Over the Northern Border
It was a fool thing to do, but Jack Trainor did it. In order to help keep his sister's husband from going to jail for robbery, Jack agrees to ride out on the getaway horse, drawing suspicions away from his brother-in-law and onto himself. But eluding the posse that follows him in hot pursuit turns out to be much harder than Jack had thought. And he was not prepared to survive the winter in the Canadian wilderness.
Now not only a fugitive, but lost, Jack is rescued by a trapper in the mountains. Over the course of some months, the two men become companions, as Jack decides to repay the man's kindness by helping him with his written correspondence. But this situation soon puts Jack in unexpected difficulty.
This is a classic western about the honor and friendships of the men of the frontier.
Fredrick Schiller Faust (1892-1944) was born in Seattle, Washington. He wrote over 500 average-length books (300 of them Westerns) under nineteen different pseudonyms, but Max Brand—“the Jewish cowboy,” as he once dubbed it—has become the most familiar and is now his trademark. Faust was convinced very early that to die in battle was the most heroic of deaths, and so, when the Great War began, he tried to get overseas. All of his efforts came to nothing, and in 1917, working at manual labor in New York City, he wrote a letter that was carried in
Faust wanted to write—poetry. What happened instead was that Davis provided Faust with a brief plot idea, told him to go down the hall to a room where there was a typewriter, only to have Faust return some six hours later with a story suitable for publication. That was “Convalescence,” a short story that appeared in
The one element that is the same in Zane Grey’s early Western stories and Faust’s from beginning to end is that they are psycho-dramas. What impact events have on the soul, the inner spiritual changes wrought by ordeal and adversity, the power of love as an emotion and a bond between a man and a woman, and above all the meaning of life and one’s experiences in the world conspire to transfigure these stories and elevate them to a plane that shimmers with nuances both symbolic and mythical. In 1920 Faust expanded the market for his fiction to include Street & Smith’s
In 1921 Faust made the tragic discovery that he had an incurable heart condition from which he might die at any moment. This condition may have been in part emotional. At any rate, Faust became depressed about his work, and in England in 1925 he consulted H. G. Baynes, a Jungian analyst, and finally even met with C. G. Jung himself who was visiting England at the time on his way to Africa. They had good talks, although Jung did not take Faust as a patient. Jung did advise Faust that his best hope was to live a simple life. This advice Faust rejected. He went to Italy where he rented a villa in Florence, lived extravagantly, and was perpetually in debt. Faust needed his speed at writing merely to remain solvent. Yet what is most amazing about him is not that he wrote so much, but that he wrote so much so well!
By the early 1930s Faust was spending more and more time in the United States. Carl Brandt, his agent, persuaded him to write for the slick magazines since the pay was better and, toward the end of the decade, Faust moved his family to Hollywood where he found work as a screenwriter. He had missed one war; he refused to miss the Second World War. He pulled strings to become a war correspondent for
Faust’s Western fiction has nothing intrinsically to do with the American West, although he had voluminous notes and research materials on virtually every aspect of the frontier.
Those who worked with Faust in Hollywood were amazed at his fecundity, his ability to plot stories. However, for all of his incessant talk about plot and plotting, Faust’s Western fiction is uniformly character-driven. His plots emerge from the characters as they are confronted with conflicts and frustrations. Above all, there is his humor—the hilarity of the opening chapters of
Too often, it may appear, Faust’s plots are pursuit stories and his protagonists in quest of an illustrious father or victims of an Achilles’ heel, but these are premises and conventions that are ultimately of little consequence. His characters are in essence psychic forces. In Faust’s fiction, as Robert Sampson concluded in the first volume of
Faust’s finest fiction can be enjoyed on the level of adventure, or on the deeper level of psychic meaning. He knew in his heart that he had not resolved the psychic conflicts he projected into his fiction, but he held out hope to the last that the resolutions he had failed to find in life and in his stories might somehow, miraculously, be achieved on the higher plane of the poetry that he continued to write. Yet Faust is not the first writer, and will not be the last, who treasured least what others have come to treasure most. It may even be possible that a later generation, having read his many works as he wrote them (and they are now being restored after decades of inept abridgments and rewriting), will find Frederick Faust to have been, truly, one of the most significant American literary artists of the 20th century. Much more about Faust’s life, his work, and critical essays on various aspects of his fiction of all kinds can be found in
Chapter 1
“It ain’t hard at all,” said the sheriff. “Most likely he thinks that nobody seen him because of the dark. And he’s right when he thinks that nobody could make out his face. But the point is that there’s lots of ways of identifying a gent, and one of the ways is by the hoss that he rides. And old Jeffreys is willing to swear that he made out the gray gelding of Bill Vance, the high-headed fool of a hoss that young Vance has been riding around lately. So all I’m going to do, boys, is to wait till the moon comes up and then slip out to the Vance place. The reason that I want you fellows to come along is because I never can tell when the Vance people will put up a fight. They got the spirit of a load of dynamite, and any old spark is lightning enough to set them off and blow the tar out of everything within reach.”
“Till the moon comes up?” queried one of his men. “Well, that won’t be more’n half an hour, I guess, at the most and…”
But Jack Trainor, sitting in the next room of the hotel and hearing every syllable that was spoken because the wall between was of a thickness hardly rivaling cardboard, waited to hear no more. He had made out, from what passed before in their talk, that the sheriff had gathered the half dozen men in the next room to conduct an inquiry into the stage robbery that had occurred the night before. And now he had been struck rigid with horror by the mention of the name of Bill Vance, his brother-in-law.
Trainor had left Bill’s house the previous evening after a visit of a fortnight. It seemed impossible that young Vance should have committed the robbery, but on second thought Jack remembered that his host had been absent during the entire first half of the night, pleading a business call across the hills. Moreover, he knew that Vance was desperately hard pressed for money. He had made considerable loans to Bill in the past, but all that he could raise on a cowpuncher’s pay had been little enough, considering the needs of a growing family. However that might be, he had no time to argue about possibilities. The important thing for him to do was to rush back to Bill’s house and learn the truth from him and deliver the warning about the coming of the sheriff.
That was what he did. Five minutes later he was out of the hotel and on his horse galloping hard along the road. As he swung out of the saddle before the door, he saw the white rim of the moon slide up above the eastern hills. The house was black. The family slept. And yet, at the first rap at the door, there was an answering stir.
Did a guilty conscience make the sleep of Bill Vance light?
“It’s me, Bill,” he called softly, and a moment later the door was opened to him by his brother-in-law, the moonlight shining fully on his face and making him seem old and pale.
“What’s wrong?” gasped out Vance.
“How d’you know that there’s anything wrong?” demanded Jack Trainor sternly. “Who said that there was anything wrong?”
“I don’t know…only…”
“Bill,” commanded Jack, “you got to tell me the whole truth. Did you stick up the Norberry stage?”
There was another gasp from the wretched Bill. Confession of his guilt, and his despair for the consequences of his act that now confronted him, showed at once in his face.
“It was only because I…” He stopped short. “Who says I did it?” he asked.
“You’re guilty, Bill,” said Trainor. “And they know it. They know that the gent that stuck up the stage rode a gray horse. They recognized that high-headed young gray of yours, that Mike horse that you been riding lately.”
“They co-couldn’t,” stammered Bill. “It was dark and…”
“You did it, then?”
“Lord help me,” groaned Bill.
“Better start by helping yourself. Bill, they’ll be here in twenty minutes. They were to start by moonrise and then…”
“I’ll stay here.”
“You’re crazy, Bill. That’ll be ruin. They’ll get you sure. You ain’t got the face to stand up before a jury. They’ll see through you as clear as day.”
“I don’t care what they do to me. It would be ruin if I ran for it. What would become of Mary and the kids if I ran for it?”
The heavy truth of that statement bore in upon the mind of Jack Trainor. He regarded his sister’s husband bitterly.
“Does Mary know that I’ve come back?” he asked.
“No. She’s sound asleep, I guess.”
“Then I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll take the gray horse and make a getaway. You stay here where you are and, if they ask, tell them that I was out last night, you don’t know where, and that I’ve gone out again tonight, and that both times I took the gray horse. Understand?”
“Good Lord, Jack, you don’t mean that you’ll take the crime on your own head? Man…”
“Shut up that talk. We ain’t got the time for it. You got a family, and it’s the needs of the family that made you do it…but you’ll never try it again, I guess.”
“Never, so help me…”
“Help yourself, Bill,” said the other sternly. “You been looking around to the Lord and other folks for help long enough.”
“But I can’t let you…I’m not a low-enough hound to let you step in and take the blame for this.”
“You got to let me. You got three people depending on you. I got none.”
“But Mary knows that you didn’t leave the house…”
“She’ll let it go as I want her to do…she knows that the family mustn’t be ruined.”
“But this may wreck your life, Jack.”
“My life is young. If it’s wrecked now, I got time to make a new life over again. Stop arguing and help me get the gray and throw a saddle over him.”
Ten minutes later, on the back of gray Mike, he wrung the hand of his brother-in-law.
“They’ll think that I started back for town and registered for a room at the hotel just as a bluff. Meantime, I’m going to ride for Jerneyville and show myself, and, when I get through at Jerneyville, there won’t be any doubts about me being the man that done the stick-up of the stage last night. Good bye, Bill. Go straight. And put every cent of that money you got by the hold-up in such a place that it will be found and returned to them that lost it. A gent can’t get on by taking things that he don’t own by rights. So long!”
And, as he gave the gray his head, they could hear the drumming of many hoofs far down the road coming out from town. But Jack Trainor regarded them not. He had under him a fresh horse with a fine turn of speed, and, by the time the posse had finished making its examination of Bill Vance, he would be so far away that they could never hope to head him off without a change of horses.
So he swung toward Jerneyville, keeping the gray well in hand, and at an easy pace cantered down the main street of the village at midnight. There he picked out the bank, which was well guarded, he knew, dismounted, broke in the back door, making noise enough to attract the attention of an army, and, of course, he was promptly encountered by the watchman.
He knew that worthy, a fat and harmless fellow with a smile as bland as a summer sky. He had often thought that thieves who could not handle such a watchman as he must be stupid villains, indeed. Now Trainor tested his theory and found that it was perfectly workable. He stopped the first yell of the fat watchman with a blow of his fist and then knocked the gun out of the hand of the other.
It exploded as it struck the floor, while the half-strangled shriek of the fat man echoed through the village: “Murder! Robbery! Jack Trainor is robbing the bank!”
With that hubbub behind him, and the grim knowledge that he had certainly established his reputation as a criminal and been identified as such, Trainor hurried outdoors, sprang into his saddle, and let the eager gray show some of the speed that had been going into the steady pull at the bit earlier in the night.
Chapter 2
The cry that the fat man raised in the bank at Jer-neyville proved to be louder and longer than Trainor had dreamed. It struck up echoes that, so it seemed, raised men out of the ground for hundreds of miles. He rode southward at first, aiming at the Río Grande and safety in the confusion beyond that muddy little river. But the first four days brought twice that many brushes with pursuing posses.
The first day of his flight went by well enough. The second day it ceased to be a joke. The third day, hard pressed on two sides, he became a criminal in fact as well as in theory by stealing a horse, even though he left behind him the worn-out gray of twice the value of the animal he took in exchange. The law had no time to waste on such trifles as this. The point was that he now rode on property that was not his. The written law of the land would send him to prison for the act, and the unwritten law of the Southwest would hang him for the same reason.
It was on the third night that he decided that the trail southward was growing entirely too hot for him. The trouble was that they knew exactly what his goal was. 200 miles away flowed the Río Grande, but every mile of the 200 would be policed with men ready to shoot to kill.
There was another border to the north, ten times as far away, but, since his pursuers never dreamed that he would strike in that direction, he might safely reach it. So that night he turned his pinto north and west and rode like mad for the railroad. Before dawn he was beside the tracks. In the gray of the early morning light he was lying stretched on the rods of a thundering freight that shot him northward, covering a day’s ride for a horse in the space of a single hour.
