North of Fifty-Three Part 18

But a spirit of restlessness drove her back into the city. And at nightfall she went up to her room and threw herself wearily on the bed.

She was tired, body and spirit, and lonely. Nor was this lightened by the surety that she would be lonelier still before she found a niche to fit herself in and gather the threads of her life once more into some orderly pattern.

In the morning she felt better, even to the point of going over the newspapers and jotting down several advertis.e.m.e.nts calling for office help. Her brief experience in Cariboo Meadows had not led her to look kindly on teaching as a means of livelihood. And stenographers seemed to be in demand. Wherefore, she reasoned that wages would be high.

With the list in her purse, she went down on Hastings--which runs like a huge artery through the heart of the city, with lesser streets crossing and diverging.

But she made no application for employment. For on the corner of Hastings and Seymour, as she gathered her skirt in her hand to cross the street, some one caught her by the arm, and cried:

"Well, forevermore, if it isn't Hazel Weir!"

And she turned to find herself facing Loraine Marsh--a Granville school chum--and Loraine's mother. Back of them, with wide and startled eyes, loomed Jack Barrow.

He pressed forward while the two women overwhelmed Hazel with a flood of exclamations and questions, and extended his hand. Hazel accepted the overture. She had long since gotten over her resentment against him. She was furthermore amazed to find that she could meet his eye and take his hand without a single flutter of her pulse. It seemed strange, but she was glad of it. And, indeed, she was too much taken up with Loraine Marsh's chatter, and too genuinely glad to hear a friendly voice again, to dwell much on ghosts of the past.

They stood a few minutes on the corner; then Mrs. Marsh proposed that they go to the hotel, where they could talk at their leisure and in comfort. Loraine and her mother took the lead. Barrow naturally fell into step with Hazel.

"I've been wearing sackcloth and ashes, Hazel," he said humbly. "And I guess you've got about a million apologies coming from everybody in Granville for the shabby way they treated you. Shortly after you left, somebody on one of the papers ferreted out the truth of that Bush affair, and the vindictive old hound's reasons for that compromising legacy were set forth. It seems this newspaper fellow connected up with Bush's secretary and the nurse. Also, Bush appears to have kept a diary--and kept it posted up to the day of his death--poured out all his feelings on paper, and repeatedly a.s.serted that he would win you or ruin you. And it seems that that night after you refused to come to him when he was hurt, he called in his lawyer and made that codicil--and spent the rest of the time till he died gloating over the chances of it besmirching your character."

"I've grown rather indifferent about it," Hazel replied impersonally.

"But he succeeded rather easily. Even you, who should have known me better, were ready to believe the very worst."

"I've paid for it," Barrow pleaded. "You don't know how I've hated myself for being such a cad. But it taught me a lesson--if you'll not hold a grudge against me. I've wondered and worried about you, disappearing the way you did. Where have you been, and how have you been getting on? You surely look well." He bent an admiring glance on her.

"Oh, I've been every place, and I can't complain about not getting on,"

she answered carelessly.

For the life of her, she could not help making comparisons between the man beside her and another who she guessed would by now be bearing up to the crest of the divide that overlooked the green and peaceful vista of forest and lake, with the Babine Range lying purple beyond. She wondered if Roaring Bill Wagstaff would ever, under any circ.u.mstances, have looked on her with the scornful, angry distrust that Barrow had once betrayed. And she could not conceive of Bill Wagstaff ever being humble or penitent for anything he had done. Barrow's att.i.tude was that of a little boy who had broken some plaything in a fit of anger and was now woefully trying to put the pieces together again. It amused her. Indeed, it afforded her a distinctly un-Christian satisfaction, since she was not by nature of a meek or forgiving spirit. He had made her suffer; it was but fitting that he should know a pang or two himself.

Hazel visited with the three of them in the hotel parlor for a matter of two hours, went to luncheon with them, and at luncheon Loraine Marsh brought up the subject of her coming home to Granville with them. The Bush incident was discussed and dismissed. On the question of returning, Hazel was noncommittal. The idea appealed strongly to her.

