Chapter IV (1)

In the darkness and the shadow something moved. Desmond was in his own bunk at the shack. There seemed to be an echo of words in the air, yet he knew that he had slept for some time. He was not asleep now, yet sleep lay on him like a weight, and he could not move.

Forbes was silent, too. He was quite clear that he was alone with Forbes, and that the other two had gone prospecting beyond Fachette. Forbes had asked him, “Will ye stay here with me and rest,—I’m all but blind the day,—or will ye go in to Fort Recompense with Jooney here and the dogs, and put the dust in safety? Or will ye try the short cut across the pass with Ohlsen?” And he knew he had chosen to stay in the shack with Forbes.

It was night. The shack was dark, save for the red glow of the stove, and something moved very softly in the dusk and the shadow.

Desmond, weighted with sleep, could not move; but he listened. Someone was shuffling very softly and slowly round the wall of the shack, pausing at the bunks. It was Forbes. He was snuffling to himself, as some little soft-nosed animal might snuffle, and feeling in his blind way with one yellowed hand.

Desmond was amused. “If I was to yell out, old Scotty’d have a fit,” he thought. He decided to wait until Forbes was quite near, and then yell, and hear the old man curse. Old Forbes’ cursing was the admiration of the camps. Desmond lay very still and listened.

Forbes was coming nearer, feeling his way as if over unseen ground, and whimpering to himself very softly. Desmond could hear the scratch, scratch of his long-clawed fingers as he slipped his hand over the empty bunk near the door. He was silent and still for a minute, then the shuffling came again.

“I’ll wait till he’s at the foot o’ my bunk,” thought Desmond, grinning foolishly, “and then I’ll bark like a dog. Used to do it in school when I was a kid and scare the teacher. Lord! how a bit of luck does raise a man’s spirits!” He lay very quiet, grinning to himself in the dark.

Forbes’ blind, bent head showed, swaying slightly, against the dull, red glow of the farther wall. A tremulous touch, as light as a falling leaf, fell on Desmond’s foot, and suddenly he was stricken with the black, dumb terror of dreams; for he knew there was death in the touch of that hand.

The walls reeled about him, shot with streaks of red. He could feel the hand hovering lightly at his knee. The blind man’s soft, whimpering breathing sounded close above him. But he could not move. His whole life was centred in the quivering nerves which recorded the touch of the blind man’s hand.

It travelled very slowly and lightly up his body, and lingered above his heart. His life gathered there also like a cold flame. And he could not move.

Visions rose before him. The gold was under his head; and he heard again the sound of wind in a garden among tall flowers, and thud of ripe apples falling, soft croons, and cluckings of hens, a whirring of the wings of doves. He saw a straight girl in a stiff print dress, with very blue eyes under brows and lashes the colour of sea-sand. He saw two children with hair the colour of gold.

The blind man moaned and bent waveringly near, his right hand gathered to his breast.

The flowers of the hollyhocks were gold, and the little ducks were gold, and gold sunlight lay on the gold hair of the children. “Gold,” said Desmond, faintly—“gold; my luck.” The blind hand crept upward. Like a blown flame, the golden visions flickered and went out.

Desmond awoke, fighting upward out of darkness and the dreams of the night. He felt reality coming back to him as a tide comes back to a beach, and opened his eyes on a glad world. His terrors fell away from him. He came near to thanking God. Dark words he had dreamed, dark deeds, but they were not true. Thank God! they were only dreams. He stirred in the bunk, sat up, and brushed a white feather of wood-ash from his sleeve. Only dreams!

Lajeune was cooking pork and making coffee; Ohlsen was mending snow shoes; Forbes bent over his bunk, black against the frozen window, feeling blindly with his hands and snuffling a little as he spoke:

“We’d ha’ let you sleep on, but we wanted to know what you’d be doing. Will ye stay with me and rest—I’m all but blind the day—or will ye go into Fort Recompense with Jooney here and the dogs, and put the dust in safety? Or will ye try the short cut across the pass with Ohlsen?”

He stopped suddenly. Desmond shrank back slowly against the wall of the bunk, his eyes staring on them as a man stares on death, a fleck of froth on his lips. There was no sound in the shack but the quick breathing of four men.

CHEAP

Ransome said that you might pick up specimens of all the unprettiest afflictions of body and soul in Herares ten years ago. He also said that when he saw any particularly miserable bit of human wreckage, white or brown, adrift on the languid tides of life about the jetty, he always said without further inquiry, “It’s Henkel’s house you’re looking for. Turn to the left, and keep on turning to the left. And if God knew what went on under these trees, He’d have mercy on you. . . . .”

The house was the last house on the last road of the town. You won’t find it now, for no one would live in it after Henkel, and in a season or two the forest swamped it as the sea swamps a child’s boat on the beach. It was a white house in a garden, and after rain the scent of vanilla and stephanotis rose round it like a fog. The fever rose round it like a fog, too, and that’s why Henkel got it so cheap. No fever touched him. He lived there alone with a lot of servants—Indians. And they were all wrecks, Ransome said, broken down from accident or disease—wrecks that no one else would employ. He got them very cheap. When they died he got more.

