Chapter XXIV: The Woman's Way

When he came to, it was from the bite and sting of the terrible white whisky of the North, being poured down his throat by a rude, generous hand.

"Aye; he's no' dead," rumbled a voice like unto a bear's growl. "He lappit the liquor though his eye's closed. Hoot, man! Ye take it in like mother's milk."

"Have done, Uncle Duncan," warned another voice--the bold, free voice of the girl, Reivers in his semi-consciousness made out. "'Tis a sick man. Don't give him the whole bottle."

"Let be, let be," grumbled the big voice, but nevertheless Reivers felt the bottle withdrawn from his lips. "'Tis no tender child that a good drink of liquor would hurt that we have here. Do you not note that mouth and jaw? I'm little more pleased with the look of him than with yon thing in the snow."

"'Tis a sick, helpless being," said the girl.

The big voice rumbled forth an oath.

"And what have we--you and I--to do with sick, helpless beings? Are we not on the trail to find Shanty Moir, who is working your father's mine, wherever it is, and there take vengeance on said Shanty for your father's murder, as well as recover your own property? Is this a trail on which 'tis fit and well we halted to nurse and care for sick, helpless beings? Blood of the de'il! An unlucky mess! What business has man to be sick and ailing on the Winter trail here in the North? 'Tis the law of Nature that such die!"

"And do you think that law will be followed here?" demanded the girl.

"Were I alone, it would," retorted the man. "Our task is to find the place of Shanty Moir and do him justice."

"And the hospitality of the MacGregors? Is it like Duncan Roy to see beast or man needing or wanting help without stretching his hand to help it?"

The man was silent.

"Do you think any good could come to you or me if we turned our hearts to stones and let a sick man perish after he had fallen helpless on our hands?"

"I tell you what I think, Hattie MacGregor," broke out the big voice. "I think there is trouble travelling as trail-fellow with this man. I see trouble in the cut of his jaw and the lines of his mouth. There is a fate written there; he's a fated man and no else, and nothing would please me better than to have him a thousand days mushing away from me and never to see him again. Trouble and trouble! It's written on him plain.

"Who is he? Whence came he? Why is he alone, dogless, foodless, weaponless, here in these Dead Lands! 'Tis uncanny. Blood o' the de'il! He might be dropped down from somewhere, or more like shot up from somewhere--from the black pit, for instance. It's no' proper for mere human being to be found in his condition out this far on the barrens, with no sign of how he came or why?"

"Have no fear, Uncle Duncan," laughed the girl. "He's only a common man."

Reivers opened his eyes, chuckling feverishly.

"You'll pay for that 'common,' you spitfire, when I've tamed you," he mumbled.

"Only a common man, Uncle Duncan," repeated the girl steadfastly, "and I've a bone to pick with him when he's on his feet, no longer helpless and pitiable as he is now."

Again Reivers laughed through the haze of fever. He did not have the strength to hold his eyes open, but his mind worked on.

"Helpless! Did you notice the incident of the rock?" he babbled. "Bare, primitive, two-handed man against a man with a gun. Who won?"

"Aye," said the man seriously, "we owe you thanks for that. For a helpless man, you deal stout knocks."

"And speak big words," snapped the girl. "Now, around with the teams, Uncle Duncan, and back to camp. There's been talk enough. We must take him in and shelter and care for him, since he has fallen helpless and pitiable on our hands. We owe him no thanks. Can you not lay his head easier--the boasting fool! There; that's better. Now, all that the dogs can stand, Uncle, for I misdoubt we'll be hard-pressed to keep the life in him till we get him back to camp."

Reivers heard and strove to reply. But the paralysis of fever and weakness was upon him, and all that came from his lips was an incoherent babbling. In the last vapoury stages of consciousness he realised that he was being placed more comfortably upon the sledge, that his head was being lifted and that blankets were being strapped about him.

He felt the sledge being turned, heard the runners grate on the snow; then ensued an easy, sliding movement through space, as the rested dogs started their lope back through the valley. The movement soothed him. It lulled him to a sensation of safety and comfort.

