The Heart of Unaga Part 38

"But I'm sorry--now."

No echo of the forest could have startled more. No spur could have stirred Marcel to swifter movement. He was erect in a moment, and turned about, towering in his generous height over the slim creature smiling up into his bewildered eyes. A white girl, wide-eyed, beautiful, was standing before him.

"Now?"

Marcel echoed the stranger's final word stupidly.

"Yes. I'm grieved all to death--now," the girl said, with a composure in striking contrast to Marcel's obvious confusion. "I just am. I hadn't right. But I was scared--scared to death. You don't understand that.

Why, sure you don't. How could you? You're a man. I'm only a girl. And I had to stand around, just waiting, with another feller within a yard or so of sheer death, while all the time I had means in my hand of fixing things right for him. That's how it was when I saw that moose breaking for you. And you--why, you just looked like two cents standing there while that feller's hoofs and horns wanted to leave you feed for the timber wolves. I couldn't stand it. My nerve broke. I drew on him. I had to. I loosed off. Then, I s'pose, I woke up. When I saw him drop I knew just what I'd done. I'd stolen your beast, and--I'm sorry to death."

A girl. A white girl. Oh, yes, there was no mistake, for all the mannishness of her clothing. Marcel stared. He had listened to her words of regret barely comprehending their drift. He was absorbed by that which he beheld, wondering, amazed.

A white girl here, alone in the primordial world of--Unaga.

From the pretty, fair hair peeping from under her beaver cap to the moccasined feet, so absurdly small, under the wide-cut buckskin chapps or trousers that clad her nether limbs, he searched stupidly for the answer to the thousand questions which flooded his brain. Who was she?

How came she there? That amazing shot?

He noted her eyes, so wide and deep-fringed, and of a blue such as he had never yet beheld in the Northern skies. Their dazzling light left him almost dizzy with intoxication. Her cheeks, perfect, with the bloom of health acquired in a life of exposure to the elements. Then her sweet lips parted in a smile that revealed a hint of even teeth of pearly whiteness. But these things were not all. No. There was her tall, slim figure under its buckskin clothing. The effect was superlative.

What a vision for pa.s.sionate youthful eyes to gaze upon in the shadowed world of the Northern forests, where life and death rub shoulders every moment of time. The youth in Marcel was aflame. There flashed through his mind a vague memory of the wooing of the painted women of Seal Bay.

The girl's explanation, her regrets, meant nothing to him.

"What--? Where? Who are you?" he blurted, all his amazed delight flung into a startled demand.

"I'm Keeko."

The reply was without a shadow of hesitation. It came simply, for the wide, amused eyes had seen the youth's confusion, and the woman's mind behind them approved.

"I'm Keeko," the girl repeated, as Marcel still struggled for composure.

"And I came right along in a hurry to tell you I'm sorry----"

Marcel thrust up a hand and pushed back his cap. It was a movement full of significance.

"Sorry?" he cried, with an awkward laugh. "Guess you don't need to be sorry. I need to feel that way, acting foolish, gawking around here like some fool kid. But--you see--you're a--girl."

Keeko's smile broadened into a delicious ripple of laughter.

"Sure," she nodded. "You didn't guess I was a-jack-rabbit?"

Marcel was recovering. He, too, laughed.

"I didn't guess anything," he said. Then with a gesture of helplessness which further added to Keeko's amus.e.m.e.nt: "I couldn't. You see I'm--well--I'm just darned! That's all--just darned!"

"I know," the girl cried delightedly. "You didn't guess to find a girl around. You weren't looking to find anything diff'rent from those things they sort of experimented with when they first reckoned making a camping ground in s.p.a.ce for life to move around on. But you haven't said about that old moose. I robbed you----"

"Oh, h.e.l.l!" Marcel cried, flinging his head back in a happy, buoyant laugh. "We'll just cut that darn old moose right out of this thing.

You're welcome to shoot up any old thing I've got. You're Keeko----"

"Who are you?"

"I--oh, I'm Marcel, and I come from--" He broke off and shook his head.

"No, I can't hand you that."

Marcel gazed down into the girl's pretty eyes. He had only just remembered in time. Somehow this girl seemed to have robbed him of his wits as well as his moose.

"Say," he went on, a moment later, with a sobering of his happy eyes. "I came near making a bad break that time. You see, I just can't tell you where I come from. There's secrets in the darn old Northland some folks would give a heap of dollars to get wise to. Where I come from is one of 'em. What I'm free to tell is I'm mostly a pelt hunter. I've a biggish outfit of Eskimo, and the usual truck of the summer trail, back there on the river that comes out of the east. We've got this territory cached with food dumps and things, and we're out, scattered miles over the country, beating it for pelts with trap and gun. Guess we figger to stop right out till it starts in to freeze up. And just about the time the old sun gets sick worrying to make Unaga a fit place for better than skitters and things, and chases off for its winter sleep, why we're hitting right back to--the place I come from. I've been making the summer trail ever since I was a kid, which isn't a long way back, and I allow this is the first time it's ever been my luck to find better than the silences that's liable to set you plumb crazed if you don't happen to have been born to 'em, the same as I was. Guess that's about all there is to me I know of, except that secret I can't just hand you."