Henkel was a large, soft, yellowish man. Ransome said, “I don’t mind a man being large and yellowish, or even soft, in reason, but when he shines too, I draw the line.” Henkel had thick hands with bent fingers, and large brown eyes. He was a Hollander Jew, and in that place he stood apart. For he didn’t drink, or gamble, or fight, or even buy rubber. He was just a large, peaceful person who bought things cheap.

He was very clever. He always knew the precise moment, the outmost low-water mark, of a bargain. His house was full of things he’d bought cheap from wrecked companies or dying men, from the mahogany logs in the patio to the coils of telegraph wire in the loft. His clothes never fitted for they belonged to men whom the fever had met on the way up the Mazzaron, and who had, therefore, no further use for clothes. The only things Henkel ever paid a fair price for were butterflies.

“I went to his house once,” said Ransome. “Had to. A lame Indian in a suit of gaudy red-and-white stripes opened the door. I knew that striped canvas. It was the awnings of the old ‘Lily Grant,’ and I saw along the seams the smokemarks of the fire that had burnt her inwards out . . . . . Then the Indian opened the jalousies with a hand like a bundle of brown twigs, and the light shone through green leaves on the walls of the room. From ceiling to floor they flashed as if they were jewelled, only there are no jewels with just that soft bloom of colour. They were cases full of Henkel’s butterflies.

“The Indian limped out, and Henkel came in. He was limping, too. I looked at his feet, and I saw that they were in a pair of someone else’s tan shoes.

“That, and the whiff of the servants’ quarter, made me feel a bit sick. I wanted to say what I had to say, and get out as quick as I could. But Henkel would show me his butterflies. Most of us in that place were a little mad on some point. I was myself. Henkel, he was mad on his butterflies. He told me the troubles he’d had, getting them from Indians and negroes, and how his men cheated him. He took it very much to heart, and snuffled as he spoke. ‘And there’s one I haven’t got,’ he said, ‘one I’ve heard of, but can’t find, and my lazy hounds of hombres can’t find it either, it seems. It’s one of the clear-wings—transparent. Here’s a transparent silver one. But this new one is gold, transparent gold, and the spots are opaque gold.’ His mouth fairly watered. ‘I tell you, I will spend anything, anything, to get that gold butterfly. And if the natives can’t or won’t find it for me, my friend, I’ll send for someone who can and will.’

“I quite believed him, though I was no friend of his. I didn’t know much about butterflies, but I guessed that in Paris or London his collection would be beyond price. But I wasn’t prepared, two months later, for Scott and his friend. . . . .

“Derek Scott. Ever meet him? A very ordinary kind of young Northerner. He was only remarkable in having everything a little in excess of his type—a little squarer in jaw and shoulder, a little longer in nose and leg, a little keener of eye and slower of tongue. I’d never have looked at him twice as he landed from the dirty steamer with a lot of tin boxes, if it hadn’t been that he was hale and sound, with hope in his eyes. Health and hope, at Herares . . . .

“Then little Daurillac ran up the gangway, laughing. I looked at him—everyone did—and wondered. And then, to cap the wonder, they two came up to me with their friendly, confident young faces, and asked for Henkel’s house.

“‘Turn to the left,’ I said. And then I said, ‘You’ll excuse me, but what does Henkel want of you?’

“Scott didn’t answer at first, but looked me over with his considering eyes, and I remembered a collarless shirt and a four days’ beard. But Daurillac said, ‘He wants butterflies of us, Monsieur. I am an entomologist, and my friend, he assists me.’ He drew up very straight, but his eyes were laughing at himself. Then we exchanged names and shook hands, and I watched them going along the path to Henkel’s . . . . .

“Next day, Scott came down to the jetty. He sat on a stump and stared at everything. He was ready enough to talk, in his guarded way. Yes, he was new to the tropics; in some ways they were not what he had expected, but he was not disappointed. He was here for the novelty, the experience. But his friend, Louis Daurillac, had been in the Indies, and with some of Meyer’s men in Burma, after orchids. Louis’ father was a great naturalist, and Louis was very clever. Yes, Henkel had got hold of him through Meyer. He wanted someone to find this butterfly for him, this golden butterfly at the headwaters of the Mazzaron—someone whose name was yet in the making, someone he could get cheap . . . . . So Louis had come. He was very keen on it. Henkel was to bear all costs, to supply food, ammunition, trade-goods, etc., and pay them according to the number of the new specimens that they found. ‘So you see,’ said Scott, with his clean smile, ‘Louis and I can’t lose by it.’ . . . .

“We talked a bit more, and then young Scott said to me, suddenly, ‘Henkel has everything ready, and we start in the morning. You seem to be the only white man about here. Come and see us off, will you?’ I said yes; afterwards it struck me as curious that he should not have counted Henkel as a white man. He laughed, and apologised for the touch of sentiment. ‘It’s like plunging head first into a very deep sea,’ he explained, ‘and one likes to have someone on the shore. You’ll be here when we come back?’ And I said, ‘Yes, either unloading on the jetty or in the new cemetery by the canal.’ But he didn’t smile. His light northern eyes were gravely considering this land, where life was held on a short lease, and he looked at me as if he were sorry for me.

