Isobel : A Romance of the Northern Trail Part 9

"I just wanted you to notice that her eyes have little brown spots in them," replied Billy. "I've only seen one other pair of eyes-- just like hers." He turned toward the door. "I'm going out to care for the dogs and dig up Blake," he added. "I can't rest until I've seen him."

Pelliter placed Little Mystery on her feet.

"I'll see to the dogs," he said. "But I don't want to look at Blake again."

The two men went out, and while Pelliter led the dogs to a lean-to behind the cabin Billy began to work with an ax and spade at the spot his comrade had pointed out to him. Ten minutes later he came to Blake. An excitement which he had tried to hide from Pelliter overcame his sense of horror as he dragged out the stiff and frozen corpse of the man. It was a terrible picture that the dead man made, with his coa.r.s.e bearded face turned up to the sky and his teeth still snarling as they had snarled on the day he died. Billy knew most men who had come into the north above Churchill, but he had never looked upon Blake before. It was probable that the dead man had told a part of the truth, and that he was a sailor left on the upper coast by some whaler. He s.h.i.+vered as he began going through his pockets. Each moment added to his disappointment. He found a few things-- a knife, two keys, several coins, a fire-flint, and other articles-- but there was no letter or writing of any kind, and that was what he had hoped to find. There was nothing that might solve the mystery of the miracle that had descended upon them. He rolled the dead man into the grave, covered him over, and went into the cabin.

Pelliter was in his usual place-- on his hands and knees, with Little Mystery astride his back. He paused in a mad race across the cabin floor and looked up with inquiring eyes. The little girl held up her arms, and MacVeigh tossed her half-way to the ceiling and then hugged her golden head close up to his chilled face. Pelliter jumped to his feet; his face grew serious as Billy looked at him over the child's tousled curls.

"I found nothing-- absolutely nothing of any account," he said.

He placed Little Mystery on one of the bunks and faced the other with a puzzled loko in his eyes.

"I wish you hadn't been in a fever on that day of the fight, Pelly,"

he said. "He must have said something-- something that would give us a clue."

"Mebbe he did, Billy," replied Pelliter, looking with a s.h.i.+ver at the few things MacVeigh had placed on the cabin table. "But there's no use worrying any more about it. It ain't in reason that she's got any people up here, six hundred miles from the shack of a white man that 'd own a little beauty like her. She's mine. I found her. She's mine to keep."

He sat down at the table, and MacVeigh sat down opposite him, smiling sympathetically into Pelliter's eyes.

"I know you want her-- want her bad, Pelly," he said. "And I know the girl would love her. But she's got people-- somewhere, and it's our duty to find 'em. She didn't drop out of a balloon, Pelly. Do you suppose-- the dead man-- might be her father?"

It was the first time he had asked this question, and he noted the other's sudden shudder of revulsion.

"I've thought of that. But it can't be. He was a beast, and she-- she's a little angel. Billy, her mother must have been beautiful. had that's what made me guess-- fear--"

Pelliter wiped his face uneasily, and the two young men stared into each other's eyes. MacVeigh leaned forward, waiting.

"I figured it all out last night, lying awake there in my bunk,"

continued Pelliter, "and as the second best friend I have on earth I want to ask you not to go any farther, Billy. She's mine. My Jeanne, down there, will love her like a real mother, and we'll bring her up right. But if you go on, Billy, you'll find something unpleasant-- I-- I-- swear you will!"

"You know--"

"I've guessed," interrupted the other. "Billy, sometimes a beast-- a man beast-- holds an attraction for a woman, and Blake was that sort of a beast. You remember-- two years ago-- a sailor ran away with the wife of a whaler's captain away up at Narwhale Inlet. Well--"

Again the two men stared silently at each other. MacVeigh turned slowly toward the child. She had fallen asleep, and he could see the dull s.h.i.+mmer of her golden curls as they lay scattered over Pelliter's pillow.

"Poor little devil!" he exclaimed, softly.

