Chapter X

Dorothy found, to her great surprise, that the days of waiting passed rather swiftly. She slept long in the mornings on the comfortable, rudely contrived grass mattress that Pete had made for her; she played cards with Ivan, and made many little adventurous excursions into the wild with one or both of the two white men. Ivan was consideration itself, always willing to beguile her with his marvelous music, wooing her with his finesse of ardor, fascinating her in hours of talk with the intricacies of his brilliant intellect and of his complex, marvelously attractive personality. Work on the grave was postponed until such a time as the casket could be cared for.

Yet she owed a great deal to the head guide, too. In particular he watched out for her material comfort, superintending the preparation of her meals so that every cup of coffee, every succulent breast of ptarmigan was exactly to her taste, keeping her ever warm and dry, refilling her mattress every day with freshly cut grass and keeping the fire bright every morning in the camp stove for her to dress by. She could not deny to herself the comfort he was to her; but she attributed it merely to the fact that he was a strong arm in a savage land, a protection against the crude forces of the wilderness that might easily overwhelm her.

It was not so easy to explain the instinctive comradeship she felt for him. Of course he was the one man of her own race in the entire company, and here—far from the cities of men—bonds of race were revealed as of surprising strength. She was down to essentials, and here, at the continent’s end, race ties mattered quite as much as those of class, such as in any clime she would have established with Ivan. Race ties are basic, those of class insubstantial at best; and only realities could exist here where the storms swept in from the sea and the barrens were green under the gray sky. She did not believe for a moment that, had she met him in her own sphere, she would have taken any real personal interest in the head guide. Surely where class lines mattered at all he would have been merely a servant or else one of the great world of toil such as had always been beyond the restricted vista of her life. Surely in her own, well-ordered, graceful civilization—of which there was no finer in the entire world—she would have never concerned herself about him. Yet he lingered in her thoughts more than her class pride liked her to admit. It was stretching race ties rather far to attribute to them solely the pleasure she took in his slow, courteous speech, in the unfaltering brilliance of his smile. She was not a snob and she was glad to admit at last that he had qualities of courage and strength, manliness and chivalry that would carry him far in any land. Perhaps he lacked in superficial polish—though of this she saw little evidence—but not in the basic traits that make for superiority.

From Pete’s point of view the days went by in a single flash between the curtains of night; and he dreaded to his heart’s depth the hour certain to come when the _Warrior_ would roll in on the waves and carry Dorothy out of his life. His belief in her never faltered for an instant; she was and always had been the star of his East, the guiding beacon of his life.

His attitude toward Ivan was too complex ever to completely straighten out in his mind. In the first place he had deep admiration and unfaltering respect for this genius from the East. He was pleased and gratified by the man’s attitude toward Dorothy; his own most chivalrous instincts seemed reflected in the Russian. Yet sometimes a sudden, white flame, strange to his sight and puzzling to his heart, mounted and paled in the thin, almost-beautiful face; sometimes he was appalled and estranged by a spark in the almond eyes, a gesture of the white hands; and sometimes he caught a fleeting expression on the classic countenance that wakened, in his own heart, a sullen, almost a murderous rage. For all that this was his dream—a consummation for which he had scarcely, indeed, ever dared to dream—he had hours so bitter, so lightless, that it seemed the very vital processes of his life must falter and cease. Once, on bringing fresh fuel to the little camp stove in Dorothy’s tent, he found the girl in the Russian’s arms.

She had just yielded to his lips, and she was convinced—at the instant that Pete appeared at the threshold—that in Ivan her destiny of happiness was secure. The dark-red hue in her cheeks had been accentuated by the swift leap of the red wine of her veins, she was breathless and enraptured, and she turned in swift resentment as the flap of the tent was drawn aside. But she was instantly cold, inexplicably appalled, as she looked into Pete’s face.