“I saw them off the next day. There were six or eight men of Henkel’s, loaded with food and trade-goods, and I saw that two of them were sickening where they stood. I looked in Daurillac’s brilliant young face, and I hadn’t the courage to say anything but ‘Have you plenty of quinine?’ He tapped a big tin case, and I nodded. ‘And what are you taking the Indianos?’ I asked.

“He fairly bubbled over with laughter. ‘You would never guess, Monsieur, but we take clocks, little American clocks. The Indianos of the Mazzaron desire nothing but little clocks, they like the tick.’

“Their men had turned down one of the jungle paths. They shook hands with me, and Scott met my eyes with his grave smile. ‘Just drawing breath for the plunge,’ he said, with a glance at the forest beyond the last white roof. Daurillac slipped his arm through Scott’s, and drew him after their slow-going hombres. At the bend of the path they turned and waved to me; Scott with a quick lift of the hand. But little Daurillac swept off his hat and stood half-turned for a minute; the sun splashed on his dark head, on his Frenchified belt and puttees, on his white breeches, and on an outrageous pink shirt Henkel seemed to have supplied him with. He looked suddenly brilliant and insubstantial, a light figure poised on the edge of the dark. One gets curious notions in Herares. The next moment they were gone. The jungle had shut down on them, swallowed them up. They were instantly lost in it, as a bubble is lost in the sea.

“Two days before I hadn’t known of their existence. But I was there to see them off, and I was there when Scott came back.

“It was well on into the rainy season, and I was down with fever. I was in my house, in my hammock, and the wind was swinging it. It was probably the hammock that did all the swinging, but I thought it was the house, and I had one foot on the floor to try and steady it. But it was no use. The walls lifted and sank all in one rush, like the side of a ship at sea. Outside I could see a pink roof, a white roof, a tin roof, and then the forest, with the opening of a path like the black mouth of a tunnel. I wanted to watch this tunnel, because I had an idea I’d seen something crawl along it a good while before. But I couldn’t manage it; I had to shut my eyes. And then I felt the scratching on my boot . . .

“I caught hold of the sides of the hammock, but it was some time before I could manage to pull myself up. Then I looked down.

“A man was lying along on his face on the floor, just as he had crawled into my hut and fallen. The yellowed fingers of one hand clawed on my boot, and that was the only sign that he was alive. He lay quite quiet, except for the slow working of his fingers. And I sat quite quiet, staring down on him with the infinite leisure that follows a temperature of one hundred and five. It was only by slow degrees I realized that this was Derek Scott come back, and that he was probably dying.

“I got to my feet, and bent over him, but I couldn’t raise him, of course. I was afraid he’d die before anyone came. So I took my revolver and aimed as well as I could at that tin roof beneath which my man Pedro was eating his dinner. The barrel went up and down with the walls of the hut, but I must have hit the roof, for the next thing I knew was a lot of smoke and noise, and Pedro’s face, eyes and mouth open, rushing out of it. There seemed no interval before I found myself sitting in the hammock, and saying over and over again, ‘But where’s the little chap? Where’s the little French chap?’

“Scott was still on the floor, but his head was on my man’s shoulder, and Pedro was gently feeding him with sips of brandy and condensed milk. He turned and looked at me, and his eyes were clear and considering as ever, though his answer didn’t sound quite sane. He said, ‘The clocks wouldn’t tick.’

“He said it as if it explained everything. Then he unstrapped a tin case from his belt, laid his head on it, and was instantly asleep.

“I cried out, ‘Is it the fever, Pedro?’ But my man said, ‘No, Senor, it is the hunger.’ He rolled Scott up very cleverly in a blanket. ‘This Senor has had the fever, but it is not upon him now. Without doubt he is a little mad from being in the forest so long. But when he wakes he will be stronger. So much I heard, and no more. Unconsciousness came down on me like a wave. But into the dark heart of that wave I carried the certainty that Pedro knew all about the matter and that he hated Henkel. How or why I was certain of this I don’t know. But I was.

“I woke in the cool of the evening. The fresh breeze off the river was like the breath of life, and Pedro’s face, thrust close to mine, no longer grew large and small by fits. I noticed that it was quite grey, and that his lips twitched as he muttered, ‘Senor, Senor . . .’

“I said, ‘Where is the Senor Scott?’

“‘He woke a little while ago and called for water to wash in and a clean coat, and he used the hair-brush. Then he went out—went out—’

“I got to my feet, threw an arm over Pedro’s shoulder, and he ran with me out into the moonlit street. The track to the fountain lay like a ribbon of silver, the houses were like blocks of silver; and every house was shuttered and silent—breathless. Not a man lounged under the shade of the walls, not a girl went late to draw water, not a dog barked. The little place was deserted in the hold of the forest. It lay like a lonely raft of silver in the midst of a black sea. Only ahead of me a man stumbled slowly in the middle of the road, and his shadow staggered beside him. I have said there was no other living thing visible. Yet as this man stumbled past the shuttered houses, the very blades of grass, the very leaves on the wall, seemed to have conscious life and to be aware of him. When the wind moved the trees, every branch seemed straining to follow him as Pedro and I followed.

