my own," she would finally say, with one of her
uninterpretable small gestures. "You are proving it by being strong."

So widely did this subjective life of feeling over-spread their outer
world of actuality that things which at other times would have seemed
momentous betrayed a tendency to scale down to the trivial. Thus, when
Claire showed Grimshaw the nuggets she had found in the stream-bed
during her blind wandering through the woods, and he had confirmed her
belief that they were fragments of native gold, he merely smiled down at
them with an impersonal sort of interest.

"Yes, they're gold," he acknowledged. "But what good is gold to us?"

"Gold is wealth," objected the girl.

"Not in our world."

"But it's at least metal, a metal that should be easily worked," she
contended.

"That's true enough," acknowledged Grimshaw. "But I'd much rather have a
harder metal, something that would take an edge and keep it. We'll find
your stream where this came from, of course, and from what you say about
it there ought to be plenty more of such stuff there."

"And wealth like this won't do us any good?" asked Claire as she turned
one of the nuggets in her hand.

"Oh, yes; if we get enough of it," was the other's casual-noted reply.
"If we get enough of these pepites we can make your frying-pan for you!
I can concoct a blow-pipe and crucible and pour the melted metal into a
clay mold. And it'll help out with our household utensils, of course.
You said you'd be needing hair-pins before long. And you can have a
better comb. And I can make other things as we need 'em, such as buckles
and buttons. I could even take the outer coating of deer-gut and prepare
it for gold-beater's skin. With that we could have gold-leaf for
decorating some of our pottery, if we cared to use it."

Claire was gazing down at the pepite in her hand.

"Could you make me a ring?" she asked. "Just a plain gold band?"

"Quite easily," he told her. "You mean, of course, one to wear on your
finger?"

"Yes," she acknowledged.

He took her hand in his and studied it. Then he lifted it to his lips
and kissed its weathered surface.

"Poor little hand!" he said with his solemn smile.

"Isn't that against the rules?" she questioned as she studied her
water-chapped fingers.

"Why should you want a ring on it?" he asked instead of answering her.
She looked up quickly, at that question, as though to discover some
deeper meaning to his words. But she saw only tenderness in his eyes.

"It's merely a woman's reason," she told him as she turned away. And
nothing more was said on the matter. Yet two days later they set out on
the trail and came to Claire's stream-side cairn and worked the bed of
the creek and carried home a quart of the rounded yellow pepites tied up
in a square of doe-skin. They carried home their casual wealth and
burned fresh charcoal and prepared a mold and melted their precious
metal and fashioned it into a none too symmetrical frying-pan. They
handled it with reverence, for a day or two, and then it became merely a
utensil, half-forgotten in the excitement of a still more stirring
discovery.

For Claire and Grimshaw, while tracking a caribou-cow which the latter
had wounded with an arrow, unexpectedly stumbled on a hollow tree filled
with honey. They marked the spot and returned with pottery jars,
smoking out the hive and carefully garnering every pound of the precious
combs filled with cloying sweetness. And as the savor of that strange
sweetness melted on Claire's bewildered tongue she realized how great a
want the absence of sugar had been leaving in her life.

"This is heavenly," she cried with the gusto of a child, as she sat
licking the amber fluid from her finger-tips. Grimshaw had been
explaining how by straining it and storing it away in containers they
could have enough sweets until the next flow of sap, to say nothing of
the beeswax which would be so useful in their sewing and net-making. And
perhaps in building a canoe. So he sat down beside her and ate some of
the honey from the point of his knife.

"I never knew the world held anything as sweet as that," he
light-heartedly exclaimed as he once more dipped his knife-blade into
the syrupy mass.

"There's just one thing sweeter," said the girl as she lifted her
honey-stained mouth up to his face.

"What's that?" he asked, remembering at the moment what pools of soft
light her eyes were.

"It's love," said Claire, with her head against his shoulder.

His arm was about her slender waist. But he sat momentarily lost in his
own thoughts.

"Yes," he finally said. "We have to do without things for a long time
before we know their value."

When, before their fire that night, she asked Grimshaw what he had meant
by his reference to building a canoe, he explained that their one
remaining hope of heading back to the outer world lay in following their
river by boat or canoe until they came to some bigger stream that might
eventually lead them to Hudson's Bay. But that could not be done now, he
pointed out, until spring. It meant a voyage of hundreds of miles,
perhaps, down to tide-water, and probably another journey of equal
length before they could find a trading post or a white man's
settlement. For such a trip they would have to have adequate equipment,
a well-made kayak of water-proofed deer-skin if they could not find
birch big enough for canoe-bark, a shelter-tent, weapons that could be
relied on, clothing that would keep them covered, food enough to insure
them against starvation, no matter what the nature of the country
through which they might have to pass.

"That means, of course, that we must winter here," he told her.

She moved her head up and down comprehendingly, as she stared into the
fire.

"It will be a long winter," she said, more to herself than to him.

"But it doesn't mean we must den up like a bear," he explained. "We'll
be quite free to come and go, even freer than before the freeze-up. And
next week I intend to start work on our snow-shoes, so as to have them
ready when we need them."

"It ought to fill me with horror, I suppose," said the gray-clad figure
before the hearth-fire. "But it really fills me with a crazy sort of
happiness."

"Then you're not afraid?"

"The only thing I'm afraid of," she answered, "is that I may no longer
be with you." She crept closer to him, with a nestling movement, and
crouched close in between his leather-clad knees. "Do you ever stop to
think just what will happen to us when we go out, when we get back to
that other world?"

He stopped short at that question, with a faint narrowing of his
ruminative eyes.

"I've scarcely thought that far ahead," he acknowledged.

"Neither have I," she confessed. "I don't even think I want to. If I
woke up in the morning and saw a motor-launch at our landing with a
_metis_ guide to pilot us straight down to that settlement on Hudson's
Bay, wherever it may be, I really think I'd be sorry."

"But I wonder how long you would feel that way?" he ventured.

"As long as I knew you loved me," was her quiet reply. "Do you?"

He did not answer her in words. But he bent low above the upturned face
until his lips met hers, even as he murmured: "This is forbidden." He
held her body close to his, bathed in the glow of their hearth-fire. He
held her there until he saw the thick-fringed lids droop heavily over
her eyes. He could feel the small quiver that sped through her relaxed
body as her arms tightened about his neck.

He unlocked them, abruptly, and rose to his feet. She could hear his
quickened breathing as he crossed to the cabin door and flung it open.

She followed him to where he stood staring out into the night, perplexed
by the look of pain on his face.

"What is it?" she asked.

"We've--we've got to settle on some sort of armistice out here," he
said, without turning toward her as he spoke.

"But an armistice is something arranged between enemies, isn't it?" she
inquired. "You're not my enemy, are you?"

"I might be."

"How?"

"By forgetting what I can't afford to forget."

"Ah!" she said, her lips a little awry. "Then you're sorry you love
me?"

"I don't want to be sorry," he amended.

"I see," she murmured, standing meditative-eyed in the wavering
firelight. "You feel it wouldn't be fair and honest to either of us, to
reach out for happiness, in shipwreck like this?"

"It wouldn't be happiness," he corrected.

"Then you don't care for me?" she demanded. "You don't like to be near
me?"

"God knows I do!" he cried out with unlooked-for passion.

"But you don't do it willingly."

"I want to do it honestly."

"You mean you're my--my guardian, out here, and that it would be a sort
of breach of trust, when the two of us are so terribly alone, to take
what our hearts cry out for, to--"

"I can't even talk about it," he gasped, like a swimmer spent by
struggle.

She stood, for a full minute, in silence beside him.

"You are so different!" she said at last. "Dearest, you are _so_
different! But I think I understand. And I love you for being strong,
for being loyal, though I can't quite understand what you're being loyal
to."

"It's you who must be loyal," he said with his face turned toward the
night.

"To you?" she questioned, leaning closer to him.

"To life," he retorted. And still again she stood silent beside him.

"But if there's nothing left of life?" she finally questioned. "If we've
nothing left but ourselves, and this?"

"We can't be sure," he reminded her.

"Then when are we to know?"

"That's something I can't answer."

"But while we wait, even though we know we love each other, you don't
want me to make love to you?"

"I want it too much!"

She thrilled perversely at that cry which attested to her woman's power
over him.

"I wish I had your courage," she said out of the silence that had fallen
between them.

"You have something better," he asserted. "You have honesty."

"I don't understand that."

"You will, some day," he told her.

He reached out, to close the door. But she arrested him, with her hand
on his outstretched arm.

"Kiss me," she said with a sudden quiet ardor that startled him. "Kiss
me good night, beloved, before we go back."

He took her in his arms and held her head close in against his shoulder.
Then he stooped and kissed her on the forehead.

"Not that way," she complained almost drowsily, as she drew his bent
head lower down to her face.

"That's our good-by," she said as he staggered back and leaned against
the log-ends of the rough door-frame. "For after this, my beloved, I'll
keep on my side of the naked sword. I want you for myself, always,
forever. And something tells me the only way I can hold you is to leave
you free. So there'll be no more of this, no more, my dear, until you
and your loyal soul can come and ask for it!"

He noticed a trace of tears in her eyes as she turned back to the light.
But there was a smile about her slightly tremulous lips as she crossed
the rough floor to where the dressed deer-skin partitioned off her
rug-strewn little sleeping-room. "And to-morrow, O King," she said with
a faint tang of _diablerie_, "we'll draw a chalk-line down the middle of
this our humble abode, and on the one side shall repose my Sovereign and
on the other side shall rest thine hand-maiden!"

He saw her take her candle made of bear-fat and at the hearth fire light
the wick made of the pith of club-moss. He heard her quietly murmured
"Good night" as the deer-skin portière fell in place behind her vanished
figure. And as with troubled eyes he later banked the fire behind their
hearth-stones he heard the unsettling faint confusion of sounds which
told him she was making ready for bed.




CHAPTER XX


Claire, during the Indian summer days that followed, found a strange
harmony between that briefly ironic season of peace and her own
tranquillized spirit. It was a peace made poignant by its very
transciency, a momentary passionless lull in the season before stronger
forces marshalled and asserted themselves. But she did not stop to
question what was to follow. She surrendered to an immersing lethargy
that was something more than lethargy, shot through with rhapsodic
moments which came as unheralded as they were unwilled. She found
strange beauty in the world about her, a transporting glory in the dark
yellow of the poplar groves painted gold by the frost, in the more
brilliant yellow of the birches, in the crimson of the willows. She
seemed alone in a painted world of her own, a world aloof from all
others, a world mysteriously complete in itself. That sense of isolation
seemed heightened by the haze which covered their hills from horizon to
horizon. It was not strong enough to shut away the sun. But it muffled
midday in a ghostly mist of gold and draped their valleys with a
softening curtain that left them strange to familiar eyes.