She could not have explained why. The man looked drawn, as in the last stages of fatigue; but there was no conceivable excuse for her sense of shame, her strange drawing-in to herself and inability to emerge again into Ivan’s warmth. The mood was nothing that she would trace to Pete. Pete was only a guide, soon to be left alone on these windy shores that were his home. His coming had merely wakened her to a realization of some curious, complex attitude toward Ivan of which heretofore she had been unaware.

On leaving the tent Pete walked straight past the camp fire on to the hills. He was profoundly shaken and unnerved, not from amazement at what he had seen—he had realized that Ivan and Dorothy were virtually engaged—but at the narrow margin by which the girl had missed irrevocable disaster. It had not been by too wide a margin that he had restrained a mad, tragic impulse to leap into the tent and shatter the man’s life.

At that instant he had hated Ivan as he would hate a wolf that menaced his child. He forgot that the Mongol was within his rights, that he had shown himself a chivalrous gentleman in whom Dorothy had every chance of finding the happiness that Pete had prayed she might find. Only a primal hatred, a devouring, murderous wrath remained. He could only call it jealousy; certainly he could not justify it by a manly impulse to protect the girl from ravishment. She had gone into his arms because it was her wish and her need, and surely it did not lie with him, from henceforth, to stand guard over her kisses. He was of the dead past, and Ivan of the living present.

The upshot of it was that some of his self-confidence was shattered,—his belief that he could play this game through to its ironic end. He would be afraid of himself henceforth. Jealousy had been the direct cause of his downfall; he saw where it might easily shatter all he had built. It was no longer easy for him to be charitable to Ivan—not that the latter was in need of his charity—and the secret resentment that had begun to smolder in him might easily, on some little pretext, break into a murderous flame that would leave but ashes of the girl’s hopes. Sometime he might be tried beyond his endurance; and he was very mortal, after all.

Indeed he had already shown himself of murderous hue. Paul Sarichef could rise from out the river’s depths and testify to that. He owed it to Dorothy not to put too great trust in himself: the storm of his fatal temper had all but wrecked her life once before, and it might now destroy what little hope of the future he had left. In spite of the restraints of civilization, of beautiful home ties and exalted position, his brute passions had once carried him into murder. It was going a long way to trust them in a land that brought out, rather than suppressed, the lawless and the primitive, yet he had deliberately faced the most dangerous temptation. Surely it was better that the _Warrior_ return at once, and the last curtain fall on this drama beside the sea.

He spent a restless night after the incident, and his peace of mind had departed from him. For all that this was his last dream on earth—the only shadow of happiness that he dared to hope for—he felt that by all conscience he must cut it short. His trust in himself was shattered, and there was nothing for him now but to turn away from this camp where his love was and vanish among the desolate hills. His star would soon set, the tower of his only strength was tottering. Yet the hours passed, and he lay in his bunk, unable to reach up to this sacrifice of self. But if he had lost faith in himself, a higher, better faith had come to him in these years in the wild, and the basic prayer, the first and last cry of all mankind, came easily to his lips: “Oh, Lord, lead me not into temptation, and deliver me from evil!”

Yet it was a higher wisdom that temptation should come to him, in an unexpected form, before the day that he saw break over the eastern hills sloped down again to darkness.

The party of five had made serious inroads in the small caribou he had brought to camp, and partly with the idea of procuring fresh meat, and partly because he wanted to be alone with his bitter thoughts, Pete announced his intention of penetrating the interior on a hunting expedition. He wanted the rugged hills to himself to-day, and since Dorothy was lame from a stiff climb of the evening previous, it did not surprise him when she declined his invitation to go. Ivan, however, looked up from his book with heightened interest.

“I’m getting soft as mud from too much ease,” he said. “I believe I’ll go with you this morning. I believe I can crack down one of those caribou with my pistol.”

Pete stiffened slightly. “I don’t see how both of us can go, unless Mrs. Newhall wants to go too,” he said quietly, so not to be overheard by the two natives.