“We followed, but we could not gain on him. It was like the dreams of fever. Pedro and I seemed to be struggling through the silence of Herares as if it were something heavy and resistant, and Scott reeled from side to side, but always kept the same distance ahead. We were still behind when we turned into Henkel’s garden, and the scent of the flowers beat in our faces like heat. At the foot of the verandah steps we met the man who had admitted Scott.

“The man was running away. He was a cripple. He came down the steps doubled up, bundled past us, and was gone. Somewhere a door clashed open. There was no other sound. But in a moment the garden seemed full of stampeding servants, all maimed, or ill, or aged. They melted silently into the bushes as rats melt into brushwood, and they took no notice of us. I heard Pedro catch his breath quickly. But when a light flared up in one of the rooms, it showed no more than Scott talking with Henkel.

“They showed like moving pictures in a frame, and the frame was dark leaves about the window, which was open. I leaned against the side of it, and Pedro squatted at my feet, his head thrust forward as if he were at a cockfight. I did not know just why I was there. Henkel sat at a table, wagging his head backwards and forwards. Scott was sitting opposite him; and he looked as Lazarus might have looked when first he heard the Voice, and stirred . . . .

“Henkel was saying, ‘Dear me, dear me, but why should this have happened?’ And Scott answered him as he had answered me, in that strange, patient voice,

“‘The clocks wouldn’t tick.’

“‘But they were good clocks,’ cried Henkel.

“Scott shook his head. ‘No, they were not good clocks, he explained gently, ‘they were too cheap. They would not go at all in the jungle. An Indian of the Mazzaron does not care what time his clock tells, but he likes it to tick. These were no good. And the food was not good. The things in the tins were bad when we opened them.’

“‘Mismanagement, mismanagement,’ said Henkel, but Scott went on as if he had not heard.

“‘We followed the river for two days and then turned east. In a week after that, two of your men were dead. They died of fever. No, the quinine was no good. There was a lot of flour in it. Two days more, and another man died, but he would have died anyhow. It was very hard to see them die and to be able to do nothing.

“‘The men who were left went so slowly that nearly all our food was gone when we reached the country of the Indios. We made our camp, and I shot a pig. That made us stronger, but Louis was very bad then with the fever.

“‘The Indios came down, and we spoke with their head-men. They thought we were mad, but the clocks pleased them. They sat round our tents and shook them to make them tick louder, until Louis cried out in his fever that all the world was a great clock that ticked. They gave us leave to hunt in their country for butterflies, and the head-men told off six to help us. One was very clever. He used to wear his net on his head with the stick hanging down behind, and he snared the butterflies with a loop of grass, as if they had been birds.

“‘Our tents were of cheap cotton stuff that would not keep the rain out, and the wet came in on Louis and made him worse. But he was young, and I saw to it that he had food, and your men loved him. I do not think he would have died if the clocks had ticked properly.’

“‘I do not understand,’ said Henkel, blinking his heavy brown eyes.

“‘No? They were so cheap that they broke at the first winding. The Indios brought them back, and asked for better ones. I had no better ones.’

“‘Still, I do not understand,’ said Henkel, smoothly, and blinked in the lamplight.

“Scott’s tired voice went on. ‘The Indios were very angry. They brought us no more butterflies and no more food. And presently, as we went about the camp, or the paths of the forest, the little arrows began to fall in front of us and behind, though we never saw who shot at us.’

“‘The little arrows?’ asked Henkel, heavily. ‘I do not understand. Go on.’

“‘There is very little to tell. Only a nightmare of hunger, of wet, of fever, of silence, and the little poisoned arrows quivering everywhere . . . . And one day a little dart flickered through a rent in the rotten cotton tenting and struck Louis. He died in five minutes. Then I and the men who were left broke through and came down to the Mazzaron. The Indios followed us, and I am the only one left. It is a pity the clocks wouldn’t tick, Mister Henkel.’

“‘Ya, ya,’ said Henkel, leaning over the table, ‘but the butterfly? The golden butterfly? You have found it?’

“Scott opened the tin case slowly and clumsily, drew out the perfect insect, and laid it on the table. But it is wrong to speak of that wide-winged loveliness as an insect. Henkel sat staring at its glittering and transparent gold, one big yellowish hand curved on either side of it, too happy to speak. His lips moved, and I fancied he was saying to himself, ‘Cheap, cheap . . . .’

“‘It is very good,’ he said at last, cunningly, ‘but I am sorry there is only one. I do not know that it is worth very much. But now I will pay you as I promised. There was no agreement that you should receive the other young man’s share, and there is only one specimen. But I will pay you.’

“Scott was fumbling in his belt. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you will pay me,’ and he leaned forward with something in his hand. We saw Henkel’s face turn to yellow wax, and he tried to stand up, but he was too stout to lift himself quickly. He had no time to turn before Scott shot him through the heart.

“When I broke through the vines, Scott was moving the butterfly out of the way . . . . . He looked up at me with his old considering look, his old clean smile. ‘It was cheap at the price,’ he said, touching one golden wing with his finger.”

STORIES

Joyce was at his tenth story, the pipes were drawing well, and the birch logs singing softly, while Father John gazed at his entertainers with fascinated eyes.

“. . . . And so he fell into the car, and the grain poured in on him, and there he was, buried. That car wasn’t unloaded until spring, and then out he came like a board, and they buried him again, and no one knew he was heir to a million.”