The phantasmagoria of fever pounded at his brain, his eyes and ears, but the steady, swishing rush of the sleigh drove them away. He slept, and awoke when a halt was called and more whisky forced down his throat. Then he slept again.

There were several halts. Once he realised that he was being fed thin soup, made from cooked venison and snow-water. That was the last impression made on remaining consciousness. After that the thread snapped.

The sledges went on. They left the valley. Through the jumbled ridges of the Dead Lands they hurried. They reached a stretch of stunted fir, and still they continued to go. At length they pulled up before a solid little cabin built in a cleft of rocks.

The Snow Burner was carried in and put to bed. After a rest Duncan Roy and the fresher of the dogteams took the trail again. They came, back after a day and a night, bringing with them a certain Père Batiste, skilled in treating fevers and wounds of the body as well as of the soul. The good curé gasped at the torso which revealed itself to his gaze as he stripped off the clothes to work at the wound.

"If le bon Dieu made him as well inside as outside, this is a very good man," he said simply; and Duncan MacGregor smiled grimly.

"God--or the de'il--made him to deal stout knocks, that's sure," he grunted. "'Tis a rare animal we have stripped before us."

"A rare human being--a soul," reproved Father Batiste. "And it is le bon Dieu who makes us all."

"But the de'il gets hold of some very young," insisted the Scotchman.

Father Batiste stayed in the cabin for two days.

"He was not meant to die this time," he said later. "It will be long--weeks perhaps--before he will be strong enough to take the trail. He will need care, such care as only a woman can give him. If he does not have this care he will die. If he does have it he will live. Adieu, my children; you have a sacred, human life in your hands."

And he got the care that only a woman could give him. For the next two weeks Duncan MacGregor watched his niece's devoted nursing and gnawed his red beard gloomily.

"Trouble--trouble--trouble!" he muttered over and over to himself. "It rides around the man's head like a storm-cap. Hattie MacGregor, take care. Yon man will be a different creature to handle when he has the strength back in his body."

At the end of a week Reivers awoke as a man wakes after a long, fever-breaking slumber, weak and wasted, yet with a grateful sense of comfort and well-being. Before he opened his eyes he sensed by the warmth and odours of the air that he was in a small, tight room, and in a haze he fancied that he had fallen in the tepee of Tillie, the squaw. Then he remembered. He opened his eyes.

He was lying in a bunk, raised high from the floor, and above the foot of the bed was a small window, shaded by a frilled white curtain. Reivers lay long and looked at the curtain before his eyes moved to further explore the room. For once, long, long ago, he had belonged in a world where white frilled curtains and frills of other kinds were not an exception.

In his physically washed-out condition his memory reached back and pictured that world with uncanny clearness, and he turned from the curtain with a frown of annoyance to look straight into the eyes of Duncan Roy, who sat by the fireplace across the room and studied him from beneath shaggy red brows.

Reivers looked the man over idly at first, then with a considerable interest and appreciation. Sitting crouched over on a low stone bench, with the light of the fire and of the sun upon him, MacGregor resembled nothing so much as an old red-haired bear. He was short of leg and bow-legged, but his torso and head were enormous. His arms, folded across the knees, were bear-like in length and size, and his hair and beard flamed golden red.

There was no friendliness in the small, grey eyes which regarded Reivers so steadily. Duncan MacGregor was no man to hide his true feelings. Reivers looked enquiringly around.

"She's stepped outside to feed the dogs," said MacGregor, interpreting the look. "You'll have to put up with my poor company for the time being."

"I accept your apology," said Reivers and turned comfortably toward the wall.

A deep, chesty chuckle came from the fireside.

"Man, whoever are you or whatever are you, to take it that Duncan MacGregor feels any need to apologise to you?"

The words were further balm to Reivers's new-found feeling of comfort and content.

"Say that again, please," he requested drowsily.

Laughingly the giant by the fire repeated his query.

"Good!" murmured Reivers. "I just wanted to be sure that you didn't know who I am--or, rather, who I was?"

"Blood o' the de'il!" laughed the Scotchman. "So it's that, is it? Tell me, how much reward is there offered for you, dead or alive? I'm a thrifty man, lad, and you hardly look like a man who'd have a small price on his head."