Claire could not tell how much this phantasmal sense of beauty was
objective and how much it was subjective. But she nursed a suspicion
that it was due to some change within herself, some newer sense of
well-being which she could not quite account for. Of her bodily health
she had no doubts. The euphrasy of open air and constant physical
exertion crowned with contentment had apparently worked a miracle of its
own. She was hard-limbed and wiry, red-lipped and vigorous. She had in
some way lost her more girlish contours. Her body had broadened and
flattened and the line of her jaw had sharpened. She seemed larger, more
calesthenic, than of old. Her neck had grown more columnar, her bosom,
with its doubled reservoir of lung-power behind it, had deepened even as
it had flattened, giving to her torso an air of athletic hardness
accentuated still again by the sinewy slenderness of the buckskin-clad
leg and the Indian-like narrowness of the hips. But about her, for all
these de-sexing influences of attire and activity, was an inalienable
aura of womanhood, of womanhood ripe with feeling and touched with
wonder. Sometimes, when Grimshaw would come upon her in those
pearl-misted autumn mornings, posted on a stand and watching for deer
along one of their runways, the sense of her beauty would catch his
breath. At other times, as he watched her, gray-clad, in the gray light
of evening, quietly stalking the snow-shoe hare between lonely aisles of
bush-willow, standing poised and Artemis-like with her arrow-tip drawn
tensely back to her cheek-bone, the sense of her loveliness would break
over him like a wave, leaving him indeterminately chilled and wretched
and driven in on himself. He was happy enough as they worked side by
side, during the long autumn evenings, but he knew none of that
unquestioning well-being which in his camp-mate amounted almost to
intoxication.

He was under a strain which she could neither understand nor fathom.
More and more he found himself watching her, secretly watching her,
arrested by some momentary accident of light on her bared brown throat,
held tense by some unconsidered grace of pose as she stooped over a
stretching-frame, stabbed as sharply as with a knife-blade by the beauty
of her idly brooding eyes as she crooned above their camp-fire. During
the quietness of the night, when he heard her turn on her bunk-bed made
of wattled willow and poplar-poles, the sound of such movements filled
him with a trouble which he dared not articulate. And once, when he
unexpectedly invaded the cabin and saw her standing bare-shouldered
above a fawn-skin slip she was warming at the fire, he turned and fled
to the woods, walking on and on without sense of direction or
destination, walking on at a great pace to keep thought away, until
warned by the lameness of his foot that he was fatiguing himself for
nothing.

He grew thinner as the season advanced and a newer restlessness showed
in his movements. If his wilderness mate detected any changes in him she
did not comment upon them. She walked, to all intents and purposes,
satisfied with what life was giving her. If, after an exceptionally
happy day with Grimshaw in the open, she sat before the hearth-fire with
the air of a child hugging a secret to her breast, that secret, whatever
it may have been, remained her own. She was happy. And happiness, in her
straitened philosophy of life, stood the final gift of fearlessness. She
was not without the impression, in fact, that she had earned this
happiness, that she had achieved it through her own secret
readjustments. For, when all was said and done, everything about her was
not idyllic. She was still surrounded by countless anxieties and
cruelties. There was Fear always in the shadows, fanged and prowling
forms, skulking marauders, timber-wolves to distress her homeward steps
and the night-call of a stalking wild-cat to chill her blood. There were
owls to visit their snares and wolverines to rob their traps. There was
blood to be faced, elbow-deep, after a kill, with a carcass to cut up
and a hide to dress. And in her own more intimate life there were
deprivations too great to be entirely overlooked, roughnesses of raiment
and the incompetencies of household makeshifts and the absence of those
countless small luxuries with which life had once so prodigally
surrounded her. But she consoled herself with the thought that she still
had the essentials of life. Just as, during this wilderness exile, she
had become an enforced meat-eater, and in doing so had found her teeth
and tissue and sinew take on the strength of the carnivorous, so, in
another way, her spirit had adjusted itself to some sturdier diet and
had grown stronger through what it had been denied.

This, however, did not altogether account for the winey intoxication of
happiness that filled her body. There was nothing, she began to feel,
that could account for it. So she accepted it, as one accepts good
weather. She accepted it, without more self-probings, as a part of the
ghostly splendor of the season. It could not last, perhaps. But while it
lasted it was wonderful to behold. It had come on her, whatever it was,
as quietly and as unexpectedly as a deer breaking cover, not with a
crushing and crashing burst of speed, but wondering-eyed through gently
parting greenery, incredibly silent, incredibly gentle, so that she had
not the will to raise a hand against an intruder so fragile. Sometimes,
it is true, the ghostly shadow of a ghostly fear troubled her. As the
days shortened and the season advanced the polar displays of the
Northern Lights increased in volume and vividness, often touching the
wondering girl into an awe which stood a framework for that silent inner
fear of hers. One night, as she stood watching the pomp and majesty of
the intermingling colors along the northern horizon, counter-marching
pennons and banners of gold and rose and orange and opal paling down to
glacial green, she called Grimshaw to her side to see the Lights.

"They rather frighten me," she acknowledged as she linked her fingers
over his arm. He sighed deeply.

"They are very beautiful," he finally admitted.

"But why should they make me feel so small and lonesome?" she asked of
the man at her side.

"Because we _are_ small and lonesome," he averred, with his gaze not on
the wavering Lights but on the questioning limpid pools of her upturned
eyes.

"Yes," she abstractedly agreed, after a silence, "we _are_ terribly
alone, aren't we?"

"A thousand miles of emptiness, between them and us," he said in little
more than a whisper. "Cold and silence, right to the Pole, and just you
and I, alone, in this pitiful little circle of warmth!"

He stood staring out, unconscious of her quiet movement of withdrawal
and the second huddling movement, almost a shiver, that passed through
her body.

"Let's shut it out!" she cried in a slightly strangled voice as she drew
Grimshaw in under the lintel and swung the rough-timbered door back
against the frame. But neither of them spoke. Her hand still rested on
his worn buckskin sleeve, where it slipped down inch by inch until her
fingers were clamped within the grasp of his great hand. She looked up,
startled, at a half-articulate cry in his throat, a cry strangely
touched with want, with protest, with despair. He caught her up, the
next moment, with a savagery that was as sudden as it was unexpected,
and half twisted and half flung her about until her body was pressed
against the rough edge of their lodge-table. There the huge leather-clad
arms wrapped themselves about her, crushing her close to him, pinioning
her panting breast against his own panting breast while he kissed her
ruthlessly, abandonedly, on her relaxed and unresponding lips. He even
lifted her from her feet, holding her without effort as he buried his
face in the soft hollow of her throat.

That movement, so oddly sustained, puzzled her beyond words, until, with
the passing moments, she found her shoulder wet with his tears and felt
faint convulsive movements of his body which told her he was sobbing
there.

Then slowly, with her hands in his hair, she lifted his shamed head up
to the light. She held his face to the wavering firelight, tenderly,
between her two hands, staring long and pityingly into the eyes made
haggard by remorse.

It had come and gone, a storm out of the silence. Slowly his arms
relaxed and fell to his sides.

"You'll hate me for this!" he gasped. "You hate me now."

"No, no," she said in a voice so small it seemed almost a dove-coo. "I
don't hate you. I couldn't do that. But I think I'm beginning to
understand you."

He winced perceptibly before a gesture from her that had much of the
maternal in it.

"But I don't even understand myself," he protested, puzzled by the quiet
radiance of her face.

"I know you don't. And that's why you make it so hard for yourself.
You're still afraid of life, just as I am, but in such an entirely
different way. It's love that you're afraid of, this thing that can
spring on you out of the dark, and take you by the throat. And it does
that because you're denying it its right to live."

"But it has no right to live," cried the man beside her.

"Well, it lives, at any rate. And the more we come to know the cold and
desolation, out here, the more we'll hunger for its warmth, for that
little fire to stoop over when we've so terribly little left. But what
I'm afraid of, dearest, is something so different. I'm afraid of life
slipping away from us, of slowly growing meaningless. I'm afraid of
being cramped and cooped up by a lot of precautions and timidities and
taboos that are supposed to keep evil away but only succeed in keeping
life itself away. For it's only once, after all, we can live--and
there's so much to lose, when we die. And it's only once that love comes
to life, real love, the love that makes everything else like straws on
the wind."

He made a gesture of helplessness, in no way quietened by these words so
quietly spoken.

"I don't think you're helping me very much," he cried with a note of
bitterness in his voice.

"I don't think I can help you. And I don't think I want to. For when we
pass the frontiers of pain we ought to step into the country of peace."

"What do you mean by that?" he asked.

She sat silent for several minutes.

"You once said that out here we could never be far wrong when we
followed the Indian. And there are times when I feel we're trying to be
too civilized. We still keep those old chains of social habit and tribe
fetich dragging at our heels. We're trying to be so unnecessarily
respectable. We're still thinking in the foolish old forms that have
nothing whatever to do with the way we're living. We're--"

"You're not arguing for mating as an Indian would mate?" demanded
Grimshaw.

"How would an Indian mate?" she asked, untroubled by the harshness of
his voice.

"That would vary with the various tribes," was the other's answer, after
a moment of thought. "There would be isolation and ritual bathing. A
flour cake would be baked and divided between the bride and groom. Or
two arrows, broken for the purpose, might be spliced together. That, of
course, is to signify the new union. Then the marriage would be publicly
proclaimed. Sometimes, in fact, it's done in writing. I've even seen a
buck and squaw tattooed, announcing the one to be the mate of the
other."

"Oh, I like that!" cried the brooding-eyed woman beside the hearth-fire.
"You could tattoo on my shoulder, in mulberry-colored letters, 'I am the
wife of Shomer Grimshaw.' And somewhere on you, where it could never,
never be changed, would have to be the words: 'I am the husband of
Claire Endicott.' That would make it seem so final and authentic."

"Authentic," he contended, "only to ourselves."

"But even though we had to consider other people, people who read their
morning paper and pay taxes, wouldn't a contract like that be really
legal? Wouldn't that make us belong to each other, for ever and ever?
Isn't that just about what our American common-law marriages are?"

"I am not an American," he reminded her.

"Then what is the law in your country?" she asked.

He explained, that in so far as he understood it, English law accepted
as valid a foreign marriage duly solemnized according to the _lex loci_,
provided it resulted in a monogamous union.

"You wouldn't want more than _me_, would you?" she startled him by
inquiring.

"I think I'd always ask for beauty and dignity, in a rite like that,"
was his slowly enunciated reply.

"But isn't the beauty and dignity put there by the people who take part
in the rite?" she quietly inquired. "And think of the weddings we've
seen back in our world--could anything be more barbaric and foolish and
meaningless?"

"They've endured, I suppose, because they serve a purpose of their own."

"But with us--what purpose could they serve?"

"None whatever," he said after another of his meditative silences.

"Then that's the way I think we ought to be married," she announced. And
it was only the silence, prolonging itself between them, that finally
caused her to look up.

"I was wondering if that's the way your father would prefer to see us
married," he said as his glance met hers. And it was her turn to sit
silent.

"Do you love me?" she asked, with her quiet eyes once more studying his
face.

"More than life itself!"

She smiled, in spite of herself, at the solemnity of his words. "But
there's something you're vaguely afraid of?" she prompted.