Father John made a stunned, murmuring noise, and his hosts looked upon him fondly. Only Morris was discontented.

“I thought he’d have come out alive.”

“Alive?”

“Yes. Fed on the grain . . . .”

Royce turned his back on Morris, and Falconer began, hastily.

“But that’s not so queer as the man at Fort Duchesne. He was a scientific fellow, and he went mad, and ran after the shooting stars with a butterfly net. It was in the Fall, when the sky is generally fizzling with meteors. This fellow would run after them till he fell, exhausted, and they had to tell off a Siwash to retrieve him, which must have been very annoying. He’s in a private asylum in ’Frisco now, keeping copper-filings in a cage; thinks they’re larvæ and feeds them on lettuce leaves.”

“Poor soul, poor soul,” murmured Father John, helplessly, and for a few minutes there was silence.

“But that’s nothing to what happened to Ignatius O’Higgins up north.” Connor’s voice rolled as richly into the flat silence as a plum pudding on a table. “Out snaring rabbuts, he was, and put his foot in a bear trap. A while after, another trapper came by, and he wondering why the snow was all trod up with rabbut tracks, and they marching in squads like Ulstermen, bad luck to ’em. And then he went on a bit, and he knew; and the knowledge he had of the black, bitter heart of a rabbut gave him a turn, and he was a better Christian all his days, Father. All the buck-rabbuts east of the Rockies, fighting and kicking and straggling round that bear trap . . . .”

“Have another drink, Con,” said someone loudly, passing up the decanter. Connor helped himself, and drank, beaming, to the guest of the evening. “Here’s good luck and a fat living to you, Father Jack, and may you never want a bottle of the best to share with a friend.”

“A memorable night,” said Father John, looking very young and pink in the depths of his leather chair. “That’s what it’s been—a memorable night. It was very kind of you to ask me again, to take me in once more among you, to give me a share in this way of all the things you’ve seen and done and heard in all these years. And such things . . . . It’s a terrible world,” and he shuddered, slightly.

“Bless your heart,” said Royce, “but lots of queer things must have come your way since you took to—this,” and he leaned forward, and gently touched the shabby, black sleeve.

Father John looked at his cassock with some discontent. “Old women’s quarrels, and young folks’ love affairs, a mother to be comforted, or an old man ushered into Paradise. It’s God’s work,” finished Father John, wistfully, “but there’s no good denying it’s a bit dull.”

“The confessional?” suggested Royce, delicately.

Father John leaned forward, with a twinkle. “Shall I tell you? Well, it’s my belief all the bad, wild deeds are done by the Protestants, I hear so few of them.”

“But life and death—you must come closer to these than any of us. They’re not dull.”

“In the aggregate I find them so.”

“But surely, sometimes . . . .?”

“Well, I don’t know.” Father John brightened up a little. “There is something under my notice now. Not through the confessional, of course; it’s open, quite open. And it’s—well, curious. Yes,” he went on, judicially, “I should certainly call it curious.”

“Is it war, passion or revenge?” asked Royce, with a smile.

“Well,”—Father John did not smile,—“it is probably murder.”

“Probably murder? Don’t you know, then?”

“No. That’s the curious part of it. I don’t know, and the man who most likely did it, he doesn’t know.”

“O, come now, Father Jack . . . .”

“It’s a fact. He’d tell me if he knew, but he doesn’t.”

“Do you mean to tell us that a fellow could murder, not kill, murder—another fellow, and not know it?”

“Yes, I do,” said Father John, mildly, “that is just M’Cabe’s case.”

“Go on with his case,” said Connor, admiringly.

“Well, I only know it in bits, you understand—in flashes as he tells it to me—a flash of light so clear and vivid it’s painful, and then fog and darkness. I’m afraid it’s a pretty bad case, though I’ve grown fond of M’Cabe. It’s curious, too,” mused Father John, “how fond you do get of anyone or anything that looks to you for help. I ought to detest M’Cabe, he’s always sending one of his brats to call me up at night—thinking he’s going to remember . . . .”

“What was M’Cabe in his off hours?” asked Morris, with envy.

“M’Cabe? O, I’m afraid he was a seal-poacher. He tells me of fights with Japanese ships in the fog—bloody decks, and half-seen yellow faces. It’s all in a fog as he tells it—the ships and the men, the seals in the sea and the bull-walrus bellowing from the floes. I wish he could make it clearer to me, but he’s always down on the floor, groaning—afraid he’s going to remember.

“He must have seen some queer things, if you like, where Asia and America are still in the making, and no man can read the tides, and on the islands in the summer you walk waist-deep in flowers. M’Cabe says he’s gone ashore on one of these islands and picked harebells and fern till his arms could hold no more. And the next year the island’s gone, swallowed in the sea, and a new volcano spouting east-by-north in the offing. They’re very troublesome, those islands. And the natives are as strange as their own coasts; you see them, M’Cabe says, in their high-prowed boats, driving down the steel-grey channels, past the long promontories, out of the fog and into the fog again. They used to massacre the fur traders, and no one seems to know what they do now. They just go past, flying low, like birds, and the crews throw things at them . . . .