Yet all was not smooth on that trip to the Northland. By no means! Before it ended, he knew the hardness of the fists of a brakeman, and many a shack knew the hardness of the quick fists of Jack Trainor. He knew other things, also, but, at the end of ten days of fighting and starving and freezing, with the bitter weather biting him more and more, he found himself at length flung from a speeding train that was roaring through a mountain pass.
He turned a dozen somersaults when he struck the ground, but he sat up, sound in body and bone, although sadly bruised. And then he watched the train thunder away out of view down the pass. He was left alone, half frozen, with the cold of an early winter night numbing his body, and the Canadian Rockies soaring up on every side toward the cold shining of the stars. And never in his life had he felt such loneliness, such a sense of utter helplessness. To him, home meant the wide silence of the desert with hills rolling softly against the horizon. Such monster forest trees as those that marched in ragged ranks up these mountainsides were almost like human beings to Jack Trainor.
Yet, he must trust to fortune to strike through those same dark and forbidding trees and attempt to find food, for he was desperately hungry. Thirty-six hours of exposure without food of any kind gave him the appetite of a wolf, and like a wolf he stalked up the slope among the trees, bent on finding game.
A rising moon made the cold visible, so to speak, and gave it teeth to pierce to the very heart of the scantily clad cowpuncher. He trudged on up hill and down dale, feeling that, if he paused, the cold would numb his muscles so that they could not be used. And yet there was no sign of life before him or on any side.
The white moonshine was displaced by an ugly dawn, for no sooner did the sun show its edge than the sky was covered by a mass of clouds driving rapidly before the wind, and the day came up dim with the storm howling through the trees. A sort of madness came on Trainor. He had put many a long mile behind him, and now he decided that there was no chance of coming across the habitation of man in this direction, for he had reached not the slightest sign of a trail in all the distance he had covered. Therefore, he determined to turn back toward the tracks. Only madness could have given him that determination, for he was long past the point where he had sufficient strength to bring him to the spot from which he started during the night. Moreover, even if he wished to get back, that was now becoming increasingly difficult, for whirls of snow began to appear on the wind, blowing through the branches above him softly, and spotting the solid black of the evergreens with white. This fall of snow was quickly transformed into such a downpouring as he had never dreamed of in his southland. It was like the descent of a myriad of gigantic moths flying down on noiseless wings and piling up on the ground.
Before an hour passed he was staggering through drifts knee high, where the wind had whipped and piled them on the edges of the open places. The air in front of him was filled with white. His senses began to reel; long since, he had lost all sense of direction. In fact, he had reached that point at which many a man would have given up, but pride kept him going. He could not admit defeat, no matter to what extreme he were pushed, and, just as he would have fought a human enemy to the bitter end, so he fought on mutely against weariness, cold, and devastating hunger.
Once he stumbled. He roused himself later to find that he had fallen into a profound sleep. And he was numb to the elbows and the knees. He got up and beat the circulation back in a frenzy, and then rushed blindly ahead, for he knew that, if he paused once again to rest in that fashion, the exhaustion of nearly three days without sleep would, combined with the cold, destroy him.
But now he found that his senses were swimming. He could not distinguish the way that he kept. Sometimes, he crashed into the trunks of trees. Sometimes, when he hooked an arm across his face to protect himself from the thicket that he seemed about to plunge into, he found that there was nothing but empty air and the rushing of the snow before him.
Every step he was taking now was straight away from the railroad. Indeed, ever since he started, save for a brief half hour, he had been working on a line due north from the tracks. And now a mere chance floored him, so greatly was he reduced. He slipped on a stone under the lee of a great tree, struck his head violently against the trunk, and collapsed to the ground. Had he possessed a tithe of his ordinary strength, he would not have minded that fall and blow on the head at all, but in his present condition of exhaustion it was enough to throw him into the deep oblivion of senselessness.
He was roused from that senselessness as from a profound sleep by a huge voice that called to him out of an immense distance. He smiled and shook his head. It seemed to him that someone was calling to him to get up and start a day’s work in the pitiless cold of the world—someone was asking him to leave a cozy bed.
But the voice thundered over him again. He felt himself being shaken. Cruelly he was wrenched to his feet. He was beaten and thumped, and ever that immense voice roared at him. Then suddenly the veil dropped from his eyes, and he beheld himself standing in the midst of a forest full of blowing snow with a monstrous man looming above him, pommeling him with one fist while with the other arm he held him erect, and all the while shouting to him to make him regain his senses.
That glimpse of the startling truth ended in a mist of blackness again, and he crumpled into a deep sleep once more. But, just before the sleep came on, he felt himself lifted and pitched over the shoulder of the stranger.
It seemed to him that a nightmare journey began. Sometimes, he was enduring another of those beatings. Again, he was being carried on by the giant, althoughthis was obviously folly. What man was large enough to carry him through such a bitter storm as this, while the wind plucked at them and swung them back and forth?
After that a longer sleep ensued, and it was broken, at length, with a sense of burning in his throat and burning, also, of his feet and his face and his hands. He opened his eyes and looked up. Brandy had been poured down his throat. He was swathed in hot blankets. He was lying beside a red-hot stove. Then, as his senses cleared still further, he saw above him the strange giant of the storm, black-bearded, with bright, bright eyes, rosy cheeks, and a tangle of uncombed hair. Out of his throat issued a great roar, that familiar voice of his dreams: “Hello…hello…hello!”
The voice fairly drowned the mind of Jack Trainor, but he managed to smile faintly. “I’m here, right enough,” he said.
At that, the big man slumped into a chair and heaved a great sigh. Jack saw that the other was on the point of collapse from exhaustion. Sweat was running down his face. The rosy cheeks were veined with purple from overexertion.
“Lord, Lord,” groaned the big man. “I thought that you’d never come ’round. I thought you was going…”
He did not finish his suggestion, but lolled back more heavily in his chair, laughing weakly and making a gesture to Jack to signify that all was well.
The man of the cattle ranges of the southland heaved himself up on his elbow and looked about him. He found that he was in a small cabin, the walls of which were of massive logs, with a small stove in the center, a bunk on one side, and guns,traps, and fishing tackle covering the walls. Plainly it was a trapper who had blundered upon him. Then it occurred to him with a start that he weighed a full 180 pounds.
“How far did you carry me?” he asked.
“Three miles…I guess,” gasped the other.
“Three miles?” echoed Jack, and then, looking more closely at his companion, he saw that it was indeed possible. The man was a giant, standing several inches above six feet, and weighing twenty or thirty pounds above 200—and all of this solid muscle.
But now the prostrate giant recovered himself. He rose from his chair and staggered to a corner from which he began to produce bacon and flour, and in a few minutes he had the beginnings of a meal smoking on top of the stove. As for Jack, he felt that, had he been 100 miles away and soundly asleep, his nose would have brought him these tidings of food and roused him.
Sitting up to throw back his covers, he found that he was astonishingly weak. He had to lean back against the side of the cabin again, and the big man, reeling with weakness as though from liquor, laughed joyously at him.
“The last mile pretty near finished me,” he declared. “I thought I was gone, my friend, I promise you. But I prayed to the good Lord. He gave me strength. And so here we are, both of us!” And he laughed again.
There was something at once so kindly and so childishly simple in what he said, and in his manner of saying it, that Jack felt his very heart warmed by the big man.
“Partner,” he said, and found that his voice was strangely small and husky, “you’ve saved my life.Nobody else that I know of could’ve carried me the way you carried me.”
“I?” said the other, shaking his head violently. “What I have done is nothing…nothing. But only think of the luck…that I saw the toe of your boot sticking up through the surface of the snow, and that I knew it was not a branch showing.”
Jack Trainor shuddered and caught his breath. Had he been as near to death as that? Had the snow entirely drifted over him?
He held out his hand to the big man. “What’s your name? I’m Jack Trainor.”
“And I, Joseph Bigot.”
“Joseph, before I come to the end of my life, I’ll show you how I appreciate what you’ve done for me.”
And he resolutely turned his back upon his guest and went ahead with the preparation of the food.
Chapter 3
A month had passed. The mountains were covered with a thick white crust that would bear the weight of a man. And behold a new Jack Trainor, whistling down the mountain trail! He was clad in a clumsy fur garment that obviously had been made for a bigger man than he. His appearance was that of a monster in a sagging skin. But he walked freely and easily on the far side of the trail, he entered the cabin, and he exhibited the duster of pelts that he had carried in.
Big Joseph Bigot sat cross-legged on the floor, working over the last broken trap that he had stayed at home to repair that day. His practiced eye looked swiftly over the catch of the day, and he shook his head.
“No more days like yesterday…but then, my friend, that is enough luck for one season, eh?”
“Sure,” said Jack, smiling, “luck enough, I guess. And here’s another that I forgot to throw in with the rest.”
And, so saying, he threw down a dark and shiningpelt, a fox skin, the fur of which was like blowing feathers, so soft and light was it. It brought a shout from Bigot. He plunged to his feet and seized the skin. He sprang to the door with it. He let the gray light fall upon it. Then he whirled and executed about the cabin a clumsy bear dance that threatened to wreck the place.
“Ah,” he cried when he could speak, “ah, Jack, it is true, what I told you yesterday when we brought in the catch! You have beginner’s luck! If we keep on, we shall be rich. You hear? Rich!”
Jack Trainor regarded his companion with a great deal of curiosity and even a trace of scorn. According to his own code, it was far better to conceal all traces of emotion. As for the bit of soft fur that he had taken from the trap, and that he now had shown, he had known that it was a particularly fine one to look at and to touch. But why it should bring such rejoicing from the trapper he could not imagine.
“I dunno,” he said slowly, “but it looks to me like a pretty far cry from this here fur to being rich.”
“Does it?” said Joseph Bigot. “Man alive, d’you know what that fur is?”
“What?”
“It’s blue fox! It’s the finest fur that a man can get. It’s what every trapper dreams about. If I told you that a thousand dollars would be…”
“A thousand dollars,” gasped Jack, amazed.
“I dunno what the market will be,” said Joseph Bigot, “but I know this one thing…that I’m going to write to the girl today and tell her that in the spring we can get married.” He cast up both of his long arms and shook his fists at the ceiling. “The time’s come!” he said. “I’ve waited twelve years, and now the time’s come!”
Jack Trainor forgot about the fox skin and the price it might bring. Instead, he could think of nothing but the last statement of the big Canadian.
“D’you mean to say that you’ve been engaged to the same girl for twelve years?” he breathed.
Bigot laughed. “Twelve years I have waited,” he answered enigmatically. “First I wait for one, and then I wait for the other…twelve years altogether.”
And he would say no more about it until they had cooked and eaten their supper and cleaned up the tins. After that, they sat around for the long, bleak evening. Outside, the freezing sap in the trees was bursting with loud reports from time to time, for the thermometer had dropped fully thirty degrees since midday. At midday it had been cold enough, a wind at ten below zero coursing over the summit and shrieking through the trees. That wind had the edges of icy knives to go through and through even the thickest furs, and the only way to keep from being frozen was to stir about. Now, at night, there was not a stir of the air. The big pale moon moved up a cloudless sky. The mountains, under its light, were either black with forest and shadow or glistening in strange blue-white. And the cold was so terrible that it needed no wind to drive it home.
In the sides of the little cabin it found crevices and cracks through which to slide like rapier points, stabbing every living thing it struck. The stove roared, and the wood within it kept up a steady hissing of sap and humming, while the top of the stove was red hot. All the air in the room above the top of that stove was clear and warm. All the air below the surface of that stove was glittering with hoar frost. The upper parts of the bodies of the men were almost too warm, but below the knees they were slowly freezing. One could feel the sharply defined borderline between the upper and the lower strata of atmosphere by passing the hand through the air. It was almost like moving the hands from warm water into ice water.