"I want to protect you," he conceded.

"From what?"

"From a world that would never understand, that would never be
charitable."

"Why are you so afraid of that world?"

"My past has taught me to be afraid of it."

"Ah, your past!" she said as she watched him add fresh wood to their
fire. "You have told me so little about that."

"It doesn't seem to count, out here."

"But if we're to live and die here, alone--" she began, and broke off
with one of her uninterpretable small gestures.

"That's the one thing we can't be certain of."

"But if in some way we broke through to our old world, you wouldn't feel
the same toward me? You wouldn't care for me as you say you do?"

"I'd rather be here, with you, than back in that world without you."

She turned on him with an upward movement of the hands that translated
itself into a gesture of endearment.

"I wonder," she said in a dreamy intonation as she faced the rising
hearth-flames, "how I'm ever to repay you for what you've done for me?
For what you saved me from? For all the loyalty and service and
tenderness you've given me? For what you lost and suffered through my
foolishness?"

"You have repaid me!"

"In what way?"

"By just being _You_--by just being here."

She turned on him, more impulsively this time, and drew his face down to
hers, pressing it to her shoulder with a convulsive little gasp of
happiness that both quickened his pulse and brought a look of trouble to
his eyes. Then she drew slowly back from him, as though the specter of
something unforeseen had also crept in between her and her happiness.

"You speak of protecting me from the world," she broke the silence by
saying, "but do you realize how it's already too late for that? My good
name's gone, forever. We've stood naked in this wilderness, side by
side. We've lived here together, alone. We've lived under the same roof
and slept side by side at night. And what will the world you're so
afraid of say to _that_?"

"We can face that when it comes," he slowly asserted. "And it will be
easier to face if we know that our hands and hearts are clean."

She sat in silence, thinking this over.

"You are right," she finally acknowledged, without turning her face from
the fire. "You are right, only I need your strength to make me see it. A
woman, in some way, is so different. She seems to live so much more in
her feelings. And sometimes, at night, I feel that terrible sense of
isolation, of being unutterably alone in an unutterably lonely silence.
I feel it so keenly that it seems to shut off my breath and smother me.
Yet I don't think I'd ever have that, if I felt your arm about me, just
a warm, sustaining, human arm to remind me there was something
breathing, something alive and conscious, between me and the wilderness.
I've--"

"Don't!" interrupted the man beside her, with what was almost a gasp of
pain.

"But it's true. And we shouldn't be afraid of the truth. One night,
after lying awake for what seemed an eternity, I felt that I couldn't
stand it any longer. It seemed crushing me, the silence and everything.
I got up and groped my way toward your bunk. I was going to wake you up
and tell you I was cold and frightened. I didn't care any more. I
suppose I was hysterical. I _must_ have been that way. For when I lifted
the elk-skin to step into your little sleeping-room, I thought I saw my
mother there, barring the way. My poor mother, all in white. And she's
been dead for years!"

There was a dewing of moisture on Grimshaw's dark brow as he rose to his
feet. He walked to the cabin door, wheeled slowly about, and returned to
the fire. There he stood with his unfocussed eyes staring into space.

"It was the same thing," he finally admitted, "that happened to me. It
was one night, weeks ago, after--after something had occurred. I
couldn't sleep. But I could hear you breathing. I'd a longing to be
nearer you, to see you, to touch you. I fought it, for an hour. But in
the end it conquered me. It seemed like a chain, dragging me, that power
that drew me toward your sleeping-place. And when I got to the entrance
there was the same figure, a white arm stretched out across the elk-skin
curtain, holding it in place."

He stared down at the intent dark face looking up into his. He could see
a little of the color ebb away from it.

"What does it mean?" she asked, a quaver in her voice, as her hand
sought his.

"It means," he said with an odd gesture of humility as he pressed her
hand against his lips, "that life is deeper than our own feelings."

She stood up beside him, looking about with widened eyes, like a child
uncertain of its surroundings. Then she shrank in closer to him,
clinging to him, as though in need of the sustaining thought of his
strength.

Unwilled, his arms closed about her and she lay in his ample clasp,
quieted and consoled. She lay there until she heard a sudden sound out
of the night, high above them. It reminded her startlingly of Milt
Bisnett's motor-horn, in the old days, sounding from the east drive of
Hillcrest.

"What's that?" she asked as the sound was repeated, again and again. And
Grimshaw was able to smile down at the startled wonder in her eyes.

"Those are the wild geese, going south," he told her.




CHAPTER XXI


Claire, when she awakened the next morning, was oppressed by the
unnatural quietness of the cabin. After lying for several minutes
without hearing any sound from her camp-mate she threw her loose _parka_
of deer-skin and swan's feathers over her shoulders and stepped out of
her fur-hung _boudoir_.

The fire, she found, had not been made. The customary pottery-pail of
water had not been carried in from the spring. Grimshaw's hide-curtain,
usually looped back to air his sleeping-quarters, hung disconcertingly
in place.

Claire listened at this curtain for several minutes. Then, hearing
nothing from within, she called aloud. When she got no answer to that
call she pushed the curtain aside. Grimshaw, she saw, was not there. And
his bunk had not been slept in.

A tremor of alarm sped through her, at this discovery, but she tried to
quiet her mounting fear with the claim that he had heard an early
moose-call and had hurried out without waking her. The discovery that
his bow and quiver, together with his spear and his newly-finished
moose-horn, were not in the cabin seemed a confirmation of her claim.
But she was troubled in spirit as she uncovered a bed of coals on the
hearth, added kindling, and fed the widening blaze with sticks of
driftwood. Then, after putting water on to boil, she took her clothing
from its wooden pegs, fresh rabbit-skin leggings and re-soled moccasins,
her tooth-brush of shredded quills set in a fawn-rib handle, her
precious small cake of home-made soap, and her absorbent big bath-towel
of sun-bleached moose-hide. With these over her arm she followed the
firm-trodden small path to her bathing-pool, where with her bare foot
she broke the crust of ice about its edge. Then she slipped out of her
_parka_ and night-dress of fawn-skin fringed at the throat, tossed them
on the rock beside her, and with a deep intake of breath plunged into
the limpid water, along the surface of which little needles of ice still
floated. She swam noisily and briefly, making little dog-like noises as
she threshed the water that drove the color from her skin. Then she
clambered out, caught up the soap, lathered her hard-muscled young body,
and once more plunged into the pool. She made no sound this time, beyond
the quick swish of her movements as she ducked and emerged, but her jaw
was set tight as she caught up the rough towel and rubbed her tingling
flesh dry. It was a rose-pink by the time she had finished, glowing
above the fawn-skin chemise and the moose-hide hunting-shirt which she
drew over her head. By the time she was dressed even her finger-tips
were tingling and the thought of broiled elk steak with hot Labrador tea
and cakes made of wild-rice meal was far from repugnant to her.

But her momentary elation vanished as she hurried back toward the cabin.
Her mate, she remembered, was not there. And life, without that mate, no
longer had much meaning.

Then, while she was still struggling to buoy up her spirits with
carefully devised reasons for his absence, she caught sight of him
approaching along the upper trail. Across his back he carried the body
of a cub-bear, apparently captured in one of the trap-line snares. She
called to him, with a sudden lightening of the heart that made her voice
bird-like in its reediness. But instead of answering her he turned and
hung his bear carcass at one end of their _starchigan_. She saw then,
for the first time, the abject weariness of his face. It carried the
look of a man who had been beaten, who had fought hard and been worsted.

"Where have you been?" she demanded, stopping short before the
half-averted haggardness of his eyes.

"Walking," he said, without meeting her gaze.

"All night?" she queried.

"I couldn't sleep," he acknowledged almost bruskly.

"Why not?"

"I think you know why," was his slightly retarded answer.

"But I don't," she protested.

"There were too many things said here last night," he said, standing
back from her.

"What kind of things?"

"Inflammatory things."

"I don't understand."

"There are certain things you can never let loose and hope to kennel up
again. _I'm only human._"

She stood startled by the protest in his cry.

"But we're all the better for talking those things out," she claimed
with her wounding wide gaze on his troubled face. "It's through such
talks as that we come to understanding, to peace."

"It brought no peace to me!"

"But you blame me for that?"

"I blame myself."

She moved toward him, with her palms upward and her fingers outspread,
in a singularly eloquent gesture of surrender. But she stopped short at
the solemnity of his face.

"Then what am I to do?" she asked. And her tone of utter humility
brought his haggard eyes to hers.

"I know now that you were right and I was wrong. I've been trying to do
the impossible. I've been trying to fight nature. And nature is stronger
than I am."

"What do you mean by that?" she asked, her color waning a trifle.

"I mean that destiny or accident or whatever you want to call it has
already mated us, has flung us man and woman together, and there's no
use our trying to fight it. I can't be near you, now, without knowing
it. I can't sleep under the same roof with you without--without this new
torture nearly driving me mad. And we can't go away from each other.
We're tied together here. We're tied together as closely as though we
were handcuffed wrist to wrist."

"Would you want to go away?" she asked, her eyes wide with wonder.

"I've been thinking about that," he confessed, "but it leads to nothing.
No, I don't want to go away. God knows, I want to be near you. But I
want it made honest and aboveboard, in some way. I want it as open and
legalized as it can be made. So that's why I say you're right when you
claim we should follow the Indian in such things.... We must have a
ceremony.... I think it ought to be as beautiful and as dignified as
we are able to make it."

They stood face to face, their attitude oddly suggestive of hostility.

"But how do you think I could face such a ceremony," she finally asked,
"knowing that you were entering it under protest?"

"No," he cried out with a gesture of helplessness, "no longer under
protest!"

"But without one touch of the happiness that could make such things
holy," she amended.

He stood silent before that charge. The pathos of his face moved her to
pity. She crept toward him, with a throaty little cry, and leaned weakly
against his shoulder. He was trembling, she noticed, as he held her body
close to his. But he did not stoop to her tear-stained face.

"I want to go away, for a day," he told her. "I want to go away and
think things out. I'll try to decide what form the ceremony ought to
take. At any rate I intend to cut white birchbark and prepare a
document, to post a public announcement, of what we are doing. Are you
willing to see that done?"

"Only if you are willing," she said, smiling for the first time at the
severity of his face. But her smile was both brief and wintry.

"And it will be for life, whatever happens?" he demanded.

"It will be for life," she repeated.

He stood silent for a moment or two.

"I'd like to be able to remember that we did this soberly and quietly
and with dignity. For, after all, we're more than animals. We're even
more than the Indians we're pretending to be. That's one reason why I'd
like to be alone to-day. I want to get the whole thing readjusted in my
own mind. I want to come back to you with a clean heart, in some way.
Does--does this sound strange to you?"

"I think I understand," was her quiet response.

"Then I'm going to leave you," he proclaimed as his arms dropped away
from her.

"Would you mind kissing me good-by?" she asked quite humbly.

"I'd rather not," he found the courage to tell her.