"Wrong, quite wrong, my suspicious friend," said Reivers. "I see you've the simple mind of the man who's spent much time in lone places. You jump at the natural conclusion. When you know me better you'll know that that won't apply to me."

"Well," drawled the Scotchman good-naturedly, "I do not say that it looks suspicious to be found a two-days' march out in the Dead Lands, without food, dog, or weapons, with an empty belly and a hole through the shoulder, but there are people who might draw the conclusion that a man so fixed was travelling because some place behind him was mighty bad for his health. But I have no doubt you have an explanation? No doubt 'tis quite the way you prefer to travel?"

"Under certain circumstances, it is," said Reivers.

"Aye; under certain circumstances. Such as an affair with a 'Redcoat,' for instance."

"Wrong again, my simple-minded friend. You're quite welcome to bring the whole Mounted Police here to look me over. I'm not on their lists, or the lists of any authority in the world, as 'wanted.'"

"For that insult--that I'm of the kind that bears tales to the police--I'll have an accounting with you later on," said MacGregor sharply. "For the rest--you'll admit that you're under some small obligation to us--will you be kind enough to explain what lay behind you that you should be out on the barrens in your condition? I'll have you know that I am no man to ask pay for succouring the sick or wounded. Neither am I the man to let any well man be near-speaking with my ward and niece, Hattie MacGregor, without I know what's the straight of him."

Reivers turned luxuriously in his bunk and regarded his inquisitor with a smile.

"Poor, dainty, helpless, little lady!" he mocked. "So weak and frail that she needs a protector. Never carries anything more than an eight-inch knife up her sleeve. You do right, MacGregor; your niece certainly needs looking after. She certainly doesn't know how to take care of herself.

"But about obligations, I don't quite agree with you. Didn't you owe me a little something for that turn with the bearded fellow? Not that I did it to save the girl," he continued loudly, as he heard the door open behind him and knew that Hattie MacGregor had entered. "What was she to me? Nothing! But I was hungry. I needed food. But for that our black-bearded friend might now have been wandering care-free over the snows, a red-haired woman still strapped to his sledge, his taste seeming to run to that colour, which mine does not."

Hattie MacGregor stilled her uncle's retort with a shake of her golden-red head, crossed to the fireplace and took up a bowl that was simmering there, and approached the bed. Reivers looked at her closely, striving to catch her eye, but she seated herself beside him without apparently paying the slightest attention. She spoke no word, made no sign to welcome him back from his unconsciousness, but merely held a spoonful of the steaming broth up to his lips.

There was a certain dexterity in her movements which told that she had performed this action many, many times before, and there was nothing in her manner to indicate her sensibility of the change in his condition. Reivers opened his mouth to laugh, and the girl dexterously tilted the contents of the spoon down his throat.

"You fool!" he sputtered, half strangling.

He strove to rise, but her round, warm arm held him down. Over by the fireplace Duncan MacGregor slapped his thigh and chuckled deep down in his hairy throat, but on the face of his niece there was only the determined patience of the nurse dealing with a patient not yet entirely responsible for his behaviour.

She was not surprised at his outbreak, Reivers saw. Apparently she had fed him many times just so--he utterly helpless and childish, she capable and calm. Apparently she was determined to sit there, firm and patient, until he was ready to take his broth quietly and without fuss.

Indignantly he raised his hands to take the bowl from her; then he opened his eyes wide in surprise. He was so weak that he could barely lift his arms, and when she offered him a second spoonful he swallowed it without further demur.

"Ah, well, we'll soon be able to take the trail again," drawled MacGregor mockingly. "We're getting strong now; soon we'll be able to eat with our own hands."

"Hold tongue, Uncle," snapped the girl, and continued to feed her patient.

"I suppose I must thank you?" taunted Reivers, when the bowl was empty.

Hattie MacGregor made no sign to indicate that she had heard. She put the bowl away, felt Reivers' pulse, laid her hand upon his forehead--never looking at him the while--arranged the pillows under his head, tucked him in and without speaking went out. Reivers' eyes followed her till the door closed behind her.

"The little spitfire!" he growled in grudging admiration; and Duncan MacGregor, by the fire, laughed till the room echoed.