“Well, from what M’Cabe says, it wasn’t natives, but islands, that gave him his trouble. They seem to have been sailing very slowly up some coast in a fog, which lay thick on the sea like a layer of wool, but cleared so suddenly that the topsails were in golden day. On deck they could see nothing. They had a man at the top of the foremast, I think he said, and that man was absolutely cut off from them by the fog. They heard his voice as a voice from another world.

“They were just creeping along, only the topsails drawing. M’Cabe and another man were up in the bows, looking over the side. He says the sea came sliding out of the fog and curling alongside, pretty little gentle waves, as white as lambs. M’Cabe watched them for some time, he says, and then was going aft, when he heard the other man say, ‘Come back and look at this.’ He went and looked, and there were all the waves breaking black.

“Quite black, he says, like soot instead of foam. And then, as they stared, the fog grew pit-black ahead of them, as if a great mouth had opened. And it was all perfectly sudden and perfectly silent. They could see nothing, they could hear nothing, except that once the look-out man screamed. Then they looked up, out of their pit of fog . . .

“It was like a signal breaking out, M’Cabe says. I do not quite know what he means, but over the golden sky something deadly—smoke, ash, gas—was rushing and spreading. I can’t make out from him whether it looked red or black; but it was dark, and hot.

“Then they felt the sea tremble, and that blind ship fouled in fog was struck. Not tossed or struck by a wave, but by something that hit at her out of the fog. They’d all run aft like sheep, away from the blackness. And the next thing that M’Cabe knows is that he was in a small boat which had been trailing astern, alone with another man, drifting in the fog. The ship was gone as if that blow had smacked her out of existence—gone for ever. It is very curious how Time seemed to go wrong. The destruction or disappearance of the ship, in M’Cabe’s mind, happened instantaneously; as a matter of fact, it must have taken some moments, for the other man had had time to run and fetch a fur coat of which he was very proud. I know nothing of this man, except that he was, and that he had a fur coat; he was the first thing M’Cabe noticed with a clear mind, brushing his coat with black hands. They were as black as sweep’s, the boat was black, a black sea lopped after them oilily, and the fog rained black on them. ‘Is it snowing black?’ asked M’Cabe. And the other man, never looking up from the coat, grunted, ‘Nah, it’s ashes. There’s been an island blowed up, or something, and it’ll ruin my coat.’

“M’Cabe says he took a dislike to him and his coat, though he’d liked him well enough before; he was that unfriendly over it. Those are M’Cabe’s words—‘that unfriendly.’

“M’Cabe took the oars that were in the boat and paddled about in the fog to see if he could find the ship. He seems to have been a good deal shaken. He says he doesn’t remember anything else until the boat grated softly on a gravel beach and a great rush and screaming went past his head in the fog, and things black as bats which he took at first for devils, but they were only sooty gulls.

“They pulled the boat up and sat down on the beach waiting for the fog to lift, but it didn’t. It didn’t lift for days; the blackness went out of it and it grew lighter, but as thick, M’Cabe says, as milk. And all the time they had to stay on this little bit of an island, a few flat rocks and a little gravel huddled together in the sea. It was spring, the rocks were all glassy with ice every morning; but the gulls were laying about the beach tamer than poultry, and they gathered the rank eggs and ate them, and drank of the half-frozen sleet pools. Fire? They had nothing to burn but the seats of the boat; they tried to kindle these with their few matches, but the sea-soaked wood refused to catch, however fine they shaved it. They turned the boat over and dug little burrows in the sand to sleep in, lining them with dried weed. But it must have been cold beyond bearing. M’Cabe says he used to crawl out of his burrow in the morning, almost crying with cold. And the other man snoozing comfortably in the fur coat. I asked him why they didn’t sleep in one burrow and share the coat; he said he didn’t like to, the other man being ‘that unfriendly.’

“M’Cabe doesn’t know how long they were on the island. He says it was all fog, and sea-beasts bellowing, and great birds buffeting them, and cold; there was the other man, too, very careful not to tear his fur coat on the rocks. At last, M’Cabe says, what with the fog and the cold and the birds, he became so that he could not take his mind off that fur coat.

“He’d lie shaking in his burrow at night, thinking how warm he’d be with it on. He’d limp about the island by day, thinking what it would feel like if he could put his hands in the pockets. He’d cry, that great bull-headed raw-boned scamp, because the other man wouldn’t lend it to him. He would have blanks, gaps of thought or consciousness, when he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. And he’d come out of them to find himself following the other man about and staring at the coat.

“I think the other man was frightened. M’Cabe has shown him to me—just a glimpse—stout, bearded, with pale eyes, running round and round the island. M’Cabe thinks he must have chased him; he’d come out of his blank fits to fear the man would fall in and get the coat wet. ‘And how to dry it then,’ said M’Cabe, ‘I didn’t see.’ The other man never left off the coat; he clung to those mangy old fox-skins literally as you’d cling to life. You see him always, furred to his pale eyes, running clumsily among a white flutter of birds, and M’Cabe pursuing him, a man in a dream—a dream of warmth. . . . .

