Chapter XIII

At the appointed time Ivan packed his supplies for his journey across the narrow, rugged Peninsula in quest of help. He took three days’ rations, tied them up in Pete’s light caribou robe, that was in itself sufficient protection from even severe cold, and strapped the pack on his lean, well-muscled back. Pete gave him ungrudging respect as he watched his preparations. Here was a man: the sharp, upreaching white peaks appalled him not at all, and he would wrestle with the wilderness powers as bravely and as successfully as Pete himself. The light pack was as nothing to that lithe, tigerlike strength.

“Pete, I’m leaving you to take care of Mrs. Newhall,” he said simply. “I know you’ll do it—as you’ve done before. She’ll be wholly in your charge till I get back, and don’t let any harm befall her.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Pete assured him.

Ivan shook his lean shoulders carelessly, to settle the pack. “I won’t be back for three days,” he went on casually, with no emphasis whatever in his musical voice, “unless I choose to come back before—so I can’t look after her personally. But I might say that if any harm _did_ befall her, I would chase the man down, no matter what corner of the earth he fled to, keeping after him and after him till I got him. When I did get him——”

He paused, and Pete looked him squarely in the eyes. There was no doubt whatever that this man meant what he said, and no doubt of his reason for saying it. “That isn’t necessary, sir,” Pete told him stiffly.

“Well, I didn’t think it was, but I wanted you to understand, in case you were tempted. I am a man myself, and I know what temptation is.”

Pete’s eyes blazed. “Temptation of that kind doesn’t come to men of our race, unless they are perverts,” he said easily. He was somewhat pale, but he lit his pipe with a steady match as he spoke. “I don’t know about the inferior races.”

Ivan smiled inscrutably. It was impossible for him to be insulted by a man in Pete’s supposed station in life, simply because such insult implied equality that Ivan would never admit. He might punish Pete for insubordination or lack of proper respect; perhaps he might kick him back into his supposed place; but the words of an obvious inferior could never so much as ruffle his complacency. “At some other place and time—perhaps just before we sail—I’ll give you a chance to show whether the Anglo-Saxon is superior to the Mongol. It would be really diverting, for a moment. At present, both of us have work to do—you to take care of the camp and I to go after supplies.” His voice changed and softened, but it had never been perceptibly hard. “Keep up the hunt for caribou,” he directed. “The boys haven’t done so well lately. Take care of the meat and cure it as fast as possible.” Then he turned to say good-by to Dorothy.

He found her in an uncertain mood. She had overheard part of the significant conversation between Ivan and Pete—the first unfriendly words they had had so far—and she had been perplexed by a queer mixture of emotions. She was definitely betrothed to Ivan, she had made her bed and was resolved to lie in it, yet in this minor controversy she was unable definitely to take sides with her fiancé. When she tried to admire Ivan’s cold deadliness, she found herself defending Pete’s sturdy, Anglo-Saxon courage. When she tried to throw her sympathies to her betrothed, she found herself—to some degree, at least—championing Pete in her heart.

The thing puzzled her, and it mortified her too. At last she had to attribute it to race ties and race loyalty—matters with which she had never concerned herself particularly before.

She walked a short distance up the hill with Ivan; and her trust in herself and her love for him swept back to her to the full when he gave her a good-by kiss. What more could a woman ask in a lover than she had in him? A love which, though physical in character, would carry him to the ends of the earth for her, great personal charm, a brilliant intellect, great wealth and a finesse of breeding and manners that even the best of America—the Old South—could not surpass! This was all in addition to his genius, that which made him the envied of all the world.

“Take care of yourself, Ivan,” she told him with a plaintive sweetness that carried him off his feet. “You are all I have now. I have lost so much, and I couldn’t bear to lose you.”

They clung together, and then she watched him as he strode away up the hill. Sighing, she turned back to the camp.

She walked slowly, lost in her thoughts; and she halted on the hillside to look down at the camp. Instantly she found herself glowing with a kindly warmth that seemed to exude from her heart. There was an atmosphere of home about this rude camp. Indeed, for the time being, it _was_ home, shelter from the storm and the night. She was surprised at the familiar manner in which she found herself regarding it, as though she had lived here years and her happiness was bound up in it. She knew in an instant that the glow that pervaded her was nothing more or less than the primitive love of home.

She had got down to essentials out here. She had felt the threat of the elements and the malevolence of the night, and she had found that even this rude tent, with the fire smoldering without, was something to be infinitely thankful for. Besides, her happiness was bound up in it. Here she had definitely accepted Ivan’s love and given her own love in return. Yet she felt that she must not follow this thought to its logical conclusion, because it would only give rise to haunting doubts such as she had agreed to shut from herself forever. If her joy in the rude habitation was a mere matter of sentimental association only—that she loved it simply because she loved Ivan—she would not now be standing, glowing with pleasure, when Ivan was far away. Where one’s heart is, there is home—but to-day her heart should be far away, trudging the barren hills with Ivan. She had to admit that there was some other, intrinsic quality about the camp that endeared it to her.

She saw the low camp fire over which Pete bent, cooking breakfast. Fortune Joe—merely a native now, not the seer he had been last night—was cutting wood with lusty strokes. The tent was warm from the camp stove: the sharp wind menaced it in vain. Suddenly she knew she would be wholly comfortable and safe while Ivan was away. She felt inexplicably light-hearted.

Pete had her breakfast ready when she reached the camp, and his homely face glowed when he brought it to her. He had taken especial pains to-day—venison liver fried with bacon, coffee such as her colored mammy herself could make, brown flapjacks not too thick, served with maple syrup. His broad shoulders towered above her; and he was boyishly elated when he saw she was pleased.