Granville was home. She had grown up there. There were a mult.i.tude of old ties, a.s.sociations, friends to draw her back. But whether her home town would seem the same, whether she would feel the same toward the friends who had held aloof in the time when she needed a friend the most, even if they came flocking back to her, was a question that she thought of if she did not put it in so many words. On the other hand, she knew too well the drear loneliness that would close upon her in Vancouver when the Marshes left.

"Of course you'll come! We won't hear of leaving you behind. So you can consider that settled." Loraine Marsh declared at last. "We're going day after to-morrow. So is Mr. Barrow."

Jack walked with her out to the Ladysmith, and, among other things, told her how he happened to be in the coast city.

"I've been doing pretty well lately," he said. "I came out here on a deal that involved about fifty thousand dollars. I closed it up just this morning--and the commission would just about buy us that little house we had planned once. Won't you let bygones be bygones, Hazie?"

"It might be possible, Jack," she answered slowly, "if it were not for the fact that you took the most effective means a man could have taken to kill every atom of affection I had for you. I don't feel bitter any more--I simply don't feel at all."

"But you will," he said eagerly. "Just give me a chance. I was a hot-headed, jealous fool, but I never will be again. Give me a chance, Hazel."

"You'll have to make your own chances," she said deliberately. "I refuse to bind myself in any way. Why should I put myself out to make you happy when you destroyed all the faith I had in you? You simply didn't trust me. You wouldn't trust me again. If slander could turn you against me once it might a second time. Besides, I don't care for you as a man wants a woman to care for him. And I don't think I'm going to care--except, perhaps, in a friendly way."

And with that Barrow had to be content.

He called for her the next day, and took her, with the Marshes, out for a launch ride, and otherwise devoted himself to being an agreeable cavalier. On the launch excursion it was settled definitely that Hazel should accompany them East. She had no preparations to make. The only thing she would like to have done--return Roaring Bill's surplus money--she could not do. She did not know how or where to reach him with a letter. So far as Granville was concerned, she could always leave it if she desired, and she was a trifle curious to know how all her friends would greet her now that the Bush mystery was cleared up and the legacy explained.

So that at dusk of the following day she and Loraine Marsh sat in a Pullman, flattening their noses against the car window, taking a last look at the environs of Vancouver as the train rolled through the outskirts of the city. Hazel told herself that she was going home.

Barrow smiled friendly a.s.surance over the seat.

Even so, she was restless, far from content. There was something lacking. She grew distrait, monosyllabic, sat for long intervals staring absently into the gloom beyond the windowpane. The Limited was ripping through forested land. She could see now and then tall treetops limned against the starlit sky. The ceaseless roar of the trucks and the buzz of conversation in the car irritated her. At half after eight she called the porter and had him arrange her section for the night. And she got into bed, thankful to be by herself, depressed without reason.

She slept for a time, her sleep broken into by morbid dreams, and eventually she wakened to find her eyes full of tears. She did not know why she should cry, but cry she did till her pillow grew moist--and the heavy feeling in her breast grew, if anything, more intense.

She raised on one elbow and looked out the window. The train slowed with a squealing of brakes and the hiss of escaping air to a station.

On the signboard over the office window she read the name of the place and the notation: "Vancouver, 180 miles."

Her eyes were still wet. When the Limited drove east again she switched on the tiny electric bulb over her head, and fumbled in her purse for another handkerchief. Her fingers drew forth, with the bit of linen, a folded sheet of paper, which seemed to hypnotize her, so fixedly did she remain looking at it. A sheet of plain white paper, marked with dots and names and crooked lines that stood for rivers, with shaded patches that meant mountain ranges she had seen--Bill Wagstaff's map.

She stared at it a long time. Then she found her time-table, and ran along the interminable string of station names till she found Ashcroft, from whence northward ran the Appian Way of British Columbia, the Cariboo Road, over which she had journeyed by stage. She noted the distance, and the Limited's hour of arrival, and looked at her watch.

Then a feverish activity took hold of her. She dressed, got her suit case from under the berth, and stuffed articles into it, regardless of order. Her hat was in a paper bag suspended from a hook above the upper berth. Wherefore, she tied a silk scarf over her head.