“He came out of this dream one day to find himself knee-deep in surf, the day blown clear as grey glass, and a whaler’s boat putting in to the island. He splashed to meet it, and a man hauled him aboard by the collar. M’Cabe’s very confused about this. He says they were very kind to him and fed him with rum with biscuit crumbs in it. They said, ‘Are there any more on ye?’ And he said ‘Yes;’ so they hunted every creek on the island, and thought he was dreaming till they found the two burrows under the boat. It wasn’t any use looking any longer; there was the island, bare as a child’s slate lung on the sea, and nothing near it but the gulls. So they tied the boat on astern and went. ‘This pore feller’s the only one saved,’ says someone, and someone else says, ‘Yes, and he wouldn’t have lasted long without he was kept warm. He’s pretty far gone as it is.’ With that, M’Cabe says, in a wild way, ‘It’s the other man who’s saved, and pore Bill M’Cabe, he’s a-lying froze on the island,’ and falls forward in a faint. Because, you see, looking down at himself, he’d seen he was all wrapped up in that old fox-fur coat.

“For some days after he’d come to aboard the whaler, he doesn’t seem to have done much or thought of much; he just lay in his bunk and shivered. They were very good to him; gave him blankets and the best food they had, and let him lie, for his mind was all in a fog. They spread the fur coat atop of the blankets, and whenever he’d lift his head or stretch his hand, there it would be. It didn’t worry him much at first, but as his strength came back, the fog in his brain lifted, all but a few patches. And he’d lie fingering the greasy fur, and wonder—and wonder—how it came there . . . .

“I’ve known men, bolder or weaker than M’Cabe, who’d have let those patches rest. But he couldn’t. He kept trying to blow the fog clear. He’d lie there, shaking under the fur coat, and fighting for memory till he was as weak as a rag, and the cook, who was especially good to him, would bring him a tin of bitter brown coffee and a hot stove-lid for his feet. . . . Those blank patches in his mind were like lead, like iron; he might wreck himself against them like a prisoner against a stone wall; his own brain, his own memory, would yield him nothing.

“How did he get the fur coat? What he struggled for was the complete picture; and in the centre, it was smeared with a great black brush. He could not remember.

“He saw himself and the other man in the boat, landing on the island, digging their burrows in the icy sand; saw again all the monotony of that suffering; saw them gathering eggs, whirling arms like windmills in the fog as they fought the great gulls. He could taste again the salty frost on his lips. He could see the other man running round the icy rocks, and a shadow of himself following anxiously. He could see the rime on the fur coat, the pockets bulging with eggs, a button that was loose and worried him for fear it would be lost. And he could see himself being hauled into the boat by the collar of that coat. But between these two—blackness.

“How did he get it? What did he do?

“Did the other man die? They didn’t find him. Did he take off the coat, leave it behind him, and fall from the rocks while scrambling for eggs? Did M’Cabe push him off? Did he kill him first and then take off the coat and throw the body into the sea? ‘He didn’t feel his end near and will the coat to me,’ says M’Cabe, ‘he’d have wished to be buried with it on, he was that jealous of it.’ Many and many a time I’ve sat there with him and gone over every inch of that dirty old coat, hunting for a cut, a tear, a stain that might help him to remember, and he in a sweat of fear. ‘Father, it’ll come in another minute,’ he’d say, ‘in a minute I’ll know.’ But he never knew, he doesn’t know. The fog never lifted. The man in the fur coat running round the rocks in the mist—himself being hauled into the boat by the collar of that coat: whatever lay between of accident, of murder, of death—whatever lay between, is locked in the mysterious archives of the brain, like a book, the covers of which he may never be permitted to open. He goes about his world, as it were, looking at his hands; and he does not know if they are clean, or if there is on them—blood.”

Father John sat silent, staring at the fire, and his hosts were silent also; until at last Royce rose leisurely, opened a drawer, and took therefrom a bundle of cheroots. “I think you are all agreed,” he said, “as to whom these belong?”

A chorus of assent and admiration rose on the words, and Royce leaned over and clapped Father John on the shoulder. “I didn’t know you had it in you, Padre,” he said.

“But your mechanism was a little too apparent,” said Morris jealously, “and I know where you got your setting from. It’s in here—” He turned and groped in the bookcase.

“When I went fishing with you a few score years ago,” put in Connor, “we’d limit the righteous increase to fifty per cent. I’d like to know how much ye tacked on to that fur coat. How many perch do ye reckon to a salmon now? Far as we go, boys,” he said, looking sadly at the cheroots, “ye can trust Holy Church to go one further. And I thought Jack that innocent, I tried me rabbuts on him.”

Royce grinned into Father John’s entirely bewildered face. “I don’t want to know the percentage. I’ve enjoyed a good yarn so well told that it took me in at first until you made it a little bit too effective. A bundle of these,” he went on, flourishing the cheroots, “always goes to the most successful liar of the evening. And I don’t think,” he finished gracefully, “that we’ve any of us a doubt as to who that is to-night . . .”

A noise at the door made him turn—made Father John pause with his mouth open and his hand outstretched in denial or acceptance. They heard the servant’s voice raised indignantly, and a short scuffle in the hall. Then the door opened and a girl ran into the room; a rough girl from the river front, with a shawl over her shoulders and the rain lying like a net of pearls on her solid flaxen hair. She ran to the priest like a dog, and caught his cassock with her square tanned hands, and began to wail, strangely, softly.