The day wore on, and his care of her, his watchfulness, was a wonder. Although his work carried him far afield, he had cut fuel always ready for her hand in case the fire burned low; he personally superintended her meals, and he saw—with fine generalship—that at no time she was left alone with Pavlof and Fortune Joe. The latter Indian, he felt, was largely to be trusted; but he put no faith in the native priest.

When the day paled, and the dusk crept in from the sea, she appreciated his care more and more. She found an actual pleasure in watching his supper preparations, rejoicing in his agile movements, thrilled a little, in spite of herself, by the play of his back muscles under his heavy shirt; and she liked the way the fire’s glow reddened his homely, weather-beaten face. . . . Some one else she had known, long ago, had in this same manner squinted blue, friendly eyes in too bright light; and the pucker of his humorous mouth, as he worked, was familiar some way too.

He took special pains with her dinner. He made reflector biscuits, thin and light, to be served with marmalade; he pot-roasted a fine canvasback duck that Pavlof had decapitated with the pistol; he fried potatoes crisp and brown. He watched her devour every mouthful of her portion, then after he had remade the bed and built up the fire in the camp stove, he turned to the task of washing dishes. Pavlof and Joe, meanwhile, were cutting into strips for curing the caribou meat they had procured in the day’s hunting.

“I wouldn’t mind washing the dishes to-night,” Dorothy told him in a friendly tone. “Maybe you’d like to help the men take care of the meat——”

“Couldn’t think of it,” Pete returned. “If you’ll excuse my saying so—I suspect you’re not very experienced at it. But if you _should_ care to help me dry ’em——”

They made quite a little party out of washing and drying the metal plates and the crude, iron knives and forks. They talked easily, almost companionably, and the time passed surprisingly swiftly for them both. And soon it was deep dark, and night winds were blowing from the sea. This work done, the girl started to turn away.

But she halted; and he saw her girlish profile in the soft light of the camp fire. “Would you like to come and sit at the door of my tent a little while?” she asked. Her voice was somewhat tremulous; but she did not try to ask herself why. “I’m rather nervous to-night,” she went on hastily. “Perhaps that would make me feel more secure. Don’t if you have any camp work to do.”

Pete glanced about him. “Camp work is pretty well done, for to-night. I will smoke my pipe once at your tent door, if you don’t mind. Human companionship is very reassuring, very necessary in this North.”

She felt that he had expressed what she had groped for. “Anywhere, for that matter.”

“Yes. Anywhere.”

She went in and sat comfortably on her bed, while he sat at the tent mouth. They talked easily, surprisingly freely while the lesser stars were emerging, and his pipe paled and glowed and paled again in the gloom. She felt wholly secure and at peace.

“Sometimes there is a throwback in your speech, an accent or a choice of a word that interests me immensely, Pete,” she told him. “I don’t want to be curious—but curiosity is a very human trait, after all. Sometimes I’m caused to think that you must have known something very different from this—before you came here.”

“I did,” he answered quietly. “It’s nothing unusual, up here. This end of Alaska is a port of missing men. I don’t see why the police don’t look here first for them: a man who wants to get away finds himself up here before he knows it—or in South America.”

She could not question this. Her own husband had come here in flight; Ivan’s instinct had been to send him to South America. Yet she did not think that this man had ever been guilty of real wickedness. He did not appeal to her as that kind.

“And you are exiled from home?” she asked him bluntly. Yet there was no hint of vulgar curiosity in her tone. Pete knew that she asked because of sympathetic interest in him, such as is never resented by any normal human being on the broad earth. The night is too dark and the storm too wild for men to shut themselves away from human sympathy. He turned to her with a grateful smile.

“Forever. But I can blame no one but myself. I guess I simply couldn’t stand civilized existence. If you’d ask the trouble, I’d say—false standards.”

This had been the cause of Peter’s downfall too: false standards of which both Peter and herself had been guilty. “I’d know better, again,” she heard him say. “I’d never sacrifice my birthright again—waste all I have. But that’s always the song we exiles sing.”

It was the same with her, too. If she had to do it over again she would never barter away her birthright for a mess of pottage. She had had all possible opportunities for happiness, but together she and Peter had wasted them; and no matter what she tried to make herself believe, no matter what contentment she would ultimately find in Ivan’s arms, they could never come again. Tears flooded her eyes.

She dropped down further on to her bunk. The fire in the camp stove burned down to coals. She saw Peter knock out the ashes from his pipe—lightly, so as not to disturb her—and for an instant he stood, perfectly motionless, at her threshold. She was not afraid. A faint, pale glow through the air draft in the front of the stove showed him dimly, and something in the cast of the homely face, the half-obscured, dim, sober curl of his lips, suggested a tenderness that she had never, even in their most exalted moments, seen in the face of the magnificent man and genius to whom to-day she had given her promise. She had seen ardor, truly, longing and desire that bewildered her by its savage intensity; but she had never found real tenderness, innate instinctive chivalry. Every attention Ivan had ever paid her had been bent toward one end: that of winning her wholly and completely and in the way the Oriental wins his woman; he had never given her his soul’s silent homage. She felt, at that moment, that from causes beyond her ken this humble man had seen fit to give her a blessing; and in all their associations Ivan had never blessed her.

“Good night, Pete,” she told him simply.

“Good night, Mrs. Newhall.” His answer came soft and moving from the darkened threshold. “Sleep good.”

He meant that she need not be afraid of the dark. She could sleep soundly, knowing that no harm could befall her. Though he himself stayed in the dugout, this humble man would be on guard through the long, empty hours.

As she drifted at half-sleep she was carried back to the first happy months of her marriage with Peter. She remembered his enfolding arms, and in them she had felt the same security that blessed her now. There was an infinite, aching void; but at least she could sleep in peace and in knowledge of safety.