Jack Trainor, in fact, had not stopped trembling during the first three weeks of his stay. But, after that, as he grew hardened exteriorly to the biting weather, and, as his body accumulated the natural protection of a thin layer of fat over its entire surface, he began to fare better. And now, thoroughly accustomed to the heavy weight of the thick clothes and the furs with which the generous Bigot had equipped him, inured to the drafts and the bitter sweep of the winds, Jack had commenced to enjoy his strange surroundings and his new life.
He had been of little use to Bigot at first, but by constant study he made himself a sufficient master of the work to tend a line of traps after Bigot had set them out, and in this fashion he was able to double the amount of ground that the big man covered with his lines. To be sure, he could never be more than a very clumsy amateur, for to become a really fine trapper one must begin in childhood to study animals and the ways of taking them. More than that, one must be born with a certain gift.
Merely by his ability to cover ground was he useful when it came to tending the traps. There were other ways in which he was of greater service, and chief among these was his skill as a hunter. To be sure, the hunting in the snow-covered mountains was quite a different thing from the hunting in the southern deserts. But, once a hunter, always a hunter, no matter in what climate or country or for what game. A man who can shoot deer will, up to a certain point, be an excellent hunter of anything else from coyotes to tigers. And Jack Trainor guarded the trap lines from those terrible enemies of the trapper that prowl through the night and devour before the dawn the prizes that the steel jaws have taken. Many a bobcat and lynx he dropped with his quick rifle, and Bigot, a most second-rate marksman in spite of a life spent in practice, wondered at these successes of his new ally.
As for the work he was doing, Bigot promised a share in the profits when the spring came and they returned to the lowlands, but the profits meant nothing to Jack Trainor. He was glad to have a haven during this winter. Moreover, he was beginning to see that the resolution he had so lightly taken, to sacrifice himself in the interests of his brother-in-law, was apt to lead to most lasting and disastrous results. During this winter, he was more or less free, for the stern weather and the inaccessible mountains would shut him off from discovery. They had almost no communication with the outer world. Once a fortnight, Bigot tramped down to the nearest little town and post office. There he sent out his mail and collected what had come for him, purchased needed supplies—as much as he could carry upon his back—and turned again into the stern trail that led over the peaks to his little cabin. Other than this fortnightly touch with the world, they were utterly isolated. But what would happen when the spring came and the trails were opened? The arm of the law was long, and the servants of the law were fleet.
So it was that many a solemn thought drifted slowly through the mind of Jack Trainor as he sat on this evening in the cabin and listened to the booming of the frozen trees and felt the cold numbing his feet. Also, he was much amused by the actions of the trapper. Joe had brought out writing materials and placed them upon the little homemade table. He was sitting, with his pencil poised above the paper, the expression upon his face that of one determined to do or die, and feeling that death was nearer than accomplishment.
He felt that this time Bigot would welcome an opportunity to talk, and therefore he asked again: “And what about that story you started to tell me, Joe, about the twelve-year engagement? What’s the yarn behind that?”
As he had half expected, Joe Bigot laid down his pencil with a sigh of relief and turned upon his companion.
Chapter 4
“You see,” said Bigot, “up to the time that I was twenty, I didn’t bother the girls none. I had other work, my friend, and I let them go their way while I went mine. But one day Nora Cary came walking by, and I turned around and looked after her. Ever since then I’ve never felt the same.”
He paused, tamped his pipe, then frowned at the floor.
“Next week,” he said, “I asked Nora to marry me. She laughed at me.”
“And you forgot her, I hope?” said Jack fiercely. “If a girl laughed at me, I’d cut out my heart rather’n foller her.”
“I guess that maybe you would,” responded the trapper mildly. There was much about Jack that he did not understand, and that he made no pretense of understanding. “But I didn’t. Next summer I asked her again, and she said no. Next winter I asked her again, and she stopped to think.”
Jack Trainor swore softly. He was beginning to see in the steady patience of the big man a force that would easily wear down the patience, and impose upon the mind of a woman.
“I asked her the next spring again, and she said yes,” went on the trapper, refilling his pipe. “After that I was happy for a couple of years, working all the time and saving up money until I had a lot of it put by. I had enough made to build a house and furnish it, and everything was all ready for the wedding next summer. But, when the time for the wedding came, Nora Cary wasn’t there.”
He began smoking so furiously that his face was almost totally obscured behind the fog.
“She’d run off with Bergen, that went to school with the both of us. They come back that fall and settled down, and next summer Nora had a baby.”
He seemed entirely serene after that brief outburst of smoking. Jack Trainor leaned and listened to him with the most profound attention. He felt an actual awe of the big man, a mental awe as well as a physical one for the giant.
“Things kept on like that,” said Bigot.
“You mean you never stopped loving Nora?”
Bigot looked at him in mild amazement.
“I said she was married,” he said in quiet rebuke.
“I know…I know,” said Jack impatiently, “but I mean…you were pretty fond of her just the same. You didn’t pay much attention to any of the other girls in the town, eh?”
“I ain’t got much time for girls,” said Bigot without emotion. “That is, for girls outside of Nora. Three years ago she died.”
Jack started. It was like the shock that comes when we hear of the death of a person we know. He had visualized Nora. He had been thinking of her, on this bitter night, in a well-warmed room in some village in the lowlands. And now, suddenly, he knew that she was long since dead. It took his mind with a wrench back to the stolid face of Bigot.
There was something so heart-wringing to him about that placid face that he rose and crossed the room with his quick, nervous step and dropped his hand upon the thick and heavily muscled shoulder of the trapper.
“Good old Joe,” he said heartily and softly. “Good old Joe.”
But Joe looked up to him in immense surprise.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing,” said Trainor, and turned and walked slowly back to his former place. When he faced the trapper again, all the signs of emotion were gone from his face.
“After Nora died,” said Bigot, “I had my sister take the little ones.”
“You did? Would her husband let you do that?”
“Him? He went away,” said the trapper tersely.
The character of the dead woman’s husband was blazoned in sudden light to the mind of Trainor.
“Children cost a good deal,” explained Bigot.
“But what’s this marriage in the spring?” asked, Jack, bewildered.
“Nora has a sister,” said the trapper.
There was another gasp from the cowpuncher. “Well,” he said with feeling, “I’ll be eternally lost. You beat all get out with a tin hat on it, Joe. But go on. She has a sister, eh? And you’re going to marry the sister so’s she can take care of the kids that Nora left behind her when she died?”
This question the big man considered for a time with great care.
“She has the same eyes that Nora had,” he replied after a time, “bright, snapping ones. They are black.”
It was another blow to Jack.
“How old is she?” he asked.
“Twenty.”
“Twenty. And you’re thirty-two. That’s a good deal of difference in the ages, isn’t it?”
“I suppose it is. But what difference does time make?”
Again Jack was staggered. He had thought, before he began this conversation, that he knew the other from A to Z. Now he began to feel that he knew nothing except about the surface of Joe Bigot. Time meant nothing to Joe. Why should it mean anything to other persons?
“There is a funny thing,” said Joe, sighing. “She must have letters. Every week she must have a letter.”
“I’ve seen you writing them. But why? The mail only leaves once in two weeks.”
“Why? I didn’t ask her,” replied the trapper. “All I know is that she wants me to write to her every week, a separate letter. And so I do it.” Sorrow spread over his face darkly. “I write a letter every week,” he reiterated. He said it as a man might speak of a plague. “It is very hard,” and he sighed. “But, you see, it angers her when she doesn’t get the letters, and yet it angers her when she gets them. Look!”
He took out his wallet. From it he removed a sheaf of letters written upon very thin white paper. He selected one of these letters and presented it to Jack. The letter under his hand showed a swift-moving and rather delicate script flowing across the page. It was a “dashed-off” hand, so to speak. He read:
Jack lowered the letter with a black scowl and passed it back to Bigot.
“So, you see,” said Bigot, “that is why I am glad that I have the blue fox…that we have it, rather. It will be something for her to live on, eh?”
“You think that’s what she meant…that she wanted money?” said Jack.
“Now you are laughing at me?” queried Bigot pathetically. “I know I am stupid. When people talk, I feel like when I was a little boy at the end of the line and they played crack the whip. That’s the way when people talk, sometimes. I go sailing off into nothing. I don’t understand what they are saying.”
Jack Trainor, still smiling in spite of himself, shook his head. “I wouldn’t mock you, Joe. In the first place, I like you too well. In the second place, I respect you too much. In the third place, I’m afraid to.”
“Afraid to?” echoed the big man. He laughed softly. “You, Jack, fear nothing. You don’t know what fear is.”
“You think not?”
“I know it. Otherwise, you would never have walked into the mountains in that thin suit without food.”
Jack Trainor shook his head. He had long before discovered that it was useless to argue with the trapper on this point. Joseph Bigot had decided to his own satisfaction that Trainor was a daredevil, and he could not be convinced to the contrary. He would have it that the braving of winter in the mountains, by a man to all intents and purposes unclothed and helpless, was a sign of sublime daring rather than ignorance.
“We’ll drop that, then,” said Jack. “But this Alice Cary…Joe, she sure knows what she wants and what she doesn’t want, and one of the things that she doesn’t want is the sort of letter that you write to her. I’d like to see one of ’em if it wasn’t so personal you couldn’t show it to me.”
“Personal?” echoed the mild-eyed giant. “Why, Jack, why shouldn’t you see it? Here’s a couple of ’em here.”
“Ones you didn’t send?”
“I sent ’em just the way they stand, except that I copied ’em clean.”
He handed the two to Trainor, and the second one read:
“Say, Joe,” called Trainor, “doesn’t it strike you that she might be interested in something a pile more than she’d be interested in the sort of furs you collected?”
“In what, then? Ain’t that what we got to live on?”
“Forget what you got to live on,” said Jack. “A girl ain’t interested in that. She’ll live on grass seed and hope and be plumb happy, so long as she’s got a gent around handy to tell her every once in a while that he’s mighty fond of her. That’s the way a woman is put together.”
Joe Bigot sighed. “You know pretty near everything, Jack,” he said. “If I had you to coach me, maybe I could write a letter that would keep her interested. Would you show me how it’s done?”
“Why, look here”—Jack chuckled—“I ain’t no professional slinger of fancy English. The best I can do is to work up an interest talking about what I want and why I want it.”
“But,” began Joe, “that won’t help me.”
“Why won’t it?”
“What d’you mean?”
“Joe, tell me just why you want to marry Alice. Is it simply because she’s her sister’s sister?”
The big man pondered. “She’s prettier than Nora ever was,” he decided. “And she’s brighter. And she’s kinder.”
“Did you ever tell her all those things?” asked Jack.
“Ain’t she got a mirror? Can’t she look in her mirror and see a pile more than I could ever tell her?”
“That right there,” cried Jack, “would be good enough to put into a letter! The thing for you to do is to loosen up. You got plenty to say. But you’re like a good pitcher at the beginning of the season…you’re afraid to put any stuff on the ball in the cold weather. Thing for you to do, Joe, is to thaw out. Show a few signs of spring…”
“In January?” said Joseph Bigot, bewildered. “Spring in January? I don’t know what you mean, my friend Jack.”
Trainor threw up his hands. “Here,” he said. “Are you dead certain that Alice Cary is more interested in you than she is in any other young gent down in those parts?”
“She has promised to be my wife,” said Joe with an air of conclusiveness.
Jack sighed. “Because she gave you a promise,” he said, “that’s a pretty good reason for her to want to change her mind…or for her to think about changing her mind…ain’t it? Man, man, when you tie up a dog with a rope, don’t that make the dog want to get away, even if the place you tied him is all covered with marrow bones?”
“If he has the bones to eat,” said Joe, “why should the dog wish to go? Such a dog would be a fool, my friend Jack.”
Jack Trainor studied his friend’s face with the air of one somewhere between anger and amusement and despair. At length he said: “If I sit down and work out a letter for you, will you use it to sort of get you started on a letter of your own?”