That done, she set her suit case in the aisle, and curled herself in the berth, with her face pressed close against the window. A whimsical smile played about her mouth, and her fingers tap-tapped steadily on the purse, wherein was folded Bill Wagstaff's map.

And then out of the dark ahead a cl.u.s.ter of lights winked briefly, the shriek of the Limited's whistle echoed up and down the wide reaches of the North Thompson, and the coaches came to a stop. Hazel took one look to make sure. Then she got softly into the aisle, took up her suit case, and left the car. At the steps she turned to give the car porter a message.

"Tell Mrs. Marsh--the lady in lower five," she said, with a dollar to quicken his faculties, "that Miss Weir had to go back. Say that I will write soon and explain."

She stood back in the shadow of the station for a few seconds. The Limited's stop was brief. When the red lights went drumming down the track, she took up her suit case and walked uptown to the hotel where she had tarried overnight once before.

The clerk showed her to a room. She threw her suit case on the bed and turned the key in the lock. Then she went over, and, throwing up the window to its greatest height, sat down and looked steadily toward the north, smiling to herself.

"I can find him," she suddenly said aloud. "Of course I can find him!"

And with that she blew a kiss from her finger-tips out toward the dark and silent North, pulled down the shade, and went quietly to bed.

CHAPTER XV

AN ENDING AND A BEGINNING

Unconsciously, by natural a.s.similation, so to speak, Hazel Weir had absorbed more woodcraft than she realized in her over-winter stay in the high lat.i.tudes. Bill Wagstaff had once told her that few people know just what they can do until they are compelled to try, and upon this, her second journey northward, the truth of that statement grew more patent with each pa.s.sing day. Little by little the vast central interior of British Columbia unfolded its orderly plan of watercourses, mountain ranges, and valleys. She pa.s.sed camping places, well remembered of that first protesting journey. And at night she could close her eyes beside the camp fires and visualize the prodigious setting of it all--eastward the pyramided Rockies, westward lesser ranges, the Telegraph, the Babine; and through the plateau between the turbulent Frazer, bearing eastward from the Rockies and turning abruptly for its long flow south, with its sinuous doublings and turnings that were marked in bold lines on Bill Wagstaff's map.

So trailing north with old Limping George, his fat _klootch_, and two half-grown Siwash youths, Hazel bore steadily across country, driving as straight as the rolling land allowed for the cabin that snuggled in a woodsy basin close up to the peaks that guard Pine River Pa.s.s.

There came a day when brief uncertainty became sure knowledge at sight of an L-shaped body of water glimmering through the fire-thinned spruce. Her heart fluttered for a minute. Like a homing bird, by grace of the rude map and Limping George, she had come to the lake where the Indians had camped in the winter, and she could have gone blindfolded from the lake to Roaring Bill's cabin.

On the lake sh.o.r.e, where the spruce ran out to birch and cottonwood, she called a halt.

"Make camp," she instructed. "Cabin over there," she waved her hand.

"I go. Byemby come back."

Then she urged her pony through the light timber growth and across the little meadows where the rank gra.s.s and strange varicolored flowers were springing up under the urge of the warm spring sun. Twenty minutes brought her to the clearing. The gra.s.s sprang lush there, and the air was pleasant with odors of pine and balsam wafted down from the mountain height behind. But the breath of the woods was now a matter of small moment, for Silk and Satin and n.i.g.g.e.r loafing at the sunny end of the stable p.r.i.c.ked up their ears at her approach, and she knew that Roaring Bill was home again. She tied her horse to a sapling and drew nearer. The cabin door stood wide.

A brief panic seized her. She felt a sudden shrinking, a wild desire for headlong flight. But it pa.s.sed. She knew that for good or ill she would never turn back. And so, with her heart thumping tremendously and a tentative smile curving her lips, she ran lightly across to the open door.

On the soft turf her footsteps gave forth no sound. She gained the doorway as silently as a shadow. Roaring Bill faced the end of the long room, but he did not see her, for he was slumped in the big chair before the fireplace, his chin sunk on his breast, staring straight ahead with absent eyes.