"Of course," she concurred, observing that his hand trembled as he
turned away. She still stood there as he moved about with a coerced
matter-of-factness, gathering up what he might need out on the trail.
"You'll be careful, this last day?" she asked, as her eyes followed his
leather-clad figure to the doorway.

"Careful?" he asked, not catching her meaning.

"Of yourself," she explained. "For after this, you know, we don't
altogether belong to ourselves."

He swallowed hard, half-way through the door, at the wistfulness of her
voice. He seemed, in fact, on the point of turning back. But that
impulse he caught and throttled before it could possess him.

"And there's one other thing," she added, now in complete control of her
voice. "I'd like you to do what you spoke of last night. Somewhere on my
body I'd like you to tattoo a sentence, a sentence that will never come
out, saying that I belong to you."

He did not speak as he turned away. But he made a gesture which she
accepted as one of assent.

For a long time she stood leaning against the door-lintel, watching him
as he strode along the twisted trail that followed the river-bank. She
saw him stop at the crest of the hill and look back toward the cabin.
The clear morning light picked him out with the distinctness of a
silhouette, the only point of life in that undulating wilderness of rock
and spruce and birch-grove. It magnified his dimensions so that, with
the pale green light behind him, he looked momentarily giant-like.

She waved to him, but he apparently did not see the movement.

"_Beloved!_" she said aloud, with her hand on her heart.




CHAPTER XXII


Claire, having set her house in order, mechanically turned to the
_starchigan_ where Grimshaw's bear-cub hung. She whetted her knife, made
a quick cut about the vent so that the rectal tract was entirely freed,
and made another cut along the plump belly well ahead of the hind legs,
dexterously opening the body only to the edge of the ribs. As her mate,
in bleeding the animal, had already severed the wind-pipe, the viscera,
freed at each end, came away easily enough, after a little cutting and
tugging at the heart and liver and lights. It bloodied her bared brown
arm to the elbow but there was neither hesitation in her movements nor
repugnance on her face as she dressed and skinned the carcass and flung
the entrails into the river-current. Work such as that was now hers to
do and she did it without thought. Her brave had made a kill, and she,
his squaw, had her housewifely part to play in this constant battle for
supplies.

Yet she stopped short, as she thought over that strange division of
labor, and instead of proceeding to scrape the moist bear-skin with her
mack-chisel, she sat back on her heels staring up at the robin-egg blue
of the sky above her. She sat there so long that the Canada jays came
closer and closer about her, feeding almost at her feet. Their raucous
calls annoyed her and she flung pebbles at them. When she had driven
them away she sat equally oppressed by the quietness of the camp. She
was restless and perplexed by feelings which she could not
satisfactorily coordinate. So, with a gesture of finality, she decided
to strike out into the open where she could best commune with her own
soul. Life, that day, was pyramiding up into one of its Great Divides.
And she wanted to think things over.

She promptly stowed away her hide and bear-meat, washed at the
river-edge, and proceeded to dress for the trail. She looped her bow and
quiver over her shoulder, belted on her new fire-bag and knife, and in
the game-pocket of her hunting-blouse stowed away food for a midday
meal. She also carried a sleeveless over-jacket of lynx-skin rolled up
and tied loosely about her waist, for the air, with all its windless
quiet, held a sword-blade of cold muffled in its misted velvet, with a
promise of increasing frost before night.

Yet when she sought the open, oddly enough, she turned in a direction
opposite to that taken by the man who had gone forth to reorganize his
own life to its newer vistas. And as she beat her meditative way up the
broken river-valley toward that half-wooded promontory which they had
once christened Lookout Point she was not entirely unconscious of the
fact that she was creeping a little closer toward the world that had
rejected her. She was shut out from that world as definitely as though
the last bridge had been burned between her new life and her old. And
from that day forward she was acknowledging the breach as final. She was
a wilderness woman now, with nothing to hope for from that world that
was receding into the mists of memory.

She turned from Lookout Point and followed a winding game-trail that
circled the inner hills and led into a shallow valley carpeted with
moss. This moss was dry and soft. Claire, as she invaded it, found that
she sank almost to her knees in its mattressing layers of timeless
growth. The frosts had long since turned its greenish surface to a warm
brown, as inviting as a lion's skin spread in the sun. She flung herself
down on it, staring idly up at the sky which had paled from a robin's
egg blue to a misted turquoise. Then she studied the small black spruce
that framed her tawny amphitheater of silence, the congress of
lonely-looking sentinels, each as straight as a ruled line, each tufted
with its witch-broom top that gave a distinctive air to such northern
landscape. From far away, across the black-fringed hills to the
northeast, there came to her the call of a moose, infinitely lonely,
infinitely mournful. It was a bull, she knew, calling for its mate. She
was idly remarking how the passing of this sound seemed to accentuate
the silence which came after it when she became thinly conscious of
still another sound growing out of the silence. It was a faint drone
like that of a summer bee heard through an open window, a scarcely
audible drone that increased oddly in volume as she listened. But it
seemed to come from nowhere about her. She let her inquiring gaze rove
for a moment about the windless air. Then she turned partly on her side,
her face puckered with perplexity as she stared thoughtfully down into
the bedded moss about her. For the drone, by this time, had taken on a
vague rhythm, a pulsing rise and fall of sound shot through with a
second sharper rhythm that made it almost a throb. Then the throb grew
stronger than the sustained drone, dominating it, drowning it out with a
mounting noise that became in turn almost a rising and subsiding
clatter.

The listening woman sat up, her lips falling slightly apart. She had
heard sounds like that before. She had heard them above Hillcrest on
summer nights as the mail-planes arrowed the darkness high above the
Jersey hills, heading for Washington. She had heard them on lazy
afternoons above the shouts of the polo players as Gibbie Hauser stunted
in his De Haviland high over the Country Club. And she had heard them
through happy Long Island twilights above the Hempstead Aviation Fields,
as some homing flier caught up the mooring-lights and maneuvered for a
landing.

They were the sounds that an air-ship made, the incredible, the
unbelievable, sounds out of another world.

It was a mistake, an illusion of loneliness, she told herself as her
heart stopped and skipped a beat and raced on again. It was a dream born
of too much brooding over the things that had been taken away from her,
an echo of older days to scatter her carefully built-up card-house of
contentment.

But, a moment later, she saw the plane itself. It was drifting toward
her, flying low, apparently following the valley of the river. Its
wings, by some accident of light, were momentarily cut off from her
vision, but distinctly now she could see the gondola which distinguished
it as a seaplane, the floating black body that looked like a shortened
canoe with upturned bow and stem. She saw it veer and turn in the misted
light. And as it came closer the noise it made increased in volume and
grew higher in note.

It floated gracefully forward, only a few hundred feet above the
whitewatering channel of the lower gorge leading out of Malign Canyon.
She realized, as it rode down on her, that it was swimming into hailing
distance of where she lay. And she gathered her breath to shout to it,
to make signs that might be seen from it, to arrest its flight while she
still had the chance.

And then a strange thing happened.

She tried to call out, but her breath came only in short gasps of
excitement. She struggled to rise to her feet, but a palsy of
helplessness took possession of her. Her arms shook with an ague like
that of the "buck-fever" of green hunters. Her muscles refused to obey
her over-tensioned mind. Even as she thought of her fire-bag, and knew
that a smoke-signal would be easily recognized by the flier above her,
she found her inert fingers unable to take the flake of pyrites from her
belt or her knife from its holder.

She saw the advancing plane loom over her, wide-winged and black. She
saw it pass with a slight _diminuendo_ in the sound of its racing
propeller. She saw it, as it receded, once more turn into a floating
black gondola with blunted ends. And she fell forward on her face,
beating the muskeg-moss with her hands, in a child-like hate of her own
helplessness. Odd tremors still tingled through her body. But she grew
quieter as she lay there. There was a lump in her throat, however, as
she sat up and stared into the empty sky.

"That was an air-ship," she said aloud. "An air-ship, from beyond the
Barrier!"

And she had been helpless to signal it. She had let it pass on into
those lonely hills without a sign.

But hope revived in her as she thought of Shomer Grimshaw. He was
somewhere in the midst of those hills. He was a man of will and brawn, a
man of resource. And he would never lie helpless while those careless
traffickers from another world flew over his head.

The memory of this quieted her, strengthened her. Yet when she tried to
rise to her feet she found that she could do so only with the greatest
difficulty. She had once prided herself on her poise, on her parade of
indifference to things about her. Yet here she was with still tremulous
fingers, with knees that were none too steady as she picked her way
along the uneven path. Nothing in life, she had imagined, could upset
her as that aerial visitor had upset her. It had come and gone
tranquilly enough, leaving her little tangle of forest pathways
untouched. Yet it had threshed its way through her newly organized world
like a winged giant in a rage of destruction. It had reopened wounds she
had thought healed. It had made a bonfire of all her older achieved
contentment of spirit. It had blown out the pitiful small flame of her
resignation.

She sat for a long time on the topmost granite shelf of Lookout Point.
She sat there scanning the opal green horizon beyond the lower river,
hoping that she might yet see the slow-tilting black planes return along
their course. She went so far as to gather moss and twigs and wood for a
fire, to make a smoke signal when the time came. She even unrolled her
lynx coat and lashed it flag-like to an alder-shaft, to wave under the
wings that might again hover over her.

But she saw no sign of life above the pointed black fringe of the
spruce-tiers. The North into which she looked with soliloquizing sad
eyes seemed very still, very still and dark and full of desolation.

She must go back, she realized as she saw the lengthening shadows about
her. She must go back to Camp Reliance. But she could no longer think of
it as home. It was nothing more, now, than a bivouac in the night, with
a touch of the abandoned already about it. It had been a momentary
shelter between the knees of forgetfulness. It was merely a lonely
outpost on the fringe of an even lonelier wilderness. It was a cell, a
cell of wooden logs where two lost wanderers had tried to live and tell
themselves that they were satisfied with life.

Then she stopped short as she thought of Grimshaw. There was a chance,
she remembered, that he might not have seen that low-flying plane. And
if not, she would never tell him. She would spare him the pain of that
knowledge. Some time before nightfall he would come back, solemn-eyed
and foot-weary. He would come back to the house she had set in order, to
the fire that blazed warm on their hearth, to the roast of bear-meat
that would stand hot on their crockery platter. He would come back,
knowing she awaited him to make his life complete in the only way in
which it could now be made complete.

And as she thought of that return a small warmth came to life at the
core of her being. It grew bigger, like one of her own hearth-fires,
until the chill of the northern air no longer depressed her. She at
least owed him that much. It was for her, after all, that he had given
up everything, had lost everything. And if into what remained of his
life she could bring any shadow of happiness she would fight with all
her strength to make him forget what she had done to him. He was her
mate, her man. And she was his woman.




CHAPTER XXIII


Robert Endicott, who had once prided himself on being impervious to
strain, found himself singularly unsettled as he saw his three months of
effort about to culminate in action. This was a new sort of battle he
was fighting, demanding weapons with which he was none too familiar. It
was a battle in which he felt acutely alone. And now that it was
approaching its end, and destiny was about to say whether it should be a
winning or a losing battle, he vaguely resented that conspiracy of
forbearance with which his frenzied last weeks had been condoned by
those about him.