“Sure,” said Joe. “Why not? Good Lord, Jack, that would be more than gold in my pocket.”
“Then give me her picture, will you?”
Joe Bigot drew out the picture, and his companion sat for some time studying it intently.
“Who’s the young gent down in the plains,” he said, “that she likes the best?”
“That’d be young Larry Haines,” said Joe. “He was courting her ever since she was a little one.”
“Well,” said Jack, “this is where we start in giving Larry the outside edge of an outside chance. We’re going to freeze him out!”
Jack Trainor walked briskly to the table. He sat down and for ten or fifteen minutes stared constantly at the picture. Then he began to write, and Joe Bigot forgot to smoke, so great was his wonder at the oiled smoothness with which the pen of the smaller man fled across the paper.
Chapter 5
It was rolling ground, but not enough to limit the horizon with higher summits here and there. That sheet of green swept away eternally. It washed off to the ends of the earth, and through that clear air, indeed, one felt that the ends of the earth were well nigh visible. Only to the far westward there arose a cloud of pale and indefinite blue, wavering low against the sky. One had to be told to know that those were the Canadian Rockies. Standing on this high place in the low country, all at first seemed monotony. There was the marvelous green of the earth and the marvelous blue of the sky and the pure, pure white of the clouds that blew here and there. There was only the sky and the earth and, in between, a great space of freedom for the mind and the soul to wander. There were few trees. No trees were wanted. No hills were wanted. The smoother and the barer, the better. One did not wish for walls or checks of any kind.
There was a great sense of life in that illimitable plain. One felt it when there was no moving thing in view save the swift clouds. It was a fruitful land. One knew that the soil was rich without seeing the patch of black, yonder, that the plow had turned up not later than that morning, and that was beginning to dry out to a fallow gray as the sun and the wind worked on it. There was such wealth of soil, indeed, that the careless proprietors rather chose to let the land produce as it would than encourage it with the plow to any great extent.
There were groupings and dottings of cattle, also, wandering here and there, swinging their heads up and down slowly, while their mellow voices came booming, now in loud single calls, and now in more distant and more musical choruses. Toward the farther horizon, one could make out two small towns, each a blur of red roofs wonderfully pleasant between sky and green earth. Nearer at hand was another town—or, rather, just a chance cluster of houses.
On the top of the hill the girl had halted her horse, and her companion had followed suit, although both his horse and he manifested impatience at the pause. But Alice Cary was enjoying every minute, as was attested by the way in which she threw back her head and smiled. She looked from the green hills to the blue sky, and from the wide limitless sky back to the flowing hills.
“Ah, Larry,” she said, “maybe you have to have other things, but I like this pretty well. Maybe you have to have Montreal, but I like this for my part.”
His horse was dancing. He allowed the high-headed creature to prance in front of the horse of Alice. Thereby he cut off her view and forced her to consider him more closely.
“But that isn’t answering me, Alice,” he said. “And for the last week you’ve been dodging me. And…and you know that he’s apt to be back almost any time now. I don’t want to doubt you, but…but it sounds mighty as if you’d changed your mind.”
His horse here worked past and threatened the roan of Alice with a flirt of his hoofs, whereat she reined her mount back deftly. She rode in divided skirts with a bold and swinging style that was extremely mannish in its pattern and extremely feminine in its effect. Her dress, too, with the cowboy red bandanna at her throat, her loose blouse, her heavy leather gloves, and the sombrero on her head was masculine in plan but wonderfully girlish in its results.
“Larry Haines,” she said, “suppose I should tell you that I had changed my mind?”
The horse of Larry Haines was changed to a statue, so closely did it follow the will of its master! Larry Haines, also, gained two inches in height as he jerked himself to rigidity. His lean, handsome face turned to iron, and his eyes glared at her. More than once before, he had half terrified her in this manner. Indeed, it was a part of the mystery and the charm of the man that attracted her. She knew Jessie Haines as well as she knew herself—or better. She knew herself like a book that had been carefully read. But Larry Haines, although she had grown up with him, remained unknown to her. He never shrouded himself with mystery, but there was about him a native strength that thrust other persons to a distance and kept them away from him. He had never wasted much time on girls until he had met her. And then his sudden burst of attentions, beginningonly a short while after her engagement to the former suitor of her sister, had fairly swept her off her feet. She was frankly flattered, because the attentions of Larry Haines made her the envied and the wondered at among the girls of the village.
How he kept up that insistent siege; how, at length, in the absence of the big trapper, she had been won over and had given her promise to leave her home and run away with Larry to be married in the distant city of Montreal—all of these things made up a long story. And now she trembled as she faced the youth.
He took it very quietly. She might have known that he would act in this manner. And yet his quietness was worse than the angry shouting of another man.
“If you told me that you had changed your mind,” he said, “I should believe you, that’s all. You’re free. You’re independent. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t change your mind if you see cause for it.”
But, while he spoke, the color went out of his cheeks and left them yellow—an unhealthy sallow. By that sign and the fixed glittering of his eyes she could guess at the emotion within him, but just the emotion was beyond her. It might be wild grief. Or it might be jealous rage. Or it might be simply injured vanity. But one could never tell what actually happened in the brain of Larry. Of his devilish temper, there could be no doubt. Since childhood, he had been a victim to silent bursts of rage that were dangerous to all around him. Now that he was grown older, his skill with weapons and the persistence of that same fierce temper made him dreaded by men of his own age. They actually shunned him. Wherever he went, he went alone. Strange to say, his dangerousqualities made him acceptable only in a company of girls, or old men and old women.
Why this should be, Alice had often wondered. But now she understood. Always, before, she had never come closer to the darker side of Larry than the reports that others made of him. But today it was easy to see the panther in him stirring under the surface. All the time that he was attributing perfect freedom to her to do as she pleased, she knew that madness was growing in his brain.
“You know that I wouldn’t change my mind easily, Larry, where you’re concerned?”
“You flatter me,” said Larry.
She looked fixedly at him. No doubt he was mocking both her and himself.
“I’ve never been easy about it…you know that,” she said at length. “I’ve always felt that it was a sin to leave poor Joe in this way.”
“A fellow that has to be pitied isn’t worth thinking about!” exclaimed Larry Haines fiercely. “But let that go.”
“You know what he’s done and what he’s been,” said the girl. “He’s never changed. He was true to poor Nora when everyone was laughing at him. And then he took her babies. He took them just as tenderly as though he had been their father! A man like that…why, how could I refuse him when he asked me to marry him, Larry?”
“I don’t suppose that you could,” said Larry slowly. “I suppose he’s fond of you just for the sake of your sister. But I see that makes no difference with you. You don’t care to be loved for your own sake.”
She raised her hand. His malevolence showed through too plainly. It made her wince.
“I admit,” she said, “that I may have made up my mind to marry him for some such reason. But lately, Larry, I…”
“Ah!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Lately you’ve been thinking about him, and, because he was a long distance from you, you suddenly began to make a hero out of him, you began to make him romantic!”
She flushed hotly and made no answer. He realized that he had gone much too far and instantly changed his tactics. His tone altered to the most soothing smoothness.
“It’s because you’re too good for him or for any other man,” he said gently. “You see, Alice, you are ashamed of yourself because you can’t love him. You think it’s your duty. You don’t see that he’s exactly what he seems…a great clod of a man, Alice! There’s no spark of real feeling in him. There’s no fire in him! Why, you’d be miserable with him!”
She shook her head and smiled at him in such a cocksure and confident manner that he was amazed. Her flush, also, had changed in quality. There was a misty touch to her eyes that alarmed young Haines.
“I thought just what you think about Joe Bigot,” she answered. “I’ve thought it all my life. I’ll even confess now, Larry, that the reason I first became engaged to Joe was because I pitied him, and because I felt, if he were so willing to raise Nora’s babies, I should at least try to do my share. I thought, too, that the only reason he cared for me at all was simply because I’m Nora’s sister. But…” She paused.
“Well?” asked Larry Haines impatiently. “Well?”
“But a few weeks ago there was a change. The letters I have been getting from Joe Bigot would have driven a saint mad. He told me about the weather. He told me about the number of furs he was taking.And that was about all. Any plowman could have written such letters. Then there was a change! You see, all the time, from the very first, I had been half hoping that behind the dull exterior there might be fire. And it turned out that I was right…I was right! It was like the breaking of a dam. I opened a letter, and his words picked me up on a flood and carried me out of myself! Oh, I wish I could show you that letter!”
“I wish you could,” said Larry dryly. “I’d sure like to see Bigot’s poetry.”
“That’s exactly what it was. It was poetry. The words had actually a rhythm to them. They keep running through my mind…not the real words, you know, but the tune of them.”
“I see,” said Larry in the tone of one who does not see and does not wish to see.
“He began in just the way he usually began a letter…except that there was a little difference in between the words that took my breath away. He began by talking about the cold and the hoar frost and the bursting trees around the cabin and the sense in the air that the world was freezing to death. And, after he had made such a picture of it that I started to shiver myself, he went on to talk about what the mountains would be like when the spring came. And he made such a picture, Larry, such a picture.” Her words failed her; her voice trembled. “And all at once, toward the end of the letter, Larry, he told me that he felt he had been frozen all of his life, and that he had never been able to say what he felt, because he was really asleep…in a wintertime, so to speak. But now he felt a change. It was a thawing, a coming of spring. That was the first letter. It set me tingling to my fingertips to read it. I kept saying to myself…is the giant going to wake up? Oh, Larry, when I opened the next letter, I knew that he had. And all at once the spring was there! It seems that he loved Nora, or thought he did. But that is nothing to the way he cares for me. It isn’t true that I only shine by her reflected light. And…”
“In one word, you love him at last, Alice.”
“Yes!”
“Then there’s no more to be said about Montreal, of course.”
“But, Larry, I’m terribly sorry.”
“Of course you are. You’re too nice a girl not to be sorry, Alice.”
“Are you sarcastic now?”
“I?”
“I never know. I never can quite tell what’s going on in you.”
“That’s because I’m so simple.”
“At least, I know you’ll forget me quickly.”
“Perhaps you hope so.”
“And I’m right, Larry.”
“You’re wrong. You know what I think of marriage.”
“Marriage? You mean that a man should never marry more than once…that it’s sacrilege to marry more than once? But what has that to do with mere love?”
“Mere love? It means just this…that a man, if he really is in love, can only love once. It’s nonsense to talk about any second affairs. It’s nonsense. It’s Continental, no doubt, but it’s not true. I tell you, my dear, that I shall never care for another woman.”
“Oh, Larry!”
He was silent.
“I know it can’t be true. You are only bitter and angry now. A month from today in Montreal you’ll be smiling when you remember me off here in the grasslands.”
“A month from today I’ll still be here.”
“Do you mean that?”
“I do.”
“Larry, does it mean that there’s going to be trouble between you and poor Joe?”
He started to deny it, then changed his mind, and there was a wicked gleam in his eye.
Chapter 6
They had shipped the pelts. Now they were ready to start eastward into the lowlands.
“But why,” said Jack Trainor, “should I go with you?”
Joe Bigot blinked. “How else will you get your share of the money?” he said simply. “Unless you want me to send it after you.”
“Money is nothing,” said the cowpuncher. “Don’t you lie awake worrying about me and money. We’ll get on.”
Bigot shook his head. “A quarter of that coin is coming to you…it belongs to you. If you don’t take it, I’ll put it in a jug and let it rest there until you come. I’ll never touch it.”
Trainor slapped him on the shoulder and laughed. “Well,” he said, “let it rest in the jug, then. But I can’t go home with you.”
“You’ve got work some place?”
“I’ve got work all the time, now that the roads are opened up. I’ve got to keep moving, Joe. The law is behind me.”
And he told the big man, for the first time, the true story about his flight to the North. At least, he told the truth from the point where he climbed onto the rods of the freight that took him on his first stage toward the Northland. But he left Joe to infer that the charges against him were true. When he had finished, he waited and studied the face of Joe with great curiosity. For all the simplicity of the big man, he was never able to tell exactly how Joe would act. He had not long to doubt.