“True enough. It had slipped my mind for a minute. We’ll take the natives with us—I think it would be a good plan to kill several caribou, if we run into them, and try to cure them—in preparation for emergencies—and these men can help you carry the meat into camp. She’s safe enough by herself, isn’t she?”

“As safe as she could be anywhere in the world. None of the wild beasts of the region will come within miles of her, and there are no other humans.”

“I’ll stay and struggle with your book then, Ivan,” Dorothy said. “You four valiant hunters need not worry about me at all.”

Since Ivan insisted upon going, Pete welcomed the plan that the guides should come too; and not only for Dorothy’s sake but for his own. He could not tell what madness might be wakened in him should he venture alone with his rival into the solitudes. He was nervous, distraught, from the mental anguish of the night just gone; and the presence of the two guides would serve to keep him in bounds. Soon they filed away into the hills, Ivan leading with his pistol, then Pete, carrying his rifle, and the two Indians, unarmed except for their hunting knives, bringing up the rear.

They deployed like a squad of advancing infantrymen as they neared the first alder thicket, the two Indians remaining at the extreme right and following a deeply worn bear trail, like the ruts of an old road, that conducted them easily through the heavy barrier of brush; and Pete and Ivan seeking separate trails to the left. They were in file again when they reached the more or less open hillside, but because of greater skill at choosing the trail, the two natives were more than a hundred yards ahead of Ivan, and Pete was thirty yards farther in the rear.

At that instant Peter caught the unmistakable thumping sound of running caribou, and turning, he had a brief glimpse of a barren doe in the brush thickets behind. She had evidently lain quietly while the four men were passing, but catching the human smell that had streamed behind them, had leaped up and was seeking safety in flight. The animal was better than two hundred yards distant when Pete glimpsed her again, running in a great arc up the hill. She made the poorest kind of a target as she leaped through the scattered clumps of brush, but eager to procure meat as near camp as possible and not to miss any chances, and perhaps slightly startled and out of hand by the animal’s sudden appearance, Pete fired vainly at every opportunity. Whether or not he hit the animal at all he could not tell, for at the fourth shot she disappeared in the thicket almost opposite Ivan.

The echo of the rifle report rolled, dimmed, and was still, and the men stood in those queer, fixed attitudes that almost invariably follow any excitement. Presently Ivan beckoned and pointed into the brush thicket beside him.

“She’s right in here,” he called. “You must have got her that last shot. I hear her thrashing around.”

It seemed entirely probable that the deer had swept through the brush thicket unseen and had fallen wounded but a few yards from Ivan. Pete started to grope for further shells; Ivan peered into the brush.

It seemed to the head guide that, as he paused, he could hear faintly the rustle and stir in the brush that came so distinct to Ivan; and he was not greatly surprised to see the latter draw his pistol and begin to fire in evident excitement. He supposed, of course, that the man was merely putting the finishing touches to the fallen caribou. No blame could be laid on Pete that he did not call a warning; he did not distinguish the real identity of the creature in the thickets until it was too late.

It was not a dying caribou that thrashed the leafy branches back and forth. The animal that suddenly bounded out of the thickets was a bear cub of that season, and it was squealing in mortal agony from the pistol lead. There was no danger in him; he was less than knee height and was desperately seeking flight. But Pete knew, and the Indians, appalled on the hill above, knew too that a squealing cub means an enraged mother not far off.

And in the wink of an eye the great, shaggy dam came roaring out of the thickets like an avalanche,—straight toward the hapless Russian.

Fear-ridden though she was, the she-bear could not seek flight when her dying cub cried for help. This was simply the mother instinct, appearing in all creatures high and low, but particularly developed in these high, intelligent mammals, the grizzly bears. She charged with unspeakable ferocity and power, ears laid back against the burly head, fangs flashing, high shoulders rocking as the great, curved claws slashed through the moss. She was a huge beast—weighing more than a thousand pounds—and the power of those terrific muscles was beyond the wit of man to estimate. One blow of the great forepaw would shatter the most sturdy human body like an eggshell.