Yet much of his impatience vanished as he watched the careless-eyed
young pilot climb into his seat and snap on his belt and pull the heavy
goggles down from his forehead. He knew a sense of finality as he felt
the helmeted youth throw the breath of life into his engine, "give her
the gun," as that youth flippantly expressed it. It seemed like sudden
emergence from dull fogs of uncertainty as he heard the roar of the
propeller and caught the resultant blast of cold air against his face.
There seemed something purposeful in the very vibration of the cowling
to which he clung with his two gauntleted hands as the seaplane
schoonered along the surface of Barrier Lake. It schoonered much farther
than he had expected, taking off with a tardiness for which he was
inclined to blame young Platner. For Endicott had no love for Platner
just as Platner obviously had no great admiration for the impatient old
autocrat who had been the cause of having him switched from his pleasant
forest-ranging routes to go body-hunting over the Land of Little Sticks.
To Platner, he was an absurd old bird with more money than brains. And
Platner, to Endicott, was a sulky young cub with the soul of a
taxi-driver and the manners of a bohunk.

But Endicott forgot about Platner as the plane rose in an appeasingly
long and graceful sweep, tilting indolently as it ascended and turned
and took the air. He knew, as he saw the amber-blue surface of Barrier
Lake fall away from them, that his hour had come.

It startled him, as they continued to climb, to see the Barrier, that
had loomed so forbidding from the camp landing, dwarf down into
flat-shadowed insignificance. He knew, as they straightened out and
swung into line with Malign Canyon, that they were crossing what was
most definitely a frontier. But there seemed nothing definite left to
mark that frontier. It was another world, from where that foaming small
ribbon of whitewater began, but there was little to mark it off from the
less mysterious world behind them. It seemed a world over which the
roller of God had passed, flattening it out, a dun world mottled with
darker patches of spruce-lands, threaded with uncertain small streams,
eyeletted with pools, studded here and there with the soft blue of some
larger lake. He could see crowns of mist above the rougher steps of the
cataract and the shadowing rock that in places made the canyon a streak
of black.

"Lower--go lower!" he shouted to the pilot.

He thought, at first, that Platner had not heard him. But as he repeated
that shout he saw the sullen side-shake of the pilot's helmeted head.

"I say go lower!" repeated Endicott at the top of his voice.

Sulkily, wilfully, Platner let the plane dip until the earth seemed to
leap up at Endicott's staring eyes. Then they suddenly flattened out
above a fan-shaped network of rapid-shallows that looked like runnels of
whipped cream, flattened out and rose again before the rocky shoulder of
the world could fling its weight against their flimsy gondola. But they
advanced, this time, at a considerably lower level. The river, Endicott
noticed, looked bigger. He could see the spray-cloud, gilded with
sunlight, above the last plunge of the rapids. He could see the long
tangle of driftwood that fringed the black-water pool at its base. And
he saw something else.

He saw something which brought his heart up in his mouth and his
gauntleted fist thumping against the leather-covered ribs of the pilot
bent forward with his hand clutching the control-stick.

"Land!" shouted Endicott at the top of his lungs. "Land quick as you
can!"

If Platner heard, he paid no heed. The older man, bent over the cowling,
stared down at an oblong of roof-thatch between a rock-wall and a slope
of sand that ran to the water's edge. Beside the pallid rectangle of
thatch stood a tiny structure of poles, poles too regularly placed to be
there by accident. And between the roof-thatch and the pole-structure
something moved and fluttered, as though swung from an invisible line.

"O God!" said Endicott, swallowing hard. "O God!" he repeated,
foolishly, again and again. Surely he was not mistaken. The hand of man
had made its mark on that valley. There was life there. And where there
was life there was a promise of hope.

"Land--land somewhere quick!" repeated the frantic man in the enmuffling
coonskin coat. And the phlegmatic Platner, with his leathered arm,
pointed toward the distant steel-blue surface of a lake, a lake broad
enough to take care of his plane. Already they were a good two miles
past the black-water pool, and the lake, Endicott estimated, was another
two miles ahead of them. That meant at least four miles away. But it was
the best they could do.

The plane took the water like a mallard heeling into its pond, with the
wind dying out against the struts. They drifted into the shallows.

"Your feet'll give out, if they get wet," warned the placid-eyed Platner
as he poled closer in to the bank. "What'd you think you saw back
there?"

"I saw a shack," cried Endicott as he scrambled ashore, wondering why
his heart should be pounding so crazily.

"And what're you going to do about it?" demanded his pilot.

"I'm going back to it," asserted the older man.

"And get lost before sun-down," countered the younger.

"You leave that to me," said the other, with spirit. "I'm no fool. I'm
going to strike straight north to the river, and then up the river the
way we came. You stick to this plane. You've got your outfit and food
enough for two days."

"And how long am I to wait here?"

"Until I get back. That may be to-night, and it may be to-morrow. I'll
blaze a trail as I go, and give you three signal shots from my
automatic when I hit the river. All you've got to do is take care of
yourself and this plane. And don't worry about me, young man. I've
traveled the north woods before you were born."

Endicott, as he headed for the river, had to warn himself to be calm. He
was not so young as he once was. The hard going had a tendency to take
his breath away and leave a wobble in his knees as he fought for an
opening through spruce and birch and alder thicket. It was farther to
the river than he had imagined. He thought, for a time, that he was off
the track, but a glance at his pocket-compass put an end to his doubts.
As fatigue took the place of elation he even found himself questioning
his earlier impressions. Perhaps, after all, Platner was right and the
thing that had looked so like a lodge-pole _starchigan_ was nothing more
than a tumble of blow-downs carried over the cliff-edge in a snow-slide.
He had made the wish father to the thought, likely as not, and
translated a drift of bulrushes into a cabin-roof. He had built too much
on the flimsiest of hopes. They had told him, from the beginning, that
he was bull-headed in this matter. And he was still insisting on the
incredible.

Yet he stopped short as he caught the flash of the river through a
downward sloping grove of spruce, for there, at his feet, where a
trodden game-trail crossed his path, stood a cluster of three stones.
And those stones, a small one placed on a larger one and another small
one on the left as he faced it, had not come there by accident. They
were the woodsman's signal of "Turn to the left here." And on a
tree-trunk, a moment later, he caught sight of three blazes, one above
the other, with a "slice" to the right. That, he remembered, was forest
language for "A trap to the right."

There was no longer any doubt in his mind. He was not alone in those
woods. A human being had been trafficking up and down those lonely
trails. He could see knife-cuts on a white-birch where the bark had been
taken away. He could see ax-marks on a sapling where a shaft had been
cut. He could even see moccasin-prints on the undulating worn pathway
that more and more definitely followed the line of the river.

"God help us!" he said aloud as he caught sight of a fish-trap in the
water not thirty paces from where he stood. But he went on again, no
longer conscious of fatigue. He noticed that the trail became more
firmly trodden, that the signs of human activity became more numerous.
His heart sank, for a moment, when he picked up the whittled shaft of a
broken arrow. That made him think of Indians. Perhaps, after all, it was
nothing more than a renegade redman hiding out in this No-Man's Land of
sinister legend. But Endicott thrust the arrow-shaft into the pocket of
his worn coonskin coat, which he unbuttoned as he became overheated with
walking. He was thirsty, he remembered, and he decided to go down to the
river to drink.

But he did not drink. For as he forged ahead, looking for a path to the
water, he came in sight of a curving slope of sand. And against the
rock-wall at the back of this he saw a cabin built of logs, a cabin with
a squat chimney abutted by a store-room of stone, with a _starchigan_
and a bark-covered forge in front of it. And stretched between the
cabin-corner and the _starchigan_ was a line of braided rawhide from
which two towels of deer-skin swung.

Endicott shouted aloud as he advanced toward the cabin. But no answering
voice came to him. So he sat down on a neat pile of fire-wood, beside
what had every appearance of a charcoal pit in the sand, muttering over
and over again: "God help us!"

Then, when his strength came back to him, he advanced studious-eyed to
the cabin door, which he pushed open. He called again as he did so. But
the cabin, he saw, was empty.

He stood for a long time in that narrow doorway, his face furrowed with
thought as he studied the place, wall by wall and point by point. It
was not the lodge of an Indian. It was a white man's home. It had all
the ear-marks of a white man's occupancy, he proclaimed to himself as he
stepped outside again and re-surveyed the worn dooryard. There was a
neatness and order there that belonged to neither redskin nor _metis_.
No Indian built bellows and forges and baked clay and glazed pottery and
dove-tailed wall-logs together in that fashion.

Agitation returned to Endicott as he threw off his coonskin overcoat and
studied these wall-logs. The unweathered ends showed they had been cut
but a matter of months. And that fitted in with the stubborn hope that
still bolstered up his heart. So he ran from point to point, studying
the foot-prints in the sand. There were two sizes, large and small. Yes,
there must be a man and a woman there--or a man and a boy, he amended,
as he mopped his moist forehead and sat back with a shadow of doubt on
his face.

He could make sure of this, he told himself, by a closer study of the
cabin. So he once more went inside. There he stood in the center of the
small whitewashed room, with its intimate aroma of life, with its
residuary odors of cooked meats, with the animal-like smell of its
dressed furs. He drew back the caribou-skin curtains and inspected the
two sleeping-bunks, one large and one small. He noticed the two pairs of
snow-shoe frames, still again large and small, with the smaller pair
already partly strung with rawhide. He noticed the orderly array of
clothing, the sinew-stitched jackets and leggings and hunting-shirts. He
noticed the softness and fineness of a fawn-skin shirt, fringed and
embroidered with dyed moose-bristles about the throat. He sniffed at it,
inquisitively, detecting a vague aura of the feminine about it. He
noticed a sewing-basket made of birchbark, holding a few fish-bone
needles, a few polished bone awls, a few coils of sinew softened with
fish-oil, a small pair of scissors roughly fashioned out of iron, even a
half dozen round disks pierced by two holes, intended for use as
buttons. But the arresting thing about these disks was the fact that
they were roughly made of native gold. He frowned over that fact,
heavily, but he forgot it in the discovery of a pottery saucer filled
with powdered soap-stone and a second saucer holding a cake of soap
faintly aromatic of winter-green.

He found something fortifying in the discovery of these trifles. He read
history in them, eloquent as they were of ordered life, the pathetic
makeshifts of the indomitable, the courageous subterfuges of the
valiant. He could read history there--but he could not read everything.
There was still a margin of doubt. So he continued his investigation,
with sober and meditative eyes. He invaded the store-room and lifted
crock-lids and appraised shelf-loads and inspected strings of smoked
fish and containers of pemmican and dried wild-rice. Then he went back
to the cooking-hearth and examined the bake-oven and the smoke-stained
cooking utensils.