“I’m sorry,” said Bigot, “but when they come for you, we’ll give them a hard job, the two of us. Why, Jack, you can’t go off by yourself. You wouldn’t have anybody to guard your back if they came at you from two sides at once.”
Trainor was so touched that the tears sprang into his eyes, but he laughed it off. “But suppose she should guess that I wrote these letters for you? If I go, we must arrange a story, Joe. We must pretend that you and I met when you were coming down from the mountains, eh?”
It was so arranged. That simple lie would do harm to nobody. But the subject of the letters was a sore one with poor Joe. They made up the first real lie he had ever told in his life. He could not get over the fact that he had signed his name to words that he had not written.
“Forgery,” he used to say, “that’s what it is!”
“Bah!” Jack Trainor would answer. “It isn’t a check, Joe.”
But all of his persuading could never quite lift the cloud from the brows of Bigot.
“The only reason I can do it,” he used to say, “is because I feel all the things you have said for me. I feel all those things, Jack, but I can’t put them down in words. Because I feel them, it isn’t altogether a lie if I let you write the letters for me, is it?”
And Jack, of course, would insist that it was a mere nothing. He himself had been passing through a strange time of trial. It had grown a peculiar pleasure and a peculiar torment to sit down before the picture of Alice Cary once a week and write to her as though he loved her. Not that the letters were hard to write, for, indeed, there was nothing easier. That faint smile of the girl in the picture was enough to keep his pen working forever, he felt. But, now that he was to see her in the flesh—what?
There were two dangers. The first, and what he felt to be the more imminent, danger was that she would not be a tithe so charming as she was in the photograph. That would mean the destruction of a pleasant dream that, otherwise, he might have taken with him to his grave. The second danger, although it was one that he declared to himself over and over would never become an actuality, was that when he saw her she might be a thing of beauty even greater than the picture promised. And in that case, what would happen to his poor head, already swimming from too much thinking of her? And what would happen to his friendship for the man who had saved his life, great-hearted, unsuspicious, gentle Joe Bigot?
He knew his own impulsive nature well enough to fear what he might do. He dreaded seeing her because seeing her might make him desire to marry her. And once he desired to marry her, he felt that he would not be able to exercise any control. He would be gone in a flash.
Because of this, he had dreaded going home with Joe Bigot. But now he succumbed to the temptation. It was decided that he would be described, in the village, as a man who Joe had simply encountered on his way down from the mountains, and who he had brought back to help him work his little farm. With this plan in mind, they started home.
There was much to be done, however, before that journey was pressed on. In the first place, Jack Trainor must have a horse. Joe was equipped with a mighty-boned Canadian gray that was capable of carrying a ton on its back. Jack Trainor, a large man himself, was by no means content with such an animal.
“I’ve got to have speed,” he declared to Joe, and for speed they started looking through the little town into which they had dropped out of the hills. They found what they wanted in the mid-afternoon on the place of a French-Canadian, 2,000 miles away from his beloved Quebec, cursing the land he farmed and caring nothing for the bad-tempered four-year-old that, as he said: “Eats the head off all day, and, when it is for riding…
He offered the colt and the saddle for hardly more than the price of the latter alone, and straightway Jack saddled the lithe-limbed bay tornado and gave it its head. There followed five savage minutes. When the tornado was breathless, Jack raked a spur down its neck—not cruelly, but with an eye to the future.
It brought out another frantic effort. That effort did not avail to unseat the rider. And so Jack Trainor paid the price, swung into the saddle, and jogged onto the long East Road.
“I’ve seen good riding,” said Joe Bigot, “but I never dreamed that a man could stay on a horse when a horse done what the bay has just finished doing.”
“Bah!” Jack Trainor grinned. “This hoss means mighty well when it comes to bucking, but he ain’t been rode enough to get any practice in fancy bucking. And it takes practice to make a good bucker, just the way it takes practice to make a man a good shot.”
“There’s exceptions to that.”
“There are?”
“I know one man who’s a dead shot, but he never practices hardly at all.”
“You know such a man?”
“Larry Haines. He can shoot as straight as an eagle looks. He never misses. But he ain’t had much practice.”
“I’d like to meet up with him,” said Jack slowly. “I’ve heard such a lot about him that I’d like to meet up with him. These dead shots…I’ve heard about ’em here and there, but I’ve never seen ’em pan out when it came to a showdown. Maybe this Larry Haines will be different.”
Such was the mood in which they started. But as they journeyed on, and day after day, they struck farther and farther into the green heart of the cattle ranges of Canada, and Jack stopped pondering the question of Haines and the girl. He was too much occupied with the beauty of the country through which they were traveling.
“We’ll go first,” said Joe, “straight for the hill that looks over the town. It ain’t very high, but it’s high enough to give us a look over the country.”
And so, on the last day, they struck for the hill, and, when they came in view of it, they could plainly make out, upon the top, the forms of two riders sitting their horses quietly there. Those forms grew into a woman and a man and these in turn grew more and more distinct, until Joe Bigot uttered a shout and spurred his horse into full speed.
“It’s Alice!” he cried. “Come on, Jack!”
Now there was enough speed in the long legs of the bay colt to lay a circle around the big gray, but Jack Trainor held his mount in. He felt that it was too important a crisis simply to be rushed upon.
And so the face of the girl grew out slowly upon him until at length, with a cry of excitement, she started her horse on to meet her lover. Then Jack Trainor knew that the test would be even grimmer than he had expected, for she was far more lovely than the photograph had been able to hint.
Chapter 7
He passed the two at a trot. They were in a flurry of exclamations and laughter, and even big Joe Bigot seemed to have found his tongue. For that matter, Jack Trainor declared to himself that she would have roused a dying man to eloquence and foolishness. Another great question was settled in his mind. How would she greet the big trapper when he came down to her? After the letters that had been poured upon her, how would she reconcile their eloquence—and Jack felt that they were eloquent indeed—with the slow-moving mind of the big man? One glance at her excited face as he moved past the two settled that matter. She was thinking of nothing except that he had returned to her. There was no doubt about him in any respect.
But, in the meantime, the attention of Jack began to center around another figure, the companion of Alice Cary who had remained in the background. One glance at that sallow, handsome face, now strangely pinched and drawn as he looked down upon the girl greeting Bigot, and Jack felt sure that he had an answer to the riddle. It was Larry Haines, the invincible fighter, the sullen and dark-minded youth.
He saw Larry, now, produce the makings and roll a cigarette in spite of the blowing wind and the emotion that, Jack guessed, would have reduced any other man to trembling. The cigarette was lighted despite the gale, and then, as the issuing cloud of smoke hung for a moment and was dashed by the breeze, Jack Trainor came up to the smoker.
“Only the lucky ones,” said Jack with great good cheer, “have someone waiting for them, eh?”
Larry Haines turned toward him with an indecipherable expression.
“That sounds as though it might be true,” he said. “Are you a friend of Joe’s?”
“Just met him when he was coming down out of the hills. We drifted this way together.”
“That’s a pretty long drift, eh?” suggested Larry Haines.
“All depends,” answered Jack. “It’s long for some and short for some…I mean, for those that keep moving and don’t care much where they get.”
“I don’t know that kind,” replied Haines coldly.
“That’s your misfortune,” answered Jack in the same tone. “Those that keep moving like the road. They can’t see any point in standing still the rest of a man’s life.”
He was disliking Haines heartily. He could gather from the expression of the other that the feeling was mutual. That distaste seemed founded upon nothing but chance. In the meantime, Joe and the girl had come slowly up the hill toward them, and Trainor gave his attention to the young couple.
Alice Cary was obviously entirely happy. They had been talking about everything—nothing. She had had no chance to make comparisons or conduct an investigation. As for Joe Bigot, the big man was actually trembling with joy. And now and again he fixed upon Trainor a glance that was burning with gratitude.
The smile with which she acknowledged her introduction to Jack Trainor went through and through him, and then he found that she and Bigot and Haines and he were riding four abreast down the hill and toward the little red-roofed village in the distance. On the way Jack thought to himself:
He was roused from this meditation by the voice of the girl saying: “Look at that tree yonder. What sort of a tree is it, Joe? But see the way it’s budding, just like points of light on the tips of the twigs. I’ll never see a tree bud after this, Joe, without thinking of something that you said about it.”
Larry Haines twisted his head sharply toward Bigot. The idea of Bigot’s having said something about budding trees apparently stunned him.
“Something I said? I don’t remember,” said Joe innocently.
The girl frowned. Had she not been in the saddle, she would probably have stamped, Jack decided. She did not want to go further into the matter. It was a reference Joe, if he were a true lover, should have caught up at once like a burning brand passed to him. It should have set him on fire, and now it seemed that he did not even remember having said it.
“Not said…but something you wrote. I suppose that’s the same thing,” said Alice Cary.
Her smile was a thin veneer over her anger, it seemed to observant Jack Trainor.
“I disremember,” said Joe Bigot as heavily as before.
In the cabin in the mountains, he had formed the habit of looking to Jack for counsel whenever he was mentally cornered by a difficulty. Now his eye rolled toward his friend again, and the flash of Trainor’s glance brought him up with an almost visible start.
“In a letter,” he said. “Yes, I sort of vaguely remember it.”
This brought a dark frown to the forehead of Alice, for it was something that he should more than casually remember. If it had been an utterance out of his soul, as it had seemed, it should never be forgotten.
Jack Trainor, gnawing his lips with anxiety at one side of the little troop, remembered it well enough.
“It was about the winter being like night, and the spring being like day, and the budding of the trees the sunshine of the day…it was something like that,” said the girl. “I thought it was beautiful, Joe.”
Joe stirred under her reproachful glance, and then, feeling the ferret-like glance of Larry Haines upon him, he turned a bright crimson.
But Jack Trainor knew that there was a vital part of the simile left out—the part that referred to her in the same breath with the buds. It had been a comparison that had come out of his heart, seeing the faint smile of the girl in the photograph play like sunshine indeed in the dark, cold interior of the cabin. But now there was danger ahead in very fact. The suspicions of Larry Haines must be by this time fully aroused. No matter how the girl may have passed over the eloquence of her big lover and accepted it as real, Larry Haines would instantly know that Joe was perfectly incapable of saying such a thing as this—of conceiving such fanciful and complicated figures of speech.
But Haines said not a word to attempt to draw a confession from Joe. For that, Trainor respected his prowess and feared him the more. A man capable of playing a waiting game is always to be dreaded when it comes to a pinch. With all of his soul, Jack wished them well and safely out of the difficulty.
Luckily the down pitch of the hill—almost the only considerable incline in the entire vicinity—had urged the horses to a gallop, and now the whole troop fled down the slope at a round pace that blew the color back into the cheeks of Alice and sent the light gleaming into her eyes. She was laughing again when they reached the level once more, and so the party continued in the most perfect good humor until they reached the silent little street of the village.
All that way Larry Haines had said not a word.
“There’s a man you ought to know, Joe,” he said. “That old chap yonder. He’s a trapper, too, and he spent the season up in the mountains pretty close to you. I think he went out from the same town to his trap line.”
He watched Joe keenly as he spoke. Trainor watched the big man with no less attention to see how he would endure the test. And he was glad to note that Bigot neither changed color nor started visibly. There had not been one chance in a thousand that a trapper from the far-distant Rockies would come into the vicinity of the little town. It was like leaving someone in Peking and meeting him again in the middle of the Arizona desert. It was an unlucky chance, to say the least. But even at that, the probabilities were great that the old fellow ahead of them, just now in the act of sauntering across the street, had never even heard the name of Joe Bigot in the mountains unless he actually stumbled across a mutual friend.