Ivan had never been in greater danger, nor was such conceivable. The two natives on the hill above instantly gave him up for lost and fled desperately, lest the enraged bear should turn on them. And in Pete’s mind two thoughts flashed like rockets,—one of the white, pure brilliance of a star, the other so strange and sullen and red, like the sun seen through the smoke of a forest fire, that it seemed beyond the pale of heaven-born mankind. At that instant Pete knew surely that he had only to hold his fire, and Ivan would be torn to pieces before his eyes. In one little second this man he had hated in his heart would be utterly destroyed, blasted and broken at the edge of the thicket; never again to hold Dorothy in his caressing arms; never to claim her lips; never to sail away with her back to the homeland, to light and love and happiness. He would be lost to the world as Pete himself was lost. He too would know the night’s cold, the storm yelling above him and the cold light of the stars.

No blame could be laid on himself for failure to stop the charge. He had but one shell in his gun, and he might have sore need of that in his own defence. From the position in which he stood it was a doubtful shot at best, not because he could not hit the great form of the bear, but because likely he could not reach her vitals. Any other wound save to the brain or vertebræ would only enrage her further: even a shot to the heart would likely permit her some seconds of raging, slashing destruction. Ivan was firing desperately with his pistol, and maddened by many minor wounds, it was wholly probable that the bear would turn toward Pete after she had struck her first enemy to the earth. In that case the guide’s only hope would lie in saving his one shell for a shot between the glowing eyes or into the throat at close range; there would be no time or chance to procure other shells from his pocket and reload his rifle.

Yet at the same instant that this knowledge came to him, his love for Dorothy commanded him as never before. It was tried in the crucible of his being, and the gold was left and the baser metals burned away. Her happiness had been his pilot star until now, and he must follow it yet even though it led him to his own destruction. Would he let his own base passions blur his sight and blind him to its beauty, lead him from the one course of manhood and decency over which it beckoned? Perhaps she loved this man, and thus he must fight for him just as he would fight for her.

These two opposing impulses, and all the thoughts that centered upon them flashed to his consciousness in the twinkle of an eye. At such times the brain moves like lightning, darting from cloud to cloud, at a speed unguessed; and the bear had not completed one forward leap between the time that Pete first saw her and that in which he knew his certain, immutable course. The light and the shadow had battled in his being, for one epochal instant of struggle; and then everything was suddenly clear and bright as if the sun had come out and showed him a wide, straight road. The infinite complexities of human existence were suddenly clear as light. He wondered that he had ever been confused.

His gun sprang to his shoulder. He looked along the barrel. The bear had reared up, preparing to strike, and at this range Pete could hardly miss the huge form: the question was whether or not he could reach a vital place. But at the crack of the rifle the roaring bear pitched forward, in unearthly silence, in the moss.

Pete had shot somewhat to one side of where he had aimed, but by good fortune the bullet had shattered the vertebræ and cut the spinal column. A great wilderness power was laid low, and she would not rise again. The rest was like a dream: Ivan shuddering, then pocketing his pistol; the fleeing forms of the natives; the hills unchanged against the gray clouds. This man was no coward—this son of Asia—and he was able to smile faintly as he turned to his rescuer.

“That was a good shot, Pete,” he said in a voice that hardly trembled. “I owe you some extra days’ pay for that. A few jumps more, and I’m afraid we’d have had two handsome gentlemen to carry back to Georgia, instead of one.”

But Pete scarcely heard. He was swept with exultation, not at the successful shot he had made, but at his sudden freedom from the dominance of his own passions. He need no longer fear his impulses. He had escaped from himself and had come out beyond, true to his ideals and his heritage of chivalry and manhood. He would not jeopardize Dorothy’s happiness by any rash, selfish act; he could play the game through, gain what happiness he could, and then wish her well as she sailed away and left him to his waste places, the cruel passion of the elements and the scourge of the storm.