He stopped short at a metal frying-pan, clean and polished, beside the
crockery pail of spring-water. For that frying-pan, he saw with
wondering eyes, was made of solid gold. It had been roughly cast in a
mold and ground down later, apparently, with sandstone or brick-dust.
And attached to it by two gold rivets was a smoothed handle of elk-horn.

Yet he forgot about it, the next moment, for the sight of the water-pail
prompted him to thrust his fingers down into the ash-pile on the hearth.
And at the core of those ashes he found live coals. And live coals meant
that the occupants of that wilderness lodge could not be far away from
their home.

The thought of their nearness left him strangely agitated again. He even
ran out through the open door and called into the echoing quietness of
the afternoon, startling the Canada jays that clustered about the
_starchigan_. But his excitement, in the face of that all-pervading calm
which filled the shadowy river-valley, began to impress him as foolish,
as childish. So he walked more soberly to the water's edge, where he
drank. Then he sat on the sun-bleached driftwood, studying that strange
wilderness home.

He was still studying it, with his eyes puckered against the slanting
sunlight, when he was startled by a sign of life along the upper trail.
He sat, shocked into a momentary catalepsy, as he saw a gray-clad figure
striding toward him. It was the figure of a youth in brownish-gray
hunting-jacket and breeches, a brown-faced youth wearing a wolf-skin cap
and carrying a bow and quiver at his shoulder.

Endicott watched that youth. He could see the weathered face with the
strangely resolute poise of the head, the brown shoulder above the paler
gray of the fur throw, the firm quick stride of the moccasined feet.

It was not until this youth stopped in front of the _starchigan_, and,
lifting an intent face, searched the pale gold sky above the pinelands,
that Endicott realized his mistake. _It was a woman._

It was not a youth that he saw, but a woman. And that woman was his
daughter Claire.

It was not dream and delusion, this time. It was reality. He rose to his
feet, gropingly, with a strangled small cry that brought her gaze slowly
about to him where he stood staring at her.

Her first movement was to shrink back a step or two, with her arm thrown
up across her eyes, as though to protect herself from a vision that was
too wordlessly terrifying to be faced. But her arm sank slowly down and
she stood without further movement, studying him, studying him with a
dull intentness as silent as his own. She did not move until he slightly
advanced his trembling hands, crying out "_Clannie!_" as he did so, and
repeating insanely as he staggered toward her: "O God, O God, it's my
Clannie!"

"_Dad!_" she said at last, in the huskiest of whispers.

Endicott could see her hand go up to her heart. He could see a spasmodic
breath or two that was almost a sob as she leaned forward where she
stood, a little round-eyed and incredulous. Then she ran toward him over
the loose sand, with her arms up.

He stood with his arms locked about her, repeating his muttered little
"Oh, my God!" over and over again as he patted her fur-clad shoulder and
held her pumping breast hungrily in against his own. Then he lifted her
chin and held her off at arm's length and studied her face, on which
there was a trace of tears. Then he noticed her hands, hard and rough.

"You poor little devil!" he said, scarcely conscious of the words. "You
poor little devil!"

"Don't pity me," she commanded, stricken by the deepened lines in his
face, by the frosty look the whitened gray about his temples had given
him.

"Oh, Clannie!" he said, his chin trembling.

"I knew you'd come. I knew it all along!" she said as her looped arm
clung to his neck.

"And you're all right?" demanded Endicott, staring into the sun-tanned
face with the strangely resolute air about it, with the happy eyes that
held their look of inalienable youth, vital youth, to mock the maturity
of the sober brow, the wistfulness of the firmer-lined mouth.

"He saved me," she said as she looked away into the lower reaches of the
river.

"Who?" said the old gentleman with the suddenly clouded eyes.

"Grimshaw, of course," was the other's answer.

"Grimshaw, of course," repeated Endicott. Then he asked, after a moment
of silence: "And is Grimshaw all right?"

"Yes, yes--he's wonderful," murmured the girl as she once more clung to
her father's shoulder.

He drew back a little, studying her face. Then he let his eye travel
down her fur-clad figure. It was a vaguely anxious, a vaguely
questioning eye. He seemed afraid of something, yet foolishly afraid to
articulate his fear.

"I always trusted that man," he finally observed. "Can I still trust
him?"

Her speech, her intonation, even her gestures, he was disturbed to
discover, had in some way grown like Grimshaw's. Yet he moved, uneasily,
at the quick glance which she leveled at him. In it he seemed to detect
a shadow of reproof. "You're--you're about all I have, you know,
Clannie," he hesitatingly reminded her.

She laughed, at that, for the first time, laughed briefly but naturally.
"Oh, dad, what do people do when they're too happy? I'm going to drop
dead, or blow up, or something. It's--it's almost too much for me!"

She was crying a little, now, crying as easily and gently as rain falls.
Endicott stopped in the act of patting her back and stared once more at
the cabin and forge and stretching-frames leaning against the
_starchigan_.

"You know, this is all rather incredible," he observed weakly, blinking
his eyes. "It--it sort of upsets one's applecart. You can't quite
swallow it in one gulp. After all that hell of doubt and anxiety and
despair, I've got you here, alive, safe and sound. It's--it's like a
grave opening and giving you back your dead."

She noticed, for the first time, the shadow of weariness under the
slightly faded eyes, the uncertainty of his step as he moved beside her.
And a swift indeterminate pity brought a lump up into her throat as she
linked her arm through his.

"Let's go in," she suggested with a newly acquired quietness. "I've got
supper to get ready."

But Endicott stopped short, half-way to the cabin door.

"Where's Shomer?" he demanded with a second puzzled stare about him.

She stopped short for a moment.

"He's out on the trail," she said without meeting her father's eye.

"For game?"

Her head-movement was one of assent.

"And when does he get back?"

"At nightfall," was her answer.

"Ah!" murmured the frosty-templed man in the coonskin coat.

Claire's color deepened a little at the clouded look that had come into
his eyes.

"And I must have supper ready," she said with a quietness which
obviously cost her a struggle.

Endicott watched her as she raked the live coals from the hearth ashes
and blew a handful of shredded bark into a blaze. He watched her as she
added kindling and wood to the fire, and put water on to boil, and
brought earthenware jars of food-stuff in from the store-room. This did
not seem like his Clannie of old.

"Now tell me what happened," he demanded as he sat back on a creaking
chair of willow and wicker-work. And as she busied herself with her
housewifely duties she told him briefly of her flight down Malign
Canyon, of her rescue by Grimshaw, of their fight for life and food, of
the building of the _karmak_ and their campaign to meet the winter.

"He was the man to do that!" observed Endicott as she came to a close.

"And there's much more than that he's done," said the woman beside the
hearth.

She looked about, disturbed by her father's silence. Then she too stood
silent for a moment or two. "Tell me what--what _you_ did," she finally
said.

So Endicott told, as quietly as she had done, of how they had been seen
that last day from the Barrier Lake camp, of how even the Indians
claimed no one could go down Malign Canyon and live. He told of his
refusal to believe in their death, of his fruitless search to find
whitewater-men who would be willing to explore the rapids, of his
efforts to try to get a message up to York Factory and a boat out before
winter closed the bay channels. Then he chartered an Imperial Oil
Company air-ship, intended for flight up to the Mackenzie Basin, but the
plane was wrecked in a forced landing north of Clearwater. Yet he did
not give up. This time he went to the Canadian government and the
premier himself cut the red tape by arranging to have a forest-ranger
and his seaplane sent out of northern Quebec. Platner, the pilot, had
followed the line of the National Railway from Abitibi Lake, but had
lost his way between Winnipegosis and The Pas and another two weeks were
lost while runners carried gasoline out to him at Moose Lake. And the
day before he had arrived at Barrier Lake, where Endicott awaited him.
And Platner, at the moment, was just over the hill, guarding his plane
and probably cursing everything that bore the name of Endicott.

"That means," said Claire, stopping short in her work, "that we can go
back, any time?"

Endicott looked up at his daughter, perplexed by the meditative light in
her eyes.

"You don't mean there's anything that keeps you from wanting to get
back?" he suddenly demanded.

"I don't know," she replied, without meeting his gaze.

"It's--it's not Grimshaw?" he challenged.

"I have him to think of," was the answer of the quiet-eyed woman beside
the hearth-fire.

"In what way?"

"In every way," was the equally low-toned reply.

"You mean you owe him something, for what he has done?"

"I owe him everything. And if I tried and tried, all my life long, I
could never quite repay him!"

Her father sat silent a moment.

"And you--you care for him, that much?" he finally inquired.

Claire did not answer, in words. But the slight movement of her head was
one of assent.

"And he cares as much for you?"

That question arrested her in her work. She stood for a full minute,
motionless and thoughtful-eyed, before speaking.

"That's something I'm not sure about. Fate, you see, hasn't been quite
fair with him."

"What do you mean by that?"

"It's rather forced me on him. He could endure me, I know, in a
background like this. But he would feel different, I'm afraid, on the
other side of the Barrier."

"Good God, Clannie, you don't feel that you're not good enough for him,
do you?" demanded her somewhat startled parent.

Instead of answering that question she turned slowly about and asked one
of her father.

"What is it about Shomer makes him so afraid of himself? That keeps him
so guarded where other men would shut their eyes and let themselves go?"

"Then he _has_ been guarded?" observed Endicott, with an audible sigh.
It might be accepted as one of relief.

"Wouldn't he have to be, dad, with a wild woman like me?" asked Claire,
with a touch of her old-time mockery.

"Perhaps he had his reasons," conceded the other, sober in the face of
her smile.

"But what were they? What _are_ those reasons?"

Endicott's movement, as he sat back in his chair, was one of withdrawal.

"That's a part of his life I've never cared to talk about," he
protested.

"But haven't I a right to know something about that part of his life?"

"On the whole, I suppose you have. But it involves more than Shomer. It
involves his mother as well."

"What was she like?" was Claire's quiet-noted query as she seated
herself at the end of the rough-timbered table.

"She was one of the most wonderful women I've ever known. And also one
of the most beautiful."

"She would _have_ to be that," murmured the girl with her chin cupped in
her hand. "Tell me the rest."

"About thirty years ago she married a man named Ruddy, Grantland Ruddy.
You wouldn't remember, of course, but Ruddy was one of the greatest
financiers of his day. He was one-half genius and one-half satyr.
Perhaps that isn't strong enough a word. For with all his gifts he
couldn't keep from leading the worst of double lives."

"Shomer's father!" said the girl, with a gasp of wonder.