However, it was necessary to make inquiries and follow up the remark of Haines. Trainor marked with pleasure that Bigot saw the need and accepted the risk. His face was unchanged except for a slight bulging of the heavy muscles at the angle of the jaw, and that small sign was enough to tell Jack of the spiritual strain under which the poor trapper was laboring. He veered his horse to the side, nevertheless, and paused beside the old man, whose bent body was token of the labor he had endured.
“Hello, stranger,” said Joe. “The boys tell me that you been up trapping around Crampton. I been working a trap line up that way myself.”
The other nodded, running his fingers thoughtfully through his short tangle of gray beard. But his face remained a blank. For that Jack was profoundly grateful.
“Look here, Minter,” broke in Haines, “you must be a good deal of a hermit if you never ran across Joe Bigot in the mountains and yet you got your provisions from the same place.”
“Joe Bigot?” echoed the old man slowly. “Joe Bigot?”
Here, as his face suddenly cleared under the light of knowledge, the heart of Trainor failed him.
“Sure I’ve heard of you, Bigot. I recollect the storekeeper talking about you. Used to say that you always took out enough grubstakes to’ve done two ordinary men. But then, a man can see in half a glance that you ain’t ordinary, not by seventy pounds, I’d say.”
He laughed heartily at his rather thin jest, his eyes snapping and glittering with enjoyment under their white brows.
“A man has to eat,” said Joe good-naturedly. “And I reckon I do my share. But I walked my share of line, too.”
“I guess maybe you did,” said the old man enviously. “You got the legs for it, man! I guess you kept an extra measure of traps this winter, eh?”
“Extra lot of traps?” echoed poor old Joe Bigot feebly, feeling that the blow was about to fall.
“Why, yes. They told me you had a man out with you…somebody that wandered into your shack during a storm, and…”
The cat was out. Could it be whistled back into the bag?
Chapter 8
“In your cabin this winter?” cried Alice Cary with great eyes of astonishment.
“In my cabin? Why, yes,” said Joe. “But, come to think about it, I guess I didn’t write that he was there.”
Jack Trainor was utterly astonished. He had never dreamed that the big, honest trapper had such possibilities. Taking it all in all, it was as roundly delivered a lie as he had ever heard told. And this from slow Joe Bigot!
“Write to me about him? You certainly didn’t! But how long was he there?”
That vital question was avoided deftly by Joe Bigot. Just as it began, he blurted out some remark to the trapper about the severity of the winter and then expressed a desire to see him soon and declared that he would look him up. With that and a farewell wave, they passed on. Alice Cary repeated her question.
“How long was the stranger with you, Joe, and who was he? And what was he doing in a storm in the mountains?”
Again Jack Trainor was breathless. Again he felt the eyes of Bigot fumble hopelessly toward him, then, realizing that there was no succor in his companion, he searched about in his own brain for a sufficient answer. How much better it would have been if, at all costs, those letters had never been written, and if the pure truth could be told!
“He was a Russian, I think,” said Joe Bigot. “His name was Rasmussen. He was running a line of traps up north of mine. But he was new to the country. One day a norther caught him out when he was hunting south, away off from his line. He’d seen my smoke, so he decided that it would be easier to make for my place than it would be to turn around and buck the wind and the snow to get back to his own lean-to. So he came down my way and got there just about froze.”
“Poor fellow!” cried Alice. “Was he very far gone?”
Jack Trainor heaved a faint sigh of relief. It seemed that the great crisis was passed. Then he turned a little and looked at Larry Haines. That worthy had fastened his ferret eyes upon the face of Joe Bigot, and, although he never spoke, a subtle disbelief, a subtle mockery, had overspread his features. Apparently he had arrived at more of a conclusion than the girl had been able to come to in seeing through the untruths that Joe was telling.
Joe Bigot was continuing his new story with a great deal of fluency that more and more surprised Jack Trainor.
“He wasn’t very far gone. But he thought he was. He wasn’t used to the cold, you see.”
“Not used to the cold! But I thought you said that he was a Russian?”
“I did. But he came out of the south of Russia.”
“But don’t they have cold winters every place in Russia?”
“Not down by Turkey, I think,” put in Trainor calmly.
Larry Haines, who had been pricking his ears during these remarks, now flashed upon Jack an absolutely wolfish glance, and then forced his eyes deliberately away, as though he feared to reveal too much of his own malignance through that look.
“He came out of the south of Russia, down by Turkey,” went on the big man glibly with a flash of gratitude toward Jack. “He wasn’t used to the cold, and he was scared because he’d got numbed in places. But I brought him around. It didn’t take long. There’s some think that the only thing to do when folks are frozen is to rub them with snow. But I’ve always figured that to be fool talk. First I use cold water, and then I take water that’s a little warmer and a little warmer, and that way I get the circulation going gradual again. I’ve tried rubbing with snow, and I’ve tried the other way. There ain’t any comparison, I think. He came around fine, and after that I saw a good deal of him.”
“He lived with you…and left his own trap line? That old fellow said that somebody was really living with you.”
“Yes, I told them about it at the store once.”
That unlucky day when he had told the storekeeper of the arrival of the stranger! How many details did the other trapper in the town know?
“He left his trap line because he thought that it was worth his while to learn what he could about setting out traps from me. Him and me used to walk my line of traps together, and so he picked up a good deal that I knew and that he didn’t.”
Here the girl laughed. “Joe,” she confessed, “when he spoke at first about somebody being with you, I thought that there was a secret about it.”
“Secret?” muttered Joe Bigot with an assumption of a vast innocence. “Why should there be any secret about it?”
Indeed, more and more Trainor began to feel that there had been possibilities of intelligence and quick wit in Bigot that he had completely overlooked. He had quite smoothed the matter over for Alice Cary, so it seemed, and it only remained to see how far Larry Haines could press his suspicions.
On the whole, Jack would have been happier had Haines taken an opportunity to cross-question the big trapper on the spot. But this he showed no intention of doing. He made no effort to corner Bigot. But the tiger was nevertheless in view in the face that Trainor saw. Sooner or later he would get on the trail of Joe, and then he would be merciless should he run him down.
A moment later, Haines parted from them, shaking hands with Joe again and saying that he was glad to see him back, and shaking hands with Trainor, also. But he did this silently, and the eyes that they raised to each other were dark with enmity.
After that, they went on to the girl’s house, and there they would both stay for supper. They were alone for a moment when she ran in while they were putting up their horses.
“I’m done for!” gasped Joe Bigot, turning white the instant they were by themselves.
“You’re not done for,” said Trainor hotly. “You’re as safe as though you’d never told anything but the truth if you stick to what you’ve said. Keep going over it until you’ve got it safe in your head. Remember what you said…Rasmussen is a good name. It sounds like the sort of name that a man would never make up. The trouble with it is that it’s a hard name to remember and keep straight. Then there’s the yarn about Russia. Why the devil you had to make him a Russian, I can’t tell.”
“I can’t, either,” said Joe wretchedly. “That name Rasmussen…it popped out of somewhere in my head. After I’d used it, I thought that I’d have to explain it. So I just said that he was a Russian. You see? And then the stuff about his trap line…”
“That’s all right, because you had to have some reason for him being out there in the snows. And, taking it all in all, Joe, I want to say right here that it was about the best lying that I’ve heard in my life.” He laughed softly at the thought. “I’ve been cornered myself once or twice, but I’ve never been able to invent things as fast as you did today, Joe. Why in the name of the devil, though, didn’t you tell me that you’d mentioned me to somebody?”
“It was the storekeeper. I spoke about you after that first time. And then I plumb forgot what I’d said. Storekeeper went right out of my head. Talking to him ain’t like talking to other folks, anyway. Sort of takes it for granted that when you go into the store you’ll tell him everything you know. It’s like talking to yourself. And listening to him talk is just like reading a newspaper. Nobody would ever think of wondering where he learned what he knows. He just seems to get all the gossip out of the air. But now the point is that it’s done and can’t be helped. I’ve told ’em that I’ve only knowed you a couple of days.What’s to be done now? Jack, hadn’t I better confess everything to Alice?”
“What!” roared Jack.
“I know. Sounds queer. And she’d be mighty mad! But I can’t get along very well carrying this lie on my shoulders, Jack. I don’t feel no ways nacheral.”
“Listen to me,” said Trainor solemnly. “If she finds out about this, she’ll be through with you for good. You think that the lie is a terrible thing to her. I don’t agree with you. She sort of would admire a man with the brains to get away with a good lie once in a while. And I don’t think that she’d be any too much shocked if she knew that you’d told something that wasn’t true but had had the brains to cover it up pretty well. It’d open up a new side of you to her. And, Joe, what she’s looking for, it seems to me, is excitement.”
“And that’s where she’ll find me out,” said the unfortunate trapper. “I can never keep her entertained.”
“I dunno,” answered Jack. “Seems to me that you’ve made a pretty good start.” He grinned as he spoke. “Haines is the rat that we’ve got to watch,” he went on, “or he’ll gnaw a hole in the ship and sink you before you know it.”
“Aye, he hates me,” said Joe, “I could see that.”
“That ain’t the important thing. The important thing is that he loves Alice. And he’d sell his soul to spoil your chances with her.”
“If he should do that,” said the trapper slowly, “I would kill him, Jack, I’m afraid.”
That quietly spoken sentence stayed in the ear of Trainor with a strange ring. It was as though the threat had been spoken to him in person. It showed him, in a glimpse, other and unexpected depths in the nature of the giant. And the ability to hate profoundly was apparently one of these.
At the supper table that night, Trainor found that the girl’s family was hardly distinguishable from many families that he had known in his own country. A sort of happy-go-lucky carelessness pervaded the talk and the manners. The talk this evening, of course, turned very largely upon Joe and his experiences during the winter. Most of all, the questions were directed toward the strange Russian who had appeared in the storm. But upon this one subject, strangely, Joe was very reticent, not as though reluctant to talk about the Russian, but as though the subject wearied him.
The meal was concluded happily enough, then Jack started for his hotel, and Joe walked part of the way with him.
“Tonight,” said Trainor as they went down the quiet street with the dim sounds of voices coming from the houses on either side, “Joe, I’ve got to get under way. I’ve got to leave town.”
“Tonight?” protested Joe eagerly. “But you can’t do that, partner. I can’t let you. You haven’t had a chance to get to know folks. You haven’t had a chance to get to know Alice.”
“I’ve seen enough of her,” said Jack with a peculiar heaviness of voice that caused the other to look at him in amazement. “I’ve seen enough,” he went on, qualifying his statement, “so’s I can get a good picture of her when I’ve gone along. I know how happy you’ll be with her, partner.”
At this, Joe clapped him on the shoulder. Still he could not understand the purpose of Jack in leaving at once.
“It’s Haines,” explained Jack. “It’s Haines that bothers me. I can’t get him out of my head.”
“Haines? I thought he was perfectly quiet.”
“That’s it. Too quiet. He bothers me for that reason. He’s got some plan in his head, and, when that plan begins to take shape, I think it’d be better for me to be out of town. I know too much. He’s liable, some way, to corner you about me. Better for me to be gone, son.”
Joe Bigot nodded. “He’s a bad one,” he admitted. “But you’ll come back, Jack?”
“Sure,” lied Trainor. “I’ll be back. Keep a thought for me, Joe.”
“I’ll never forget you,” said Joe Bigot simply. “I’ll think of you every minute of my life. And if I marry Alice, I’ll know that it’s been on account of you. But still, it looks as though I’m getting something I don’t deserve.”
And with that he turned and went slowly up the street.
Chapter 9
To Jack Trainor, following with his eyes as the gigantic trapper swung down the street, it seemed that he was watching Joe Bigot march ahead to a great happiness, the greatest that had come to any man he had ever known. For himself, he felt that he was doing the only honorable thing in leaving the town and leaving it forever. It was not Haines. Haines was only a partial reason, although a strong reason, at that. But the real impulse came from the thought that he must not see too much of the girl. She was too beautiful for him to feel safe. He could not trust himself. There was a dash of headlong recklessness in his nature that had not been checked by the freedom of his life during the past few months, and that recklessness was tingling in his soul now. He knew that, given a fair opportunity, he would be swept off his feet.