It was all said so frankly, so simply. It was not the story Marcel had to tell that established confidence. It was the telling of it. And it needed no words from the girl to admit her approval. It was s.h.i.+ning in her smiling eyes, while a wonderful feeling began to stir in a heart that was only a shade less simple than the heart of the youth.

Keeko, woman-like, applied no reason where her feelings were concerned.

She liked the man, and she liked the name he called himself by. She liked his great, height and breadth of shoulder, and she liked his clear, handsome eyes with their ingenuous smile. That was sufficient.

She nodded with that intimate air of sympathy.

"I know," she said readily. "It's a land of secrets north of 60. That's why folks live in a country that can't ever get out of its eternal sleep, and only the nightmare of storm disturbs it. The secret isn't usually ours. The secret mostly belongs to those who brought us here, and though maybe we don't understand it right, why, the thing just grows up in our minds, and we find we couldn't talk of it to strangers any more than if it was our own. That's the way of it. It's a country that starts in to break your kid's heart, and ends by making you love it--if it doesn't kill you."

"Oh, yes. I love this old north," she went on with gentle warmth. "Maybe you do, too. It's half-baked and dead-tough anyway. But it teaches even a girl the things it doesn't hurt anyone to know. It's good for us all to get up against Nature in the cold raw. Guess if I was back in a city the biggest thing in my life would likely be squeezing hands made to do things with into gloves that weren't. Or maybe reckoning up which beau could hand me the best time before I got too old to count. It isn't that way here. The north teaches you to think and act right, and you don't have to worry that the girl next door's wearing a later mode in s.h.i.+rt waists than you. No. Man or woman, we've got to make good or go under.

We're all here for that, only some of us don't know it. I'm kind of glad I've learned it, and I'm mighty grateful to those who've taught me.

That's why I'm out on the summer trail same as you. But I've only a small outfit. Three neches and two canoes back there on the river that comes up out of the south, and doesn't quit till it reaches the seas of snow and ice that never thaw. We can't chase the territory wide like you can. We can't carry food for caches, or make the big portages. So we hunt the river, and a day's trail on either bank. There's beaver and fox to be had that way, and it's most all I can hope for. I don't worry if we get it plenty. You see, I need it big--this trip."

Something of the strangeness of the encounter was pa.s.sing from Marcel's mind. A curious feeling of intimacy was induced by the girl's brief outline of the things that concerned herself. Then, above all, there was that youthful desire, untainted by any baseness of pa.s.sion, the natural desire inspired by the appeal of a sweet face, and the smiling eyes of a young girl, battling in a country where there is no margin for the strongest of men.

Nor had Marcel forgotten all the early teachings of Uncle Steve. He knew it was demanded of him that woman, in all her moods, was man's heritage to help, to protect, to relieve, where possible, of those heavy burdens with which nature so mercilessly weighs her down. The opening lay there to his hand, and he seized upon it with an impulse that needed nothing to support it.

"You're needing pelts?" he cried. "Why, that's great!"

Keeko laughed shortly. She failed to realize the thought prompting Marcel's evident delight.

"It would be greater if I didn't," she returned, with a rueful shake of the head.

"How's that?"

"Why it's days since our traps have shown us so much as a wolf track.

And it's nearly a week since we took our last beaver. There's three months of the season left, and I'm needing a three-thousand-dollar trade with Lorson Harris at Seal Bay. Maybe you don't know what that means?"

"Maybe I do," Marcel laughed.

"You do?" Keeko was forced to a responsive laugh. "Yes. It means a whole lot," she went on. "And--I don't guess we've taken five hundred dollars yet--at his price. Last year I took three silver foxes, and a brace of jet black beauties that didn't set him squealing at fifty dollars each.

No. They were jo-dandies," she sighed appreciatively. "But it hasn't been that way this season," she continued, with pathetic regret. "It seems like there isn't a single fox this side of the big north hills."

Marcel shook his head.

"But there is," he said very definitely.

"Is there?" Keeko shook her head. "Then I must have been looking the other way most all the time."

A reply hovered upon Marcel's lips. But he seemed to change his mind. He could not stand the obscuring of the sun of the girl's pretty eyes. He turned away, and laid his rifle aside. Then he sprawled his big body at the foot of an adjacent tree, and sat with his wide shoulders propped against it for support.