"It came out, like a thunderclap, when he was murdered in one of his
Love-Nests, as the papers called them. He was killed by a young rounder,
a rounder half-crazy with heroin, who forced his way into Ruddy's
apartment and put a bullet through him. That, of course, was before your
time. And it unearthed enough rottenness to make even New York sit up
for a season. But it broke Mavis Grimshaw's heart. She had her one
child, a boy who in the bitterness of her heart she christened Shomer.
Shomer, I believe, is Hebrew for the Watcher. And she had her world
suddenly cut from under her feet. So she took her maiden name and
intended to hide away from it all, for the rest of her life. She was on
her way to South Africa, but I stopped her at Vancouver. I took her up
into the Klinaklini Valley and showed her an Arden I'd found, the
loneliest and loveliest Arden in all western Canada. She built a home
there, a hundred miles from nowhere, with two old Chinks for servants
and a consumptive Oxford curate to act as a tutor for her boy. She kept
that boy there, utterly away from the world, watching and guarding him
every moment of his life, dreading, always dreading, that some trait of
his father would show up in him. She would have kept him there always, I
believe, if I hadn't interfered. For the boy had brains. And he was
headed right, after all his mother had taught him. But in one way he was
half Indian, growing up in the open that way and knowing more about
animals than human beings. So she took him to England for three years,
where he studied hard but wasn't any too happy. When he came back I had
him enter McGill and take the engineering course. The year after he
graduated his mother died. I was there at the time--and she asked me to
look after her boy. He was still a boy to her, and she was still afraid
of what some woman might do to him. He promised her, that last hour, he
promised her on his knees, that he would never make the misstep she was
so afraid of. That's why he asked me for this outpost work I've given
him this last five or six years. It's given him a world of his own. It's
kept him out on the frontier, away from the things he was afraid of. And
he was well named; for all that time, I think, he's been the watcher.
He's been the one real man I've ever known who went straight and wanted
to go straight!"

Endicott thought, as he stopped speaking, that Claire's interest had
lapsed, for he noticed her slow movements as she drew the sleeveless
lynx-fur jacket from her shoulders and as slowly hung it on its wooden
peg along the cabin-wall. There seemed something so casual and collected
about that action and her further movement as she crossed slowly to the
hearth-side that he was startled by the slow runnel of tears that
dripped down her sun-darkened cheek as she abstractedly lifted fresh
wood to the fire and as abstractedly turned and stared down at her
toil-roughened hands.

"Poor, poor boy!" she said in a quiet whisper of mingled pity and
tenderness. "I think, now, I understand!"

"Understand what?" asked her father, standing arrested on the threshold
of some newer privacy which perplexed him.

"How I was making it so hard for him," was the answer of the
abstracted-eyed girl.

"But won't it be equally hard for you, when you have all that old world
to face again? What, for instance, will you have to say to the bunch at
Hillcrest?"

She turned on him, with the abstraction vanished from her face.

"What will that bunch have to say to _me_?" she demanded with a vigor
that her father had not expected of her. "Whatever I've done, I've at
least been _living_. And they've only been playing at living. They
don't even know they're alive. Everything they do is so futile and
foolish it seems pathetic. They've never once got back to bed-rock.
Life's taken about everything worth while away from them without their
knowing it. No; they don't bother me. And I don't think that kind of
living will ever bother me again. It would seem like being smothered."

Endicott, with his eyes studying his daughter, absently reached for his
worn coonskin coat which he held across his knee as he thrust a hand
deep into one of its capacious pockets. From that pocket he drew forth a
thick-bodied chocolate-bar covered with silver-foil. Mechanically he
pulled away the wrapping tissue and broke off a piece of the dark brown
bar.

Claire watched him with a troubled look in her eyes. She watched him
intently, with the look of trouble turning to one of distress. She
moistened her lips and stood motionless before him.

"What's that?" she asked almost sharply.

"Sweetened milk chocolate," casually retorted her parent. "I've been
carrying a few bars as an emergency ration."

"Oh!" she said, retaining her unconsidered attitude of expectancy.

"It's something they make rather well back in that old world you've no
more use for," explained her father as he broke another piece from the
thick brown slab. "By the way, what have you missed most up here?"

"You," answered Claire, but with her eyes still on the chocolate-bar.

"And what else?"

"A looking-glass," acknowledged the foster-child of the forest. "_Am_ I
a fright, dad?"

Endicott's inspection of her was discreetly noncommittal.

"You might be worse," he conceded. "But what came next in your list of
wants?"

She paused for a moment, returning his look of appraisal as she wondered
whether or not he might be probing deeper than he pretended.

"Sugar, I think. And after that, bread, bread made out of wheat flour.
And I'm not sure whether it's cow's milk or safety-pins come next."

She smiled, but her smile was an abstracted one. Her attention seemed
fixed on her father as he innocently and industriously appraised the
precious stock of chocolate-bars from his overcoat pocket. She even
advanced slowly toward him, with one hand held out in front of her. And
Endicott glanced up, apparently mystified by her attitude.

"What d' you want?" he demanded, keeping his face solemn.

"One of those chocolate bars," she retorted with a grim hunger that
left her face almost tragic in its child-like intensity.

It was not until her fingers had closed on the confection and she had
backed away to the table-edge and torn off the wrapper and sunk her
strong white teeth into the oblong of compressed sweetness that the
tyranny of appetite over dignity came home to the man watching her. It
disturbed him to behold her and her old-time sophistications thus swept
back to the rudimentary. And he wondered if there were other hungers in
the transmuting circumstances of solitude that had asserted themselves
under the thin veneer of civilization, if there were deeper impulses
that had extricated themselves from the pallid tapestry of isolation and
asserted their right to existence.

"That sounds more like my Clannie of old, more like the girl who always
wanted what she wanted," he said with a smile that was not without a
wintry sort of wistfulness. "And I've been wondering about this other
thing you want."

"What other thing?" she asked, busy devouring the last of the
thick-bodied brown bar. She was thinking, at the moment, of how one
hungers for a thing with one's whole body, how it is not any particular
organ that calls out for appeasement but the indivisible sum-total of
nerve and tissue and cell making up the entire apparatus of life. And
her father, as he studied her, was wondering at the vast yet subtle
changes that must have taken place in her, the changes that had made her
more mysterious even while they had made her more comprehensible.

"Grimshaw," he finally admitted.

"What about him?" she asked with a quickness which left a thin fog of
jealousy hanging about her father's heart.

"That's what _I_ want to know. What about him? And what about this whole
terrible situation?"

"Is it terrible?" she countered, with suddenly thoughtful eyes.

"They'd regard it as terrible back where the chocolate-bars are made."

She sat silent a moment. Then slowly her clouded face cleared.

"Shomer'll straighten that out," she contended. "He'll straighten that
out the same as he straightened out this other hopeless muddle!"

"Is he _that_ wonderful?" demanded Endicott, envious of the light in her
eyes.

"No more wonderful than you, dad," she replied, softening at the
wistfulness of her father's face. "Only different! He believes in
conquering. It's in his blood. And he'll conquer in this."

"But how can he?"

"That all depends on one thing."

"What one thing?"

"On whether or not he still wants me."

Endicott moved abruptly, disturbed by the unlooked-for humility of her
voice.

"And what _I_ may have to say about it isn't of much importance?"

"To whom?"

"To you!"

"No, dad; it's too late!"

"But you don't view this thing as I've got to view it. You don't face it
honestly. Down at the rail-head is a telegraph operator named Keaton,
who acts as correspondent for a news service. He's perched there like an
eagle, ready to pounce on any stories of prospectors or Indians or
hunters that are worth revamping to suit his own ends and put on the
wire. Imagine what he'll do to you and your Shomer, once he gets hold of
this situation!"

"Shomer will attend to that," she said with an unqualified faith that
seemed child-like as she crossed to the hearth and took up the yellow
frying-pan that threw back the light of the fire. "That's something that
belongs to him, the same as the knowledge of where this thing came from
belongs to him. For can't you see, dad, that there's going to be a
gold-rush up here next spring and that Shomer and you have got to be in
on the ground-floor?"

It was with an indifferent eye that Endicott inspected the pan of yellow
metal.

"I'm not thinking about trifles like that," he protested. "I'm thinking
about your future, your happiness."

"That's in Shomer's hands," said the grave-eyed woman as she crossed to
the door and swung it open.

Endicott threw up his hands, with what seemed a gesture of helplessness.
He was about to speak as he followed Claire to the door, but the words
died on his lips. For, out of the pale northern twilight there drifted
down to him a growing sound which he could not at first understand.

"Listen!" said the woman, in a voice slightly touched with awe, as the
sound mounted to a steady drone.

"Good God!" cried her father, "that's Platner!"

High in the pale heavens they could see the dark mass of the beetle-like
thing that hummed over their head. They could see it tilt and veer and
head into the southwest, high above the lonely ridges of rock and
pineland.

"What does it mean?" asked Claire as the drone died down on the dusk.

"That's our plane, going back," said Endicott, with a look of
bewilderment on his deep-lined face. That look of bewilderment was
reflected in the more limpid eyes beside him as the girl stood staring
into the band of green-gold light above the horizon. Then she smiled
very faintly, as she shook her head from side to side.

"He wouldn't go without me," she finally said, with quiet conviction.

"Who wouldn't?" demanded Endicott, resenting the estranging
impersonality of her gaze.

"My Shomer," she said, unconscious of her movement as she pressed her
clasped hands against her breast. Then she stopped short in the doorway,
with her unseeing eyes on the paling band of greenish gold. "Now I
know," she suddenly exclaimed. "I know what has kept him away. He's
found your plane and sent Platner back!"

"Back for what?" asked Endicott as he watched the rapt-eyed woman hurry
into the cabin and catch up her lynx-skin coat and cap.

"That's what I've got to find out," was her resolute-noted reply, as she
strapped on her bow and quiver and flung her looped spear-shaft over her
shoulder.

"What in the name of God are you going to do?" demanded her startled
father.

"I'm going to find my Shomer," she said as she thrust her knife and
fire-bag into her belt. She seemed, of a sudden, a being remote from
him, a being of elder time, a dark and hairy thing that belonged to a
world other than his, a half-savage thing with incommunicable impulses
and a touch of wildness about her.

He stood in the doorway a moment, as though to stop her, as though about
to point out to her the impossibility of wandering through such a
wilderness alone at night.

But he moved aside, bewildered by the imperative light in her eyes,
disturbed by the discovery that she was beyond the pale of his will.

"Don't wait for me," she called back from the doorway. "Eat your supper
and go to bed when you're tired. I may be late."

The sound of a wolf-howl echoed down from the hills beyond the river.

"Then for God's sake take this," cried Endicott as he ran after her,
holding out his gun-metal automatic.

She looked down at it. Her laugh was almost curt.

"It's no use to me," she said over her fur-clad shoulder. "That doesn't
belong to my world now, any more than the other things you spoke about!"

And the next moment she was gone.




CHAPTER XXIV


Endicott, as he waited that night in the lonely _karmak_ beside its
lonely northern river, nursed the impression of having been swept by
tidal-waves of emotion which had receded and left him desolately alone
on a sand-slope of helplessness. He had a sense of being overlooked, of
being negligible in the midst of a movement in which he remained vitally
concerned. But he had found his Clannie, he kept repeating to himself as
he sat smoking before the tranquillizing hearth-fire; he had found his
lost girl. She had changed. She had changed incredibly. But she was
still his Clannie. And she would go back, in the end, and adjust herself
to the world which she had merely forgotten. And if Shomer Grimshaw
should fail him, in a crisis like this, that was the end of his
field-engineer, his end, for all time.