It was this knowledge that made him go. But, in obeying all that was best in his heart, he was gloomy indeed as he turned around and faced the little shack of a building that did duty as a hotel in the little town. He had not yet reached the doorway of the small building when a hand was laid gently upon his shoulder. He whirled like a shot and found himself looking into the face of no other person than Larry Haines himself.
Larry Haines had apparently recovered from his deep gloom.
“I’ve a story to tell you,” he said, “and there’s such a laugh to it that I guess you’ll forgive me for stopping you in the street with it.”
“Go ahead,” answered Jack, and waited uneasily. On the whole, he felt that he would have preferred frowns or even open threats to this continual smiling.
“Well,” said Larry, “I’d better put it up to you to decide for yourself. When a bear goes off and starts barking like a fox, is it reasonable to suppose that he has actually turned into a fox, or sha’n’t we conclude that there is a fox at hand doing the barking for him?”
“I don’t get the drift of that,” said Trainor coldly.
“I didn’t think you would. But you’ll get a laugh out of it by tomorrow at the latest.”
There was such an open and defiant insolence under this apparent good nature that Trainor saw the other was simply aching for a fight and was perfectly confident of his ability to end the battle in his favor. It brought a flush into the head of Jack. Never in his life—and he had done many a deed of violence in his time—had he been so desirous of annihilating a man root and branch. But two things held him back. The first was a sudden knowledge sweeping over him that poor Joe Bigot would never get married to Alice Cary so long as this cunning devil was around to interfere. The second, speaking very frankly, was a decided doubt as to his ability to cope with Haines. He decided that he must not venture a battle until his back was against the wall. But first of all, he must find out what Haines knew and what he merely guessed. That was of the very greatest importance.
“Maybe I’ll be laughing tomorrow, then,” he said. “But I don’t get the bear story.”
Haines nodded. “I can’t make you understand,” he declared, “so I’ll drop the fable and get down to facts. My friend, I’ve made up my mind to several things. The first is that Mister Rasmussen of wintry memory is a myth.”
“Rasmussen? Well, that’s strange. But why would Bigot invent a yarn like that?”
Haines shook his head. “You are Rasmussen,” he said. “That’s plain, whatever your real name may be.”
“Wait a minute,” said Trainor. “I don’t keep up with you. I’m a Russian trapper, you say? Well, Haines, I guess I’ll get my laugh out of you without waiting until tomorrow.”
“Bah!” snapped Haines, suddenly in dead earnest. “You know what I mean. I mean that you’re the man who stayed with Bigot this winter. You must think I’m a fool not to see through it? You’re the man who wrote the letters.”
“Partner,” said Trainor softly, “something has happened to your head. What letters?”
“All right,” said Haines. “I was going to make a little proposition to you. But, if I can’t do that, I’ll turn around and go to Alice Cary in the morning and tell her what I suspect.”
“And that is?”
“Why, simply that you were marooned in a storm, found Joe’s cabin, had good reasons for wanting to stay quiet during a month or two, and so remained with him. While you were there, Joe tells you what a hard time he’s having keeping up his end of the correspondence with Alice. You offer to take a hand. He tells you about her. You get interested. He shows you her picture. You sit down and start writing love letters on your own account, you might say, and you let him copy them and sign his name.”
The narrative was so wonderfully faithful, so nearly exactly the truth, that Trainor was floored. He could neither laugh nor grow angry for an instant, and during that moment he knew that the ferret eyes of Haines had burrowed into his face and seen the truth in his confusion.
“By thunder!” cried Haines. “It is true, then. It’s more than a guess. I couldn’t believe it. But now I know that it’s true.”
Trainor ground his teeth. He had mistaken Larry’s assumption of certainty for the fact. Now he must pay the penalty.
“And what’s more,” went on Haines, thinking aloud now, “if you stayed all winter with Joe, you did have a reason for it. And, if there was a reason for you to stay there, maybe there’s a reason for other people to want you somewhere else, eh?” He was fairly rushing upon a complete discovery. “I think,” continued Haines, “that, if I were to telegraph to certain places in the States, they’d be pretty interested in a description of you, eh?”
Trainor meditated quickly. It was plain that Haines felt his first step in destroying Bigot’s influence with the girl must be to get rid of Joe’s new friend. No matter if he intended to leave the next day and never return again. Haines would not believe that, and straightway he would bring the powersof the law down upon the head of Trainor. But what could he do to checkmate the younger man?
“Haines,” he said, “you’d never find out anything in time to stop the wedding.”
Haines started. “You admit everything, then?”
“That’s not the point. I say you’ve started on the trail too late.”
“Not a bit too late.”
“What could you do? How could you stop things from going on the way they’ve started now?”
“Very easy. I get Joe Bigot and the girl together. Then I tell them that you have confessed, and I recount the whole story. Do you think that old pigheaded Bigot will have brains enough to laugh the story down? No, he’ll blurt out a confession of his own and leave Alice and me laughing at him.”
Jack Trainor saw that it was not more than the truth. Still he fought against that belief.
“You forget,” he said, “that Joe’s improving. Look at the nice little series of lies he’s just told today. And he was taken by surprise, at that. But now I’ll get him prepared for you. I’ll even work up his counter story.”
“No,” said Larry Haines. “You’ll do nothing like that.”
“No?”
“Certainly not. You and I, my friend, are coming to an understanding!”
“Impossible, Haines. I’m Bigot’s friend.”
“You are? You’ll be more my friend than you are his before I’m through with you.”
Trainor shrugged his shoulder. A slight chill was creeping over him. He could not estimate what strength the other might have in reserve.
“I can pay a high price,” went on Haines calmly.
“You can? Not high enough,” answered Jack.
“Good!” said Haines. “I’m glad to see that you’re not going to start by talking virtue and end up by talking dollars. I’d rather have the dollars talk from the first. It’s cheaper that way. I can begin, you see, by offering to keep away from the telegraph.”
“You start with that. What that means I can’t tell.”
“I’m not asking you to confess anything about that. I’m asking you simply to listen to reason after you’ve heard me state my terms. The first of them is that I won’t try to get the law on your shoulders. The second one is that I’ll give you a fat little stake for yourself. Understand?”
“A stake for myself and no jail,” said Trainor curtly. “That sounds good to me!”
“Now we’re beginning to talk business, eh?”
“Looks that way. How much of a stake, though?”
Haines hesitated. “A thousand…” he began.
Trainor laughed. “I thought we were going to talk business?” he said.
“How much do you want?”
“A pile more than a thousand.”
“Why should you get it?”
“Because I’m going to give you a signed confession telling you everything from the first.”
Haines jerked back his head and laughed softly to himself.
“I’ll boost it over a thousand, then,” he said. “Nobody has ever had to call me a miser.”
“How high above? Remember, you’re bidding for a wife.”
There was an angry snarl from the other at this implication, but he said no articulate word.
“I’ll make that two thousand dollars cold, my friend! Will that do you?”
“That’s about right. That gives me a little leeway.” He paused. “Suppose you give me a check for that right now?”
“Well, I can give you my note for it. Step into the hotel.”
“Come up to my room. I’ve got to get a room, and we can talk things over there, eh?”
Accordingly Larry Haines followed into the hotel where Jack secured a room and went up to it in the company of the other. There he sat down to the little table in the center of the room and took paper and pen and ink out of the drawer.
“Now,” he said, “I’ll sit here and watch you do it, and you sit right over there, opposite, and write out the confession. And, when you’re through with it, I’ll give you an I.O.U. Will that do?”
“Certainly,” said Trainor.
He stepped to the table, dragged up a chair, and stooped as though to sit down. Instead of lowering himself into the chair, however, he shot out his right fist. It landed high along the side of Larry’s head. The latter had seen the shadow of the arm dart out across the top of the table and had flinched. Even in that infinitely slight moment, he had been able to reach the gun that he wore concealed in his clothes, for, when he toppled to the floor and Jack rushed around the table to pick him up, he found that the long Colt was lying in the loose fingers of the fallen man. It was such a tribute to his speed that it sent the shivers again flying up Trainor’s back. Suppose it had been gunplay?
Chapter 10
If he felt any scruples, however, they were short-lived. He had, to be sure, tricked the man shamefully. But all things were fair, so it seemed, in combating one who did not hesitate to purchase a wife, and who, on the way to that end, thought nothing of buying the honor of another man. In the meantime, he had need for speed of hand rather than debates of conscience. Quickly he ripped up a sheet, and with the bands he bound Larry hand and foot and gagged him. All this he accomplished before the latter opened his eyes. The blow had landed just back of the temple where the skull is softest and thinnest and a great purple blur was beginning to show up where the hair did not cover it.
He had hardly ended this task when there was a trample of feet in the hall and then the rap and the voice of the landlord at the same instant. The door opened, but Jack Trainor was there, barring the entrance.
“Something fell,” said the landlord. “I heard something drop. Anything wrong?”
“I was tilted back in my chair,” said Trainor glibly, “and it fell over backward with me. I’ve got a bruised back. That’s all that’s been injured.”
The landlord looked as though he would enter, but presently he nodded, and then withdrew. Trainor closed and locked the door and returned to his victim.
He found that Haines was in the act of struggling weakly to a sitting position, his eyes blank and troubled, but, at the first glimpse of Trainor, the face of Haines flooded with intelligence and hatred.
“Now,” said Jack, drawing his revolver and laying it ostentatiously upon the table, “the time has come for us to talk business of a different kind from what you’ve expected, I guess. In the first place, I want to tell you that you’re right. I’m wanted. And I’m wanted for murder.” The lie came easily from his tongue. “Murder, Haines, and I want you to know it so you’ll understand that I’m ready to go the limit up here if you press me. A man can’t be hung more than once, and he’ll be hung as easy for one killing as for fifty.” It was evident that Haines was impressed. “And so,” said Jack, “I think I can trust you not to holler for help if I take the gag out of your mouth.”
He did as he said. Haines gasped violently to recover his choked-off wind, and then he stared steadily at Trainor with such a consuming rage that the larger man shuddered.
“What’s coming now?” asked Haines.
“The first thing is that I’m going to free your right arm and let you sit at that table to write a little note to your home saying that you’re going to be kept out pretty late, and that you may sleep at the hotel. You hear?”
There was a snarl from Haines, but he carefully softened the tone so that it would not carry beyond the room in which he was imprisoned.
“I’ll do what you want,” he said. “I know that I’ve been a fool. I’ve trusted a stranger for the first time and the last time in my life. No matter what it costs me, I can’t pay too high for it.”
“Not even the woman you love?”
“Not even the loss of her is too high a price,” insisted Larry Haines, although he lost his color as he spoke. Accordingly Jack freed his arm, and then helped him to the table and saw him take pen and paper and write:
This note he then sealed in an envelope and handed to Jack, who got a servant and dispatched the message. Then he turned once more to the other and secured his right hand firmly. After that, he went on to tie Larry Haines hand and foot, so swathing him with bandages that he was well nigh like an Egyptian mummy.
“Because,” he said, when a faint protest was wrung from Haines, “I’ve got to leave, and, if I leave, I’ve got to make sure of you. There’s one safe way, Haines, and that’s a tap on the head. Then Ineed not waste all this time. If you were in my boots, that’s what you’d do, eh?”
The suggestion brought a quick and indescribably cruel smile across the lips of the other man, and then he made his face impassive once more.
“Well, that’s a chance that may come my way one of these days. In the meantime, you lie here, partner, and keep thinking about what’s going on outside. When they come up in the morning and let you loose, you’ll find that Alice Cary and Joe Bigot are man and wife. No matter what you tell her then, the damage will be done, and in the end she’ll be glad that she married him.”
He moved the gag toward the lips of Haines, but the latter stopped him again.
