Part 22

"No, it wasn't me, it wasn't me that done it; it was a girl. Here she is--Jenny Long! You got to thank her, Jake."

Jake! Jake! The girl awakened to full understanding now. Jake--what Jake? She looked, then stumbled forward with a cry.

"Jake--it was my Jake!" she faltered.

The mine-boss caught her in his arms.

"You, Jenny! It's you that's saved me!"

Suddenly there was a rumble as of thunder, and a cloud of dust and stone rose from the Snowdrop Mine.

The mine-boss tightened his arm round the girl's waist. "That's what I missed, through him and you, Jenny," he said.

"What was you doing here, and not at Selby, Jake?" she asked.

"They sent for me--to stop the trouble here."

"But what about our wedding to-day?" she asked, with a frown.

"A man went from here with a letter to you three days ago," he said, "asking you to come down here and be married. I suppose he got drunk, or had an accident, and didn't reach you. It had to be. I was needed here--couldn't tell what would happen."

"It has happened out all right," said Dingley, "and this'll be the end of it. You got them miners solid now. The strikers'll eat humble pie after to-day."

"We'll be married to-day, just the same," the mine-boss said, as he gave some brandy to the girl.

But the girl shook her head. She was thinking of a white petticoat in a little house in the mountains.

"I'm not going to be married to-day," she said, decisively.

"Well, to-morrow," said the mine-boss.

But the girl shook her head again. "To-day is to-morrow," she answered. "You can wait, Jake. I'm going back home to be married."

QU'APPELLE

(Who calls?)

"But I'm white; I'm not an Indian. My father was a white man. I've been brought up as a white girl. I've had a white girl's schooling."

Her eyes flashed as she sprang to her feet and walked up and down the room for a moment, then stood still, facing her mother--a dark-faced, pock-marked woman, with heavy, somnolent eyes--and waited for her to speak. The reply came slowly and sullenly:

"I am a Blackfoot woman. I lived on the Muskwat River among the braves for thirty years. I have killed buffalo. I have seen battles. Men, too, I have killed when they came to steal our horses and crept in on our lodges in the night--the Crees! I am a Blackfoot. You are the daughter of a Blackfoot woman. No medicine can cure that. Sit down. You have no sense. You are not white. They will not have you. Sit down."

The girl's handsome face flushed; she threw up her hands in an agony of protest. A dreadful anger was in her panting breast, but she could not speak. She seemed to choke with excess of feeling. For an instant she stood still, trembling with agitation, then she sat down suddenly on a great couch covered with soft deer-skins and buffalo robes. There was deep in her the habit of obedience to this sombre but striking woman. She had been ruled firmly, almost oppressively, and she had not yet revolted. Seated on the couch, she gazed out of the window at the flying snow, her brain too much on fire for thought, passion beating like a pulse in all her lithe and graceful young body, which had known the storms of life and time for only twenty years.

The wind shrieked and the snow swept past in clouds of blinding drift, completely hiding from sight the town below them, whose civilization had built itself many habitations and was making roads and streets on the green-brown plain, where herds of buffalo had stamped and streamed and thundered not long ago. The town was a mile and a half away, and these two were alone in a great circle of storm, one of them battling against a tempest which might yet overtake her, against which she had set her face ever since she could remember; though it had only come to violence since her father died two years before--a careless, strong, wilful white man, who had lived the Indian life for many years, but had been swallowed at last by the great wave of civilization streaming westward and northward, wiping out the game and the Indian, and overwhelming the rough, fighting, hunting, pioneer life. Joel Renton had made money, by good luck chiefly, having held land here and there which he had got for nothing, and had then almost forgotten about it, and, when reminded of it, still held on to it with that defiant stubbornness which often possesses improvident and careless natures. He had never had any real business instinct, and to swagger a little over the land he held and to treat offers of purchase with contempt was the loud assertion of a capacity he did not possess. So it was that stubborn vanity, beneath which was his angry protest against the prejudice felt by the new people of the West for the white pioneer who married an Indian and lived the Indian life--so it was that this gave him competence and a comfortable home after the old trader had been driven out by the railway and the shopkeeper. With the first land he sold he sent his daughter away to school in a town farther east and south, where she had been brought in touch with a life that at once cramped and attracted her; where, too, she had felt the first chill of racial ostracism, and had proudly fought it to the end, her weapons being talent, industry, and a hot, defiant ambition.

There had been three years of bitter, almost half-sullen, struggle, lightened by one sweet friendship with a girl whose face she had since drawn in a hundred different poses on stray pieces of paper, on the walls of the big, well-lighted attic to which she retreated for hours every day, when she was not abroad on the prairies, riding the Indian pony that her uncle the Piegan Chief, Ice Breaker, had given her years before. Three years of struggle, and then her father had died, and the refuge for her vexed, defiant heart was gone. While he lived she could affirm the rights of a white man's daughter, the rights of the daughter of a pioneer who had helped to make the West; and her pride in him had given a glow to her cheek and a spring to her step which drew every eye. In the chief street of Portage la Drôme men would stop their trafficking and women nudge one another when she passed, and wherever she went she stirred interest, excited admiration, or aroused prejudice--but the prejudice did not matter so long as her father, Joel Renton, lived. Whatever his faults, and they were many--sometimes he drank too much, and swore a great deal, and bullied and stormed--she blinked at them all, for he was of the conquering race, a white man who had slept in white sheets and eaten off white tablecloths, and used a knife and fork, since he was born; and the women of his people had had soft petticoats and fine stockings, and silk gowns for festal days, and feathered hats of velvet, and shoes of polished leather, always and always, back through many generations. She had held her head high, for she was of his women, of the women of his people, with all their rights and all their claims. She had held it high till that stormy day--just such a day as this, with the surf of snow breaking against the house--when they carried him in out of the wild turmoil and snow, laying him on the couch where she now sat, and her head fell on his lifeless breast, and she cried out to him in vain to come back to her.

Before the world her head was still held high, but in the attic-room, and out on the prairies far away, where only the coyote or the prairie hen saw, her head drooped, and her eyes grew heavy with pain and sombre protest. Once in an agony of loneliness, and cruelly hurt by a conspicuous slight put upon her at the Portage by the wife of the Reeve of the town, who had daughters twain of pure white blood got from behind the bar of a saloon in Winnipeg, she had thrown open her window at night, with the frost below zero, and stood in her thin nightdress, craving the death which she hoped the cold would give her soon. It had not availed, however, and once again she had ridden out in a blizzard to die, but had come upon a man lost in the snow, and her own misery had passed from her, and her heart, full of the blood of plainsmen, had done for another what it would not do for itself. The Indian in her had, with strange, sure instinct, found its way to Portage la Drôme, the man, with both hands and one foot frozen, on her pony, she walking at his side, only conscious that she had saved one, not two lives that day.

Here was another such day, here again was the storm in her heart which had driven her into the plains that other time, and here again was that tempest of white death outside.

"You have no sense. You are not white. They will not have you. Sit down--" The words had fallen on her ears with a cold, deadly smother. There came a chill upon her which stilled the wild pulses in her, which suddenly robbed the eyes of their brightness and gave a drawn look to the face.