The Magnetic North Part 55

"Yep."

There was a little silence.

"I wish you wouldn't, Colonel."

"It's dangerous alone--not for two."

"Yes, it IS dangerous, and you know it."

"I'm goin' along, laddie." Seeing the Boy look precious grave and hara.s.sed: "What's the matter?"

"I'd hate awfully for anything to happen to you."

The Colonel laughed. "Much obliged, but it matters uncommon little if I do drop in my tracks."

"You be blowed!"

"You see I've got a pretty bad kind of a complaint, anyhow." The Boy leaned over in the firelight and scanned the Colonel's face.

"What's wrong?"

The Colonel smiled a queer little one-sided smile. "I've been out o'

kelter nearly ten years."

"Oh, _that's_ all right. You'll go on for another thirty if you stay where you are till the ice goes out."

The Colonel bent his head, and stared at the smooth-trodden floor at the edge of the buffalo-skin. "To tell the truth, I'll be glad to go, not only because of--" He hitched his shoulders towards the corner whence came the hoa.r.s.e and m.u.f.fled breathing of the Denver clerk. "I'll be glad to have something to tire me out, so I'll sleep--sleep too sound to dream. That's what I came for, not to sit idle in a G.o.d-d.a.m.n cabin and think--think--" He got up suddenly and strode the tiny s.p.a.ce from fire to door, a man transformed, with hands clenching and dark face almost evil. "They say the men who winter up here either take to drink or go mad. I begin to see it is so. It's no place to do any forgetting in." He stopped suddenly before the Boy with glittering eyes. "It's the country where your conscience finds you out."

"That religion of yours is makin' you morbid, Colonel." The Boy spoke with the detached and soothing air of a sage.

"You don't know what you're talking about." He turned sharply away. The Boy relapsed into silence. The Colonel in his renewed prowling brought up against the wooden crane. He stood looking down into the fire. Loud and regular sounded the sleeping man's breathing in the quiet little room.

"I did a wrong once to a woman--ten years ago," said the Colonel, speaking to the back-log--"although I loved her." He raised a hand to his eyes with a queer choking sound. "I loved her," he repeated, still with his back to the Boy. "By-and-by I could have righted it, but she--she wasn't the kind to hang about and wait on a man's better nature when once he'd shown himself a coward. She skipped the country."

He leaned his head against the end of the shelf over the fire, and said no more.

"Go back in the spring, find out where she is, and--"

"I've spent every spring and every summer, every fall and every winter till this one, trying to do just that thing."

"You can't find her?"

"n.o.body can find her."

"She's dead--"

"She's _not_ dead!"

The Boy involuntarily shrank back; the Colonel looked ready to smash him. The action recalled the older man to himself.

"I feel sure she isn't dead," he said more quietly, but still trembling. "No, no; she isn't dead. She had some money of her own, and she went abroad. I followed her. I heard of her in Paris, in Rome. I saw her once in a droschky in Vienna; there I lost the trail. Her people said she'd gone to j.a.pan. _I_ went to j.a.pan. I'm sure she wasn't in the islands. I've spent my life since trying to find her--writing her letters that always come back--trying--" His voice went out like a candle-wick suddenly dying in the socket. Only the sleeper was audible for full five minutes. Then, as though he had paused only a comma's s.p.a.ce, the Colonel went on: "I've been trying to put the memory of her behind me, as a sane man should. But some women leave an arrow sticking in your flesh that you can never pull out. You can only jar against it, and cringe under the agony of the reminder all your life long.... Bah!

Go out, Boy, and bring in your sled."

And the Boy obeyed without a word.

Two days after, three men with a child stood in front of the larger cabin, saying good-bye to their two comrades who were starting out on snow-shoes to do a little matter of 625 miles of Arctic travelling, with two weeks' scant provisioning, some tea and things for trading, bedding, two rifles, and a kettle, all packed on one little hand-sled.

There had been some unexpected feeling, and even some real generosity shown at the last, on the part of the three who were to profit by the exodus--falling heir thereby to a bigger, warmer cabin and more food.

O'Flynn was moved to make several touching remonstrances. It was a sign of unwonted emotion on Mac's part that he gave up arguing (sacrificing all the delight of a set debate), and simply begged and prayed them not to be fools, not to fly in the face of Providence.

But Potts was made of sterner stuff. Besides, the thing was too good to be true. O'Flynn, when he found they were not to be dissuaded, solemnly presented each with a little bottle of whisky. n.o.body would have believed O'Flynn would go so far as that. Nor could anyone have antic.i.p.ated that close-fisted Mac would give the Boy his valuable aneroid barometer and compa.s.s, or that Potts would be so generous with his best Virginia straight-cut, filling the Colonel's big pouch without so much as a word.

"It's a crazy scheme," says he, shaking the giant Kentuckian by the hand, "and you won't get thirty miles before you find it out."

"Call it an expedition to Anvik," urged Mac. "Load up there with reindeer meat, and come back. If we don't get some fresh meat soon, we'll be having scurvy."

"What you're furr doin'," says O'Flynn for the twentieth time, "has niver been done, not ayven be Indians. The prastes ahl say so."

"So do the Sour-doughs," said Mac. "It isn't as if you had dogs."

"Good-bye," said the Colonel, and the men grasped hands.

Potts shook hands with the Boy as heartily as though that same hand had never half throttled him in the cause of a missing hatchet.

"Good-bye, Kiddie. I bequeath you my share o' syrup."

"Good-bye; meet you in the Klond.y.k.e!"

"Good-bye. Hooray for the Klond.y.k.e in June!"

"Klond.y.k.e in June! Hoop-la!"

The two travellers looked back, laughing and nodding, as jolly as you please. The Boy stooped, made a snow-ball, and fired it at Kaviak. The child ducked, chuckling, and returned as good as he got. His loosely packed ball broke in a splash on the back of the Boy's parki, and Kaviak was loudly cheered.

Still, as they went forward, they looked back. The Big Chimney wore an air wondrous friendly, and the wide, white world looked coldly at them, with small pretence of welcome or reward.

"I don't believe I ever really knew how awful jolly the Big Chimney was--till this minute."

The Colonel smiled. "Hardly like myself, to think whatever else I see, I'll never see that again."

"Better not boast."

The Colonel went on in front, breaking trail in the newfallen snow, the Boy pulling the sled behind him as lightly as if its double burden were a feather.

"They look as if they thought it'd be a picnic," says Mac, grimly.

"I wonder be the Siven Howly Pipers! will we iver see ayther of 'em again."