The Hunted Woman Part 8

"Let me ask you something before I go on," he whispered. "You won't take offence--because it's necessary. She looked like an angel to me when I saw her up at the train. But you _know_. Is she good, or----You know what we think of women who come in here alone. That's why I ask."

"She's what you thought she was, Stevens," replied Aldous. "As pure and as sweet as she looks. The kind we like to fight for."

"I was sure of it, Aldous. That's why I sent the kid for you. I saw her in your cabin--after the outfit went to h.e.l.l. When I come back to camp, Quade was here. I was pretty well broken up. Didn't talk to him much. But he seen I had lost everything. Then he went on down to your place. He told me that later. But I guessed it soon as he come back. I never see him look like he did then. I'll cut it short. He's mad--loon mad--over that girl. I played the sympathy act, thinkin' of you--an' _her_. He hinted at some easy money.

I let him understand that at the present writin' I'd be willing to take money most any way, and that I didn't have any particular likin' for you.

Then it come out. He made me a proposition."

Stevens lowered his voice, and stopped to peer again about the bush.

"Go on," urged Aldous. "We're alone."

Stevens bent so near that his tobacco-laden breath swept his companion's cheek.

"He said he'd replace my lost outfit if I'd put you out of the way some time day after to-morrow!"

"Kill me?"

"Yes."

For a few moments there was a silence broken only by their tense breathing.

Aldous had found the packer's hand. He was gripping it hard.

"Thank you, old man," he said. "And he believes you will do it?"

"I told him I would--day after to-morrow--an' throw your body in the Athabasca."

"Splendid, Stevens! You've got Sherlock Holmes beat by a mile! And does he want you to do this pretty job because I gave him a crack on the jaw?"

"Not a bit of it!" exclaimed Stevens quickly. "He knows the girl is a stranger and alone. You've taken an interest in her. With you out of the way, she won't be missed. Dammit, man, don't you know his system? And, if he ever wanted anything in his life he wants her. She's turned that poison-blood of his into fire. He raved about her here. He'll go the limit.

He'll do anything to get her. He's so crazy I believe he'd give every dollar he's got. There's just one thing for you to do. Send the girl back where she come from. Then you get out. As for myself--I'm goin' to emigrate. Ain't got a dollar now, so I might as well hit for the prairies an' get a job on a ranch. Next winter I guess me 'n the kid will trap up on the Parsnip River."

"You're wrong--clean wrong," said Aldous quietly. "When I saw your outfit going down among the rocks I had already made up my mind to help you. What you've told me to-night hasn't made any difference. I would have helped you anyway, Stevens. I've got more money than I know what to do with right now.

Roper has a thirty-horse outfit for sale. Buy it to-morrow. I'll pay for it, and you needn't consider yourself a dollar in debt. Some day I'll have you take me on a long trip, and that will make up for it. As for the girl and myself--we're going on to Tete Jaune to-morrow."

Aldous could see the amazed packer staring at him in the gloom. "You don't think I'm sellin' myself, do you, Aldous?" he asked huskily. "That ain't why you're doin' this--for me 'n the kid--is it?"

"I had made up my mind to do it before I saw you to-night," repeated Aldous. "I've got lots of money, and I don't use but a little of it. It sometimes acc.u.mulates so fast that it bothers me. Besides, I've promised to accept payment for the outfit in trips. These mountains have got a hold on me, Stevens. I'm going to take a good many trips before I die."

"Not if you go on to Tete Jaune, you ain't," replied Stevens, biting a huge quid from a black plug.

Aldous had risen to his feet. Stevens stood up beside him.

"If you go on to Tete Jaune you're a bigger fool than I was in tryin' to swim the outfit across the river to-day," he added. "Listen!" He leaned toward Aldous, his eyes gleaming. "In the last six months there's been forty dead men dragged out of the Frazer between Tete Jaune an' Fort George. You know that. The papers have called 'em accidents--the 'toll of railroad building.' Mebby a part of it is. Mebby a half of them forty died by accident. The other half didn't. They were sent down by Culver Rann and Bill Quade. Once you go floatin' down the Frazer there ain't no questions asked. Somebody sees you an' pulls you out--mebby a Breed or an Indian--an'

puts you under a little sand a bit later. If it's a white man he does likewise. There ain't no time to investigate floaters over-particular in the wilderness. Besides, you git so beat up in the rocks you don't look like much of anything. I know, because I worked on the scows three months, an' helped bury four of 'em. An' there wasn't anything, not even a sc.r.a.p of paper, in the pockets of two of 'em! Is that suspicious, or ain't it? It don't pay to talk too much along the Frazer. Men keep their mouths shut.

But I'll tell you this: Culver Rann an' Bill Quade know a lot."

"And you think I'll go in the Frazer?"

"Egzactly. Quade would rather have you in there than in the Athabasca. And then----"

"Well?"

Stevens spat into the bush, and shrugged his shoulders. "This beautiful lady you've taken an interest in will turn up missing, Aldous. She'll disappear off the face of the map--just like Stimson's wife did. You remember Stimson?"

"He was found in the Frazer," said Aldous, gripping the other's arm in the darkness.

"Egzactly. An' that pretty wife of his disappeared a little later. Up there everybody's too busy to ask where other people go. Culver Rann an' Bill Quade know what happened to Stimson, an' they know what happened to Stimson's wife. You don't want to go to Tete Jaune. You don't want to let _her_ go. I know what I'm talking about. Because----"

There fell a moment's silence. Aldous waited. Stevens spat again, and finished in a whisper:

"Quade went to Tete Jaune to-night. He went on a hand-car. He's got something he wants to tell Culver Rann that he don't dare telephone or telegraph. An' he wants to get that something to him ahead of to-morrow's train. Understand?"