"I believe that woman was Little Mystery's mother," Pelliter went on.

"She couldn't bear to leave the little kid when she went with Blake, so she took her along. Some women do that. And after a time she died.

Then Blake took up with an Eskimo woman. You know what happened after that. We don't want Little Mystery to know all this when she grows up.

It's better not. She's too little to remember, ain't she? She won't ever know."

"I remember the s.h.i.+p," said Billy, not taking his eyes off Little Mystery. "She was the Silver Seal. Her captain's name was Thompson."

He did not look at Pelliter, but he could feel the quick, tense stiffening of the other's body. There was a moment's silence. Then Pelliter spoke in a low, unnatural voice.

"Billy, you ain't going to hunt him up, are you? That wouldn't be fair to me or to the kid. My Jeanne 'll love her, an' mebbe-- mebbe some day your kid 'll come along an' marry her--"

MacVeigh rose to his feet. Pelliter did not see the sudden look of grief that shot into his face.

"What do you say, Billy?"

"Think it over, Pelly," came back Billy's voice, huskily. "Think it over. I don't want to hurt you, and I know you think a lot of her, but-- think it over. You wouldn't rob her father, would you? An' she's all he's got left of the woman. Think it over, Pelly, good 'n' hard.

I'm going to bed an' sleep a week!"

X

IN DEFIANCE OF THE LAW

Billy slept all that day and the night that followed, and Pelliter did not awaken him. He aroused himself from his long sleep of exhaustion an hour or two before dawn of the following morning, and for the first time he had the opportunity of going over with himself all the things that had happened since his return to Fullerton Point. His first thought was Pelliter and Little Mystery. He could hear his comrade's deep breathing in the bunk opposite him, and again he wondered if Pelliter had told him everything. Was it possible that Blake had said nothing to reveal Little Mystery's ident.i.ty, and that the igloo and the dead Eskimo woman had not given up the secret ? It seemed inconceivable that there would not be something in the igloo that would help to clear up the mystery. And yet, after all, he had faith in Pelliter. He knew that he would keep nothing from him even though it meant possession of the child. And then his mind leaped to Isobel Deane. Her eyes were blue, and they had in them those same little spots of brown he had found in Little Mystery's. They were unusual eyes, and he had noticed the brown in them because it had added to their loveliness and had made him think of the violets he had told Pelliter about. Was it possible, he asked himself, that there could be some a.s.sociation between Isobel and Little Mystery ? He confessed that it was scarcely conceivable, and yet it was impossible for him to get the thought out of his mind.

Before Pelliter awoke he had determined upon his own course of action.

He would say nothing of what had happened to himself on the Barren, at least not for a time. He would not tell of his meeting with Isobel and her husband or of what had followed. Until he was absolutely certain that Pelliter was keeping nothing from him he would not confide the secret of his own treachery to him. For he had been a traitor-- to the Law. He realized that. He could tell the story, with its fict.i.tious ending, before they set out for Churchill, where he would give evidence against Bucky Smith. Meanwhile he would watch Pelliter, and wait for him to reveal whatever he might have hidden from him. He knew that if Pelliter was concealing something he was inspired by his almost insane wors.h.i.+p of the little girl he had found who had saved him from madness and death. He smiled in the darkness as he thought that if Pelliter were working to achieve his own end-- possession of Little Mystery-- he was inspired by emotions no more selfish than his own in giving back life to Isobel Deane and her husband. On that score they were even.

He was up and had breakfast started before Pelliter awoke. Little Mystery was still sleeping, and the two men moved about softly in their moccasined feet. On this morning the sun shone brilliantly over the southern ice-fields, and Pelliter aroused Little Mystery so that she might see it before it disappeared. But to-day it did not drop below the gray murkiness of the snow-horizon for nearly an hour. After breakfast Pelliter read his letters again, and then Billy read them.

In one of the letters the girl had put a tress of sunny hair, and Pelliter kissed it shamelessly before his comrade.