“Father, Father,” she besought him, “come to M’Cabe. O, come quick to poor M’Cabe. He’s remembered. . . . .”

THE STOVE

“I’ll be back the third day at latest with the doctor. I’ve left you wood enough for three days and more and you’ve grub for a month.” Garth looked at her anxiously; his strong mouth twitched. Suddenly he leaned forward and brushed her cheek lightly with his yellow beard. “I—hate to leave you, little girl,” he said, with a gentleness not common with him, “but I guess it’s Derek’s only chance.”

“Of course you must go. It’s Derek’s only chance.” Dorette faced him steadily. She was pale, slight, sleepy-eyed, but wilderness born and bred, for all that; one guessed a spirit of steel in that fragile sheath. She finished wistfully: “There’ll be nothing for me to do—nothing, but—wait.”

“Only look after yourself and keep the stove up.”

“I’ll do it. And you—if you meet Maxime . . . .”

Rage blazed suddenly in her brother’s eyes. The barrel of his rifle gleamed blue as he gripped it. “If I meet Maxime,” he said, through his teeth, “it’s a finish for him or for me!”

He turned about without another word, and swung down the forest trail on his long run to Mandore.

Dorette watched him until he was no more than a dark shadow among the heavy blue shades that hung from spruce to spruce like tangible banners. All life, all sound, all motion seemed to go with him. Mile after mile, she knew, on each side of her was nothing but the same silence, the same stillness, league after league of the desolate fir forest of the North. She went into the cabin and bolted and barred the door behind her, as if the solitude were an enemy which she must keep out.

The cabin was a pleasant place. The walls were sheathed in red cedar, and there were fur rugs on the floor, red curtains at the windows. In the centre of the larger of the two rooms into which the cabin was divided stood the great iron stove, in winter the source of their very life.

Its voice filled the cabin with a roar like the forever unsatisfied roaring of the wind and sea—a hungry voice. Dorette swung open the heavy door, wincing from the furnace-glory within, as she flung on more wood. That was her one occupation until Garth came back—feeding the stove.

She went to one of the bunks—like the bunks of a ship—that were built on the wall behind the stove, and looked in.

Derek, her younger brother, lay there without sense or motion, as he had lain ever since the sergeant of police and Garth had carried him in and laid him there. He drowsed between life and death, shot through the body. Now and then he swallowed a little broth, but with no knowledge of the hand that fed him. She dared not touch him. There was nothing she could do for him but keep the cabin warm enough to sustain that flickering lamp of life till the doctor came, for the cold of that country kills like a sword.

Suddenly, clinging to the side of the bunk, she trembled. “If only you could speak to me, Derek,” she whispered. “If only I could hear your voice!”

But the only voice was the voice of the great stove.

Her mind painted for her the scene she had not witnessed—the hard men of the mines and the lumber camps, still men with formidable eyes, following Cain’s trail from Fort Dismay to Anisette; the end of the trail at a little lonely shack blinded in snow, ringed with watchful men; Derek pleading that Maxime might have “one more chance, boys;” the parley at the door, the shot coming from nowhere; men storming into the shack over Derek’s fallen body, and finding it empty; Maxime Dufour escaped again! She saw it all. Heard again Garth’s voice in hard-breathed sentences between shut teeth: “But he’s not goin’ to get away again. He’ll have to get food and shelter somewhere; and if it’s a thousand miles away, we’ll follow and shoot him down like the wolf he is!”

She glanced round, pale and shaken, thinking that still she heard that deep voice of bitter rage. But it was only the undertone of the roaring stove humming its angry song.

She busied herself about such duties as she could find. Twice she fed the stove from the pile of wood on the floor beside it. The fierce heat licked out at her each time, just as a savage beast will strike through the bars of his cage, and each time she shut the door with the sense of prisoning some lion-voiced living thing.

Her work was soon done. Everything in the cabin was tidied and tidied again. She glanced at the clock. Only an hour of the slow time had gone. Garth had only been gone an hour. She turned the clock with its face to the wall, took out a shirt she was making for Garth—red-and-black checked flannel, thick as felt—and stitched resolutely.

Her hearing, accustomed to the sound of the stove, as the ear adjusts itself to the thunder of a waterfall, was acute to catch the faintest noises. She heard the tiny sound of the thread passing through the flannel, the soft thud of snow slipping from the boughs of the forest, the least check and stumble in Derek’s shallow breathing. Each time she heard this last, her own heart checked and stumbled in tune with it. She held her own breath till her brother’s renewed its weak rhythm.

So the morning passed. In the afternoon, she found a snowshoe that needed re-stringing. Deftly as Montagnais she twisted the gut and wove the net.

It was dark sooner than she could have hoped. She needed no lamp. The stove filled the cabin with its glow. In the dark it became a beautiful and formidable thing, a shape of dull red, with a heart of lambent rose. She glanced at the little windows, sheathed thick with frost-ferns. It would be a cold night. Her thoughts went to Garth, then, with dread, to Maxime Dufour. She dragged her cot from the inner room, set it across the front of the stove, and lay down. The warmth was like a hand pressing on her eyelids.