CHAPTER VIII

John Aldous confessed to himself that he did not quite understand, in spite of the effort Stevens had made to impress upon him, the importance of not going to Tete Jaune. He was bewildered over a number of things, and felt that he needed to be alone for a time to clear his mind. He left Stevens, promising to return later to share a couple of blankets and a part of his tepee, for he was determined to keep his promise to Joanne, and not return to his own cabin, even though Quade had left Miette. He followed a moonlit trail along the river to an abandoned surveyors' camp, knowing that he would meet no one, and that in this direction he would have plenty of unbroken quiet in which to get some sort of order out of the chaotic tangle of events through which he had pa.s.sed that day.

Aldous had employed a certain amount of caution, but until he had talked with Stevens he had not believed that Quade, in his twofold desire to avenge himself and possess Joanne, would go to the extraordinary ends predicted by the packer. His point of view was now entirely changed. He believed Stevens. He knew the man was not excitable. He was one of the coolest heads in the mountains. And he had abundant nerve. Thought of Stimson and Stimson's wife had sent the hot blood through Aldous like fire.

Was Stevens right in that detail? And was Quade actually planning the same end for him and Joanne? Why had Quade stolen on ahead to Tete Jaune? Why had he not waited for to-morrow's train?

He found himself walking swiftly along the road, where he had intended to walk slowly--a hundred questions pounding through his brain. Suddenly a thought came to him that stopped him in the trail, his unseeing eyes staring down into the dark chasm of the river. After all, was it so strange that Quade would do these things? Into his own life Joanne had come like a wonderful dream-creature transformed into flesh and blood. He no longer tried to evade the fact that he could not think without thinking of Joanne.

She had become a part of him. She had made him forget everything but her, and in a few hours had sent into the dust of ruin his cynicism and aloneness of a lifetime. If Joanne had come to him like this, making him forget his work, filling him more and more with the thrilling desire to fight for her, was it so very strange that a beast like Quade would fight--in another way?

He went on down the trail, his hands clenched tightly. After all, it was not fear of Quade or of what he might attempt that filled him with uneasiness. It was Joanne herself, her strange quest, its final outcome.

With the thought that she was seeking for the man who was her husband, a leaden hand seemed gripping at his heart. He tried to shake it off, but it was like a sickness. To believe that she had been the wife of another man or that she could ever belong to any other man than himself seemed like shutting his eyes forever to the sun. And yet she had told him. She had belonged to another man; she might belong to him even now. She had come to find if he was alive--or dead.

And if alive? Aldous stopped again, and looked down into the dark pit through which the river was rus.h.i.+ng a hundred feet below him. It tore in frothing maelstroms through a thousand rocks, filling the night with a low thunder. To John Aldous the sound of it might have been a thousand miles away. He did not hear. His eye saw nothing in the blackness. For a few moments the question he had asked himself obliterated everything. If they found Joanne's husband alive at Tete Jaune--what then? He turned back, retracing his steps over the trail, a feeling of resentment--of hatred for the man he had never seen--slowly taking the place of the oppressive thing that had turned his heart sick within him. Then, in a flash, came the memory of Joanne's words--words in which, white-faced and trembling, she had confessed that her anxiety was not that she would find him dead, but that _she would find him alive_. A joyous thrill shot through him as he remembered that. Whoever this man was, whatever he might have been to her once, or was to her now, Joanne did not want to find him alive! He laughed softly to himself as he quickened his pace. The tense grip of his fingers loosened. The grim, almost ghastly part of it did not occur to him--the fact that deep in his soul he was wis.h.i.+ng a man dead and in his grave.

He did not return at once to the scenes about Quade's place, but went to the station, three quarters of a mile farther up the track. Here, in a casual way, he learned from the little pink-faced c.o.c.kney Englishman who watched the office at night that Stevens had been correct in his information. Quade had gone to Tete Jaune. Although it was eleven o'clock, Aldous proceeded in the direction of the engineers' camp, still another quarter of a mile deeper in the bush. He was restless. He did not feel that he could sleep that night. The engineers' camp he expected to find in darkness, and he was surprised when he saw a light burning brightly in Keller's cabin.

Keller was the a.s.sistant divisional engineer, and they had become good friends. It was Keller who had set the first surveyor's line at Tete Jaune, and it was he who had reported it as the strategic point from which to push forward the fight against mountain and wilderness, both by river and rail.

He was, in a way, accountable for the existence of Tete Jaune just where it did exist, and he knew more about it than any other man in the employ of the Grand Trunk Pacific. For this reason Aldous was glad that Keller had not gone to bed. He knocked at the door and entered without waiting for an invitation.

The engineer stood in the middle of the floor, his coat off, his fat, stubby hands thrust into the pockets of his baggy trousers, his red face and bald cranium s.h.i.+ning in the lamplight. A strange fury blazed in his eyes as he greeted his visitor. He began pacing back and forth across the room, puffing volumes of smoke from a huge bowled German pipe as he motioned Aldous to a chair.

"What's the matter, Peter?"

"Enough--an' be d.a.m.ned!" growled Peter. "If it wasn't enough do you think I'd be out of bed at this hour of the night?"

"I'm sure it's enough," agreed Aldous. "If it wasn't you'd be in your little trundle over there, sleeping like a baby. I don't know of any one who can sleep quite as sweetly as you, Peter. But what the devil _is_ the trouble?"

"Something that you can't make me feel funny over. You haven't heard--about the bear?"

"Not a word, Peter."