“It seems a queer thing to me, stranger,” he said to Jack, “that a fellow like you would stand by and see such a girl as Alice Cary marry a blockhead like Bigot without lifting your hand. Why, man, she’s on fire with brains and energy. She’s the sort of girl…”
“That I’d like to marry myself,” said Jack. “That what you’re driving at?”
“I tell you this, that she’s fallen in love. She thinks that she’s in love with Joe Bigot. But I know that she isn’t. The man she’s in love with is the man who wrote those letters out of the mountains…and you’re the man.”
Jack shook his head. “It won’t work, Haines,” he said. “You certainly hate Bigot, eh? But you can’t make me do it. I don’t say that couldn’t be done. She’s like prairie grass in August. It wouldn’t take much to set her on fire, as you say. But the very things that make her incline to laugh at Joe are the things that will make her love him more in the end. Why, he’s twice the man that you and I are put together.He doesn’t talk as much, that’s all. And what does a lot of chatter mean?”
“What’s he done for you?” asked the other suddenly, making no effort to reply to this sudden flood of words.
“He saved my life.”
“I thought it was that. Well, I’ll stop talking. But I’d rather see her married to any man in the world than to Bigot.”
After that, without a struggle, he allowed Jack to affix the gag between his teeth. Jack stood back, made sure that all the bonds were so fast that the victim could hardly lift his head, to say nothing of banging upon the floor in any manner, and then turned upon his heel and strode rapidly from the room.
Downstairs he found the proprietor and told him that he would be out for some time, and that Mr. Haines, in the room above, must not be disturbed at any cost, because he was doing some important work. Then, knowing that the door to that room was locked, and that the key was in his pocket, he hurriedly sought Joe Bigot in the house of Alice Cary.
There was only one light burning in the old house when he arrived. But he knew perfectly well that it was the room of Alice in which the light burned and never the room of his friend. Alice’s room it was, where she sat with her thoughts chasing through the clouds. She was full of the return of her lover, but that lover was by this time fast asleep and smiling.
Jack Trainor shrugged his shoulders. He could barely understand such a man. But at least he knew enough of Joe to be aware that the latter’s apathy did not always spring from indifference. No matter how calm his exterior might be, his calmness was no true sign that there was a lack of fire in his heart.That he loved the girl with a quiet and enduring love, Trainor was certain.
He reached the house. In a minute he was in the room where Bigot slept, and roused him by dropping his hand upon the shoulder of the sleeper. Instantly Joe was up and grappling him with a bear-like power. It was a moment before he recognized the protesting voice of Jack and gasped out, as he relaxed his hold: “I thought it was Larry Haines come with a gun to get me because he couldn’t stop me any other way.”
It was such a basically true dream, in spite of its falsity, that Jack was amazed.
“Why does Haines hate you so much?” he asked at length.
“Once him and me and two others sat in at a game of poker. I caught Haines cheating. I didn’t say anything right then, but the next day, when I paid him what I’d lost to him, I told him what I knew. Ever since then he’s hated me. He thinks that I try to tell about that game to everybody. But you’re the first human being that’s heard me speak of it.”
It was such a tribute to the patient honesty of the big man that the heart of Jack Trainor softened suddenly. For years, perhaps, Joe had kept in perfect secrecy tidings about his greatest enemy that would have brought about the detestation of the rest of the acquaintances of the younger man. What motive of clemency had influenced him to this end? Once again, as so often before, Jack felt that he was brought into the presence of a fineness of heart of which he himself would be incapable.
He communicated the purpose of his errand at once. Larry Haines suspected everything. All must be put to the torch now. Tomorrow would be too late. If he loved Alice Cary—if he really felt that he could make her happy to the end of her life—he must prepare to push matters, for, in the morning, Larry Haines would be at liberty, and he would reveal the deception in the writing of the letters. Before morning dawned, Alice must be the wife of Joe Bigot.
Poor Joe listened to the storm of words and bowed his head. It was the result of the first real lie he had ever lived and acted.
“Go to her now,” urged Jack softly. “Tell her that you’ve got to marry her now. And you can do it. You can have a minister here in no time. You can have everything fixed right away, eh?”
Joe Bigot, for answer, went to the window and leaned out into the cooler and the more placid air of the night.
Chapter 11
The man-of-all-work who took the letter from Larry Haines to his home hitched a horse to a cart, jogged the two miles into the country to the farmhouse of the Haines family, and then, having delivered the envelope, turned about and jogged peacefully back toward the village, his head jerking forward sleepily as the cart wriggled down the road. He had no idea of the hubbub that broke out behind him in the Haines house when he delivered the letter.
It was opened by a gray-haired lady, and, when she scanned the contents, she frowned, and then rose from her seat and began to walk the floor anxiously, very much as men do when they are in trouble. As a matter of fact, Larry Haines had managed to write into that apparently harmless note the message that all was not well with him. It had been in an entirely simple manner, and it had succeeded because Jack Trainor knew nothing of the domestic history of the Haines family. The alarm note lay entirely in the opening address—
It was one of those things that could not indicate a lapse of mind. One does not carelessly write down at the head of a letter a familiar name for someone who has been dead for ten years and in a quiet grave.
She read the note through. It was certainly sanely phrased. There was no evidence of liquor in it. Besides that, she knew that her boy did not drink. Moreover, it was his handwriting, or it seemed to be his handwriting. But, when she looked at the handwriting again, she said to herself that it was changed. And changed it certainly was, for with consummate art Larry Haines had altered some of the small details of his script. They had to be small things, and they had to be swiftly and smoothly done, for every line that he made was under the inspection of the hawk eye of the victor. What he managed to change was the method of crossing the Ts, not curling a line back from the bottom of the letter and swirling it over the top, making a separate and straight line through the letter to complete it. It was not hard, also, to follow the same method throughout the note. Every letter he formed with greater care than usual, leaving out all of those lazy little flourishes that tell where a careless writer’s pen has trailed across the paper.
Mrs. Haines stared eagerly at the letter, and then she went to her desk and took out a letter that her son had written from Montreal the year before. One glance was sufficient to sweep all of the color from her face.
“Boys!” she cried, and dropped into her chair almost in a faint.
It happened by the grace of Providence that two tall nephews were at that moment laughing and jesting in the next room. They came hurrying to her, and she thrust the two letters into their hands.
“Larry is in danger…Larry is in danger!” she cried. “Henry…Bob…help him!”
They stared at her as though she might have lost her mind. What danger could have overtaken clever Larry Haines, whose prowess with his fists and with weapons of all kinds they knew only too well?
“It’s a forged letter!” cried the poor mother. “Don’t you see? It’s addressed to his father…ten years dead! And look at the handwriting…forgery!”
The two crowded their heads close together, and they stared at the two letters.
“It is a forgery,” said Bob suddenly. “It’s got the swing of Larry’s writing, but all the little touches are left out. Come on, Henry. We’ll ride in to the hotel.”
Five minutes later they were in the saddle, and their horses’ hoofs were roaring down the hard road toward the village. They rode recklessly, for they were come of a reckless race. They covered the two miles before them in hardly more time than it had taken them to catch and saddle their horses, and then they flung out of their stirrups and rushed into the hotel.
“Where’s Larry Haines?” they asked. “Seen him around here?”
“Sure,” said the proprietor. “What’s happened? Is his house on fire? He’s right upstairs writing!”
Bob and Henry exchanged embarrassed looks.
“We’ll be drifting back, then,” growled Bob.
“Better see him and make sure, first,” said Henry. “You never can trust anything until you’ve seen it with your own eyes. I’ve heard that said a pile of times.”
He led the way up the stairs, and at the designated door they saw the filtering of light through the crack at its edges. They tapped, but there was no response.
“He’ll be mighty mad when we come in,” muttered Bob. “You know how he hates to be bothered. We better go back.”
“I’d rather have him mad at me,” insisted Henry, “than go back and face Aunt Marie without having seen him. I sure would!”
The fear of Aunt Marie made them knock again, and then call softly to tell Larry who was there.
Still there was no answer. They then tried the knob of the door and found that it was locked. Next they beat heavily against the door, and, when that summons brought no answer, they exchanged half-frightened, half-grim looks and in silence both put their strong shoulders to the door.
Something was certainly wrong when a light burned in a room where the door was locked and no one gave an answer. Down went the door with a crash, and, stepping over the threshold, they found the object of their quest lying near the bed, helpless with his bonds and nearly choked by the gag that had worked deeply into his mouth.
That was removed. Their knives slashed the strips of sheet away. For a moment he could only gasp for air, and then he managed to say: “Not a word of this…not a word of how you found me here. You understand? Otherwise, I’ll do a murder on you!”
The injury done to his vanity was, after all, of the first importance in the eyes of Larry. But now, in another moment, he had regained his breath and could speak and act. His first move was to tear the revolver out of Henry’s holster.
Then, briefly and savagely, he told them what he knew—that a conspiracy had been formed against Alice Cary—that she might at this very moment be in the midst of a ceremony that was making her the wife of the wrong man!
The mention of the name of the pretty girl and a wrong done to her sent the others into a fury. In a trice they were down the stairs. It was only a short distance down the street to the house of Alice Cary, but they traveled that distance on horseback, with Larry clinging beside Bob.
They reached the house. They rushed inside and shouted for Alice. The shout brought her sleepy father who, amazed, repeated the call for the girl, received no answer, and then threw her door open. But Alice was gone! Her bed had not been slept in!
He shouted these strange tidings down to the group below and was answered by a wail of fury.
Out of the house they sped and to their horses.
“Try the minister’s…try him at his house!” cried Larry.
And down the road they went at the full speed of the laboring, sweating, terrified horses. They flung themselves off when they reached the little vine-covered house of the man of God. And there, shining through the vines that tangled in front of his study window, was a light.
Yet he might be up reading. No, for they could hear other voices sounding in the room!
They crashed through the front door, and, almost in the same leap, they found themselves herding into the narrow, low-ceilinged room. The aged minister stood with his book in his hand and his eyes raised to heaven. Kneeling before him were Joe Bigot and Alice Cary. Behind stood the minister’s wife and his man-of-all-work. At the trio’s entrance, the witnesses withdrew.
“It’s wrong!” cried Larry Haines, struck sick and white by this sight. “Alice, will you give me two minutes to tell you what I know…?”
“Rise up,” said the minister, “you are man and wife.” He turned upon the intruders. “You have come too late,” he said. “You should have spoken before. Hold your peace forever!”
But Larry cried, writhing in his passion: “There’s been foul play! I’ve been bound and gagged to keep me from coming here and telling Alice what I know to…”
“Wait, Larry,” said Alice.
She spoke with such a perfect coolness in front of his excitement that he was abashed in spite of himself.
“I know everything,” she said.
“Perhaps you think you do, but…”
“I know everything,” she answered, “about the letters.”
“When…?”
“Tonight. In the middle of the night Joe came and told me everything, just before he asked me to marry him. It wasn’t what you would have done, I suppose, if you’d been in his place. And it wasn’t even what that clever friend of his would have done…but it was the best thing, Joe.”
She stepped a little closer to Larry Haines, her eyes suddenly sparkling.
“It took the knife out of your hands. But up to this very moment I wouldn’t believe that you really intended to use it.”
Color rushed into the face of Larry. He saw himself baffled, shamed. For an instant he glared around him, seeking some equal foe on whom he could work his vengeance. But, seeing none, he turned and rushed out into the night.
On that far-off hill that was the only elevation overlooking the beautiful little Canadian village, Jack Trainor halted his horse and looked back. He could make out two or three lights still burning in the town, but, even as he drew rein, one of these went out, then another. He waited for a few long minutes. At length the third light also disappeared, and no one could have told where the village lay in the deep blackness which covered the plain.
It was the blotting out of a great adventure for Jack. And, as he turned away, there was a weight of melancholy and a joy mingled with it, for he knew that he had learned to give more than he could ever take. For, as he said to himself, what did one added sorrow matter when, at the price of it, he could give great happiness to two?