"She says she's making the dress she's going to wear when we're married, and that if I don't come home before it's out of style she'll never marry me at all," he cried, joyously. "Look there, on that page she's told me all about it. You're-- you're goin' to be there, ain't you, Billy?"

"If I can make it, Pelly."

"If you can make it! I thought you was going out of the Service when I did."

"I've sort of changed my mind."

"And you're going to stick ?"

"Mebbe for another three years."

Life in the cabin was different after this. Pelliter and Little Mystery were happy, and Billy fought with himself every hour to keep down his own gloom and despair. The sun helped him. It rose earlier each day and remained longer in the sky, and soon the warmth of it began to soften the snow underfoot. The vast fields of ice began to give evidence of the approach of spring, and the air was more and more filled with the thunderous echoes of the "break up." Great floes broke from the sh.o.r.e-runs, and the sea began to open. Down from the north the powerful arctic currents began to move their grinding, roaring avalanches. But it was a full month before Billy was sure that Pelliter was strong enough to begin the long trip south. Even then he waited for another week.

Late one afternoon he went out alone and stood on the cliff watching the thunderous movement of arctic ice out in the Roes Welcome.

Standing motionless fifty paces from the little storm-beaten cabin that represented Law at this loneliest outpost on the American continent, he looked like a carven thing of dun-gray rock, with a dun-gray world over his head and on all sides of him, broken only in its terrific monotony of deathlike sameness by the darker gloom of the sky and the whiter and ghostlier gloom that hung over the ice-fields.

The wind was still bitter, and his vision was shut in by a near horizon which Billy had often thought of as the rim of h.e.l.l. On this afternoon his heart was as leaden as the day. Under his feet the frozen earth s.h.i.+vered with the rumbling reverberations of the cras.h.i.+ng and breaking mountains of ice. His ears were filled with a dull and steady roar, like the echoes of distant thunder, broken now and then-- when an ice-mountain split asunder-- with a report like that of a thirteen-inch gun. There were curious wailings, strange screeching sounds, and heartbreaking moanings in the air. Two days before MacVeigh had heard the roar of the ice ten miles inland, where he had gone for caribou.

But he scarcely heard that roar now. He was looking toward the warring fields of ice, but he did not see them. It was not the dead gloom and the gray monotony that weighted his heart, but the sounds that he heard now and then in the cabin-- the laughing of Little Mystery and of Pelliter. A few days more and he would lose them. And after that what would be left for him? A cry broke from his lips, and he gripped his hands in despair. He would be alone. There was no one waiting for him down in that world to which Pelliter was going, no girl to meet him, no father, no mother-- nothing. He laughed in his pain as he faced the cold wind from the north. The sting of that wind was like the mocking ghost of his own past life. For all his life he had known only the stings of pain and of loneliness. And then, suddenly, there came Pelliter's words to him again-- "Mebbe some day you'll have a kid." A flood of warmth swept through his veins, and in the moment of forgetfulness and hope which came with it he turned his eyes into the south and west and saw the sweet face and upturned lips of Isobel Deane.

He pulled himself together with a low laugh and faced the breaking seas of ice and the north. The gloom of night had drawn the horizon nearer. The rumble and thunder of crumbling floes came from out of a purple chaos that was growing blue-black in the distance. For several minutes he stood listening and looking into nothingness. The breaking of the ice, the moaning discontent in the air, and the growling monotone of the giant currents had driven other men mad; but they held a fascination for him. He knew what was happening, and he could almost measure the strength of the unseen hands of nature. No sound was new or strange to him. But now, as he stood there, there rose above all the other tumult a sound that he had not heard before. His body became suddenly tense and alert as he faced squarely to the north. For a full minute he listened, and then turned and ran to the cabin.

Pelliter had lighted a lamp, and in its glow Billy's face shone white with excitement.

"Good G.o.d, Pelly, come here!" he cried from the door.

As Pelliter ran out he gripped him by the shoulders.

"Listen!" he commanded. "Listen to that!"