But this younger generation was beyond him, he admitted as he blinked
wearily into the glow of the birch-wood flames. They had their own rules
and went their own way. What they were after was more than he could
comprehend. And the end of it, after all, lay in the lap of the gods.
And it was a very creditable bed this wilderness Crichton had made out
of his poplar poles and wattled bark and deer-skin and duck-feathers.
And Endicott, wearied by a trying day and still further narcotized by
the quietness of the cabin, decided that it would do no harm to have at
least forty winks while he waited for those unaccountable forest
children to return. So he made sure the fire was all right, and gazed
long and meditatively at the frying-pan of smoke-stained yellow metal.
Then he unlaced his shoes, and gazed even more meditatively about the
crowded small cabin with its evidences of a forlorn efficiency. His face
was puckered with thought as he stretched himself out on the creaking
bunk and covered himself with a robe of interwoven rabbit-skin. It was
more comfortable than he had expected, that bunk, and his wrinkled brow
relaxed at the thought that perhaps his Clannie had wrung a sort of
comfort out of such discomfort, that perhaps in her sheer
empty-handedness she had found some stranger sort of wealth. But he was
too tired to think it out as he wanted to. His eyelids drooped, and he
fell asleep. And when he slept he slept like a man who had been drugged.

When he awakened from that sleep he imagined for a moment that he was
lying in his private car, side-tracked below a water-tank on some
timber-limit side-line. For he could catch a sound that was
unmistakably the running of water. Through a perplexing square of
parchment he could see the pale yellow of filtered sunlight. And that
was as pleasant to the eye as the water-tinkle was to the ear. But the
narrow bed which became vocal at his first body-movement was strange to
him. Its creak was disturbing. And disturbing, too, was the creosotic
smell of the furs that hung about him.

He lay there for a moment, staring at the whitewashed walls that shut
him in, puzzled by the broken chatter of the whisky-jacks beyond the
dooryard. It was not until he heard the bark of a fox, sharp as a
repeated gun-shot, that the veil of mystery collapsed and he remembered
where he was. He sat up, oppressed by the quietness that once more
engulfed him. But it was a good old world, he reassured himself, with
the immediate past re-marshalling itself along the frontier of
consciousness. He'd have his Clannie back with him. He'd have her again,
safe and sound. He even called her name aloud, in husky high spirits, as
he threw back the hare-robe and looked about for his shoes.

But there was no answer to that call. He emerged from his curtained
sleeping-quarters, with a frown of perplexity on his face. He examined
the cabin and found it empty. The second sleeping-bunk, he saw, had not
even been occupied. Grimshaw, apparently, had also failed to return.

Endicott went to the door and looked out. But there was no one in sight.
He beheld no sign or movement to assure him his fears were as foolish as
he wished to rate them. He was unmistakably and most mysteriously alone.
And he did not altogether like the looks of things.

The sun was already well up above the purple-misted hills, tempering the
cold air that had thrown a sheet of ice about the margins of the
river-cove overnight. The morning was not windless, but the softness of
the azure sky gave a beguiling air of quietness to a world still further
etherealized by the countless traceries of frost so miraculously
silvering every twig and leaf and frond. Above that diamond-like
interwoven mass of brilliance, which tended to make the eyes ache,
brooded a wash of opaline air with an ozonic tang carrying the prophecy
that the Northern Lights, that evening, would be both active and
intense. The earth seemed a baldachin of time-mellowed velvet spangled
with jewels that threw back the pallid sunlight in an illusion of
splendor. Even Endicott, as he drew in a deep breath, was touched into a
momentary awe before that accidental magnificence of frost and light.

Yet he gave no prolonged attention to it. He could feel its tug at his
spirits, as though it strove to elate a puny atom of life preoccupied
with puny ends. But a feeling of desertion touched with frustration had
already taken possession of him. He wanted to hear human voices and know
human contacts again. He wanted to understand the secret of Platner's
flight. And above all he wanted to know what had become of his Clannie.

So after hurriedly drinking a rogan of spring-water he put on his cap
and his coonskin coat, munching a slab of roasted bear-meat as he took
to the close-trodden trail that followed the line of the river. Several
times he stopped and called across the echoing valley. But no answer
came to those calls. And instinctively he pushed on to the inland lake
where Platner had landed the day before with his plane. It seemed, to
Endicott, a long time ago.

He stopped short when he came to the height-of-land overlooking that
egg-shaped body of hooker-green water. For floating on its surface, with
its great wings magnified by the dissimulative refracted light, stood
the returned seaplane. It took on an air of efficiency, of silent but
static power, of elaborately achieved purposes, bringing back to the man
from the world of machinery an assuaging sense of restoration. It was
his link with life. And he was glad to know it stood within his reach.

Then for the second time he stopped short. He stopped short in the midst
of a covey of jack-pine half-way down the hill-slope, for he found
himself confronted by still another scene that arrested his eye. Between
him and the lake he saw a grove of white-birch, a cluster of ghostly
white boles roofed by a mass of ruffled gold that deepened and
brightened like moving water in the morning sunlight. That suspended sea
of gold, he saw, was nothing more than the massed foliage of the
whispering trees that had been yellowed by frost. And through them, in
ragged patches, the slanting morning sunlight struck in bands of Roman
gold, leaving the mottled floor of the woodland indescribably warm and
rich in color. The entire inland valley, in fact, was a bewildering
panorama of color framed in the lonely purple of ever-receding hills,
wild crimsons and browns and greens and yellows, royal reds and pallid
blues and consoling grays, stained leaves and ruddy cones and
emerald-shadowed basins of evergreen and tawny reaches of marsh-grass
and silvered bayous of foliage that shocked the eye with their rioting
prodigality of tone. It impressed Endicott as unnatural, as unlifelike,
as too vivid a pageant for the every-day world as he knew it. And to add
to that sense of the ethereal, as he watched, he saw a small movement at
the far end of the lake, where the hooker-green water, catching the
sun, turned to a molten silver touched with opal. Through a low-lying
mist that hung like lamb's-wool along the brown-green sedge he saw a
moose walk majestically down to the water's edge. He saw the antlered
black head emerge from the retreating fog as though it were emerging out
of the mists of prehistoric time. He saw the great head dip and rise and
dip and rise again, oddly solemn and measured in its movements, and then
turn and recede into the mists as though once more trafficking back into
the childhood of the world.

But Endicott gave it no further thought, for his attention was now fixed
on the Corot-like grove much closer to him.

In that grove, from the ruffled gold roof of which stray flakes of
yellow fell indolently through the sunny air, he could see a group of
figures, human figures. They too took on an unearthly air in that
mysteriously transmuting light. He was, in fact, compelled to creep
closer, meditative step by step, before they became definitely fixed in
his vision. Then he realized that the slender-bodied figure standing
arrow-straight beside the taller figure under the wavering canopy of
gold was his daughter Claire. Beyond them, with his back against a
birch-bole, stood Platner, Platner with his goggles thrust up over his
leather aviator's helmet and an incongruous-looking cigarette between
his lips. He seemed to be smiling half-cynically at the pair who waited
side by side, bareheaded in the clear light, with their hands linked so
confidingly together. And for the first time, as he looked, Endicott
definitely distinguished the fourth figure in that oddly arrested group,
the fourth figure that had come from Heaven knew where.

It was a lean and gaunt figure in faded black, who stood immediately
confronting the two gray-clad figures still so confidently clinging to
each other's hands. This man in rusty black also was bareheaded, his
pallid face shining intent in the fulcrum of light that temporarily
irised it.

There was nothing savage and superb about that figure, as there was
about the tawny-clad pair so silently facing him in the filtered soft
sunlight. But as he stood there, with a small book edged in gold held
ceremoniously before him, he took on an air of the hieratic, an aura of
the pontifical. And at the inclination of his bony head as he apparently
began to read from the abraded small volume in his hand Endicott
realized that the newcomer was the "black-robe" from the Little Elk Lake
mission, the solemn-eyed young minister from the frontier settlement
beyond the Barrier.

It was then that the somewhat restive Platner caught sight of the older
man standing so immobile at the edge of the grove. The youth in the
aviator's helmet sighed with relief. Step by cautious step he stole away
from the self-immured trio so intent on the words from the little black
book edged in gold. He stepped gingerly over the carpet of rustling
yellow, like a man walking slightly abashed in a house of worship, until
he came to Endicott's side.

"How's that for a hook-up?" he said in a husky whisper. His voice, for
all its parade of carelessness, was a tacit bid for companionship. But
Endicott did not answer him. His ruminative and slightly misted eyes no
longer rested on his daughter. They strayed to the deeper shadows of the
birch-grove, where he became indeterminately conscious of yet another
figure, even as the restive Platner had become conscious of his own. It
was the figure in white, so insubstantial that it merged at times into
the ghostly white of the sheltering birch-boles.

"And that Wild Man made me fly back and bring in a sky-pilot," the
husky-voiced youth at his elbow was complaining.

But Endicott did not seem to hear him. The older man's eyes were still
on the uncertain white figure with the beseechingly outstretched arms.
Yet as he looked those ghostly outstretched arms lost their air of
imploring unhappiness and the two pale hands, clasped gratefully
together, were pressed against a heart that no longer seemed to ache.

"And now," muttered the husky but not irreverent Platner, still angling
for companionship, "I've got to bring 'em in flour and sugar and tea.
For they've told me they don't intend to come out for a month. But, gee,
here's where the chain goes on!"

Endicott motioned sharply for silence, for he was remembering how like
his dead wife Erica was that paling shadow with the two white hands
pressed against its heart. And when he could see it no more he turned
back to the sun-mottled trio in the foreground, where he saw Shomer
Grimshaw take from the fire-bag on his belt a ring roughly fashioned out
of gold. He could see the uneven band flash red in the sun. And at the
same time he could see the intent side-glance of the woman as her
fur-clad mate thrust the ring on the finger of the reddened small hand
which she let rest for a moment on his darker and larger hand. He
noticed the two heads, irradiated with an odd dignity as they bowed
together, remain passive, and remain receptively motionless, while the
figure in faded black stood with arms extended, as though uttering a
blessing on them whom he and his strange rite were uniting.

Yet it did not strike the older man as barbaric. It impressed him more
as taking on an air of pathos through its simplicity. And his throat
tightened as he saw the smaller figure enclosed in the appropriating
corded arms of the larger and the upturned sober face of the woman held
against the stooping sober face of the man. There was a hunger in that
movement, an intensity in that contact, which belonged to a world where
Endicott felt himself to be merely a trespasser. It brought back to him
a sharpened sense of his remoteness from his own. And even their
indifference to him, as he stood thoughtful-eyed at the edge of their
grove where sun and shadow patterned the leafy ground, saddened him with
a sense of his isolation. Before him stood the two to whom he would and
could have given all that life had left him to give. Before him were the
two who, in all the world, should have stood closest to him. But already
they seemed embarked on an end prodigiously their own.


THE END


[The end of _Empty Hands_ by Arthur Stringer]