Part 55

"No."

"Did you ever want to kill a man?"

"No."

"Were you ever broke and friendless and hopeless?"

"Why, I can't say I ever was."

"And you've never been downright hungry, either, where you didn't know if you'd ever eat again, have you? Then what license have you got to blame people for the condition you find them in? How do you know what brought this girl where she is?"

"Oh, I pity any woman who is adrift on the world, if that's what you mean, but I won't make a pet out of her just because she is friendless. She must expect that when she chooses her life. Her kind are bad--bad all through. They must be."

"Not on your life. Decency runs deeper than the hives."

"Trouble with you," said I, "you've got a juvenile standard--things are all good or all bad in your eyes--and you can't like a person unless the one overbalances the other. When you are older you'll find that people are like gold-mines, with a thin streak of pay on bed-rock and lots of hard digging above."

"I didn't mean to be discourteous," our man continued, "but I'll never change my feelings about such things. Mind you, I'm not preaching, nor asking you to change your habits--all I want is a chance to live my own life clean."

The mail came in during March, five hundred pounds of it, and the camp went daffy.

Monty had the dogs harnessed ten minutes after we got the news, and we drove the four miles in seventeen minutes. I've known men with sweethearts outside, but I never knew one to act gladder than Monty did at the thought of hearing from his mother.

"You must come and see us when you make your pile," he told me, "or--what's better--we'll go East together next spring and surprise her. Won't that be great? We'll walk in on her in the summer twilight while she is working in her flower-garden. Can't you just see the green trees and smell the good old smells of home? The catbirds will be calling and the grass will be clean and sweet. Why, I'm so tired of the cold and the snow and the white, white mountains that I can hardly stand it."

He ran on in that vein all the way to town, glad and hopeful and boyish--and I wondered why, with his earnestness and loyalty and broad shoulders, he had never loved any woman but his mother. When I was twenty-three my whole romantic system had been mangled and shredded from heart to gizzard. Still, some men get their age all in a lump; they're boys up till the last minute, then they get the Rip Van Winkle while you wait.

This morning was bitter, but the "sour doughs" were lined up outside the store, waiting their turns like a crowd of Parsifal first-nighters, so we fell in with the rest, whipping our arms and stamping our moccasins till the chill ate into our very bones. It took hours to sort the letters, but not a man whimpered. When you wait for vital news a tension comes that chokes complaint. There was no joking here, nor that elephantine persiflage which marks rough men when they forgather in the wilderness. They were the fellows who blazed the trail, bearded, shaggy, and not pretty to look at, for they all knew hardship and went out strong-hearted into this silent land, jesting with danger and singing in the solitudes. Here in the presence of the Mail they laid aside their cloaks of carelessness and saw one another bared to the quick, timid with hunger for the wives and little ones behind.

There were a few like Prosser, in whom there was still the glamour of the Northland and the mystery of the unknown, but they were scattered, and in their eyes the anxious light was growing also.

Five months is a wearying time, and silent suspense will sap the courage. If only one could banish worry; but the long, unbearable nights when the mind leaps and scurries out into the voids of conjecture like sparks from a chimney--well, it's then you roll in your bunk and your sigh ain't from the snow-shoe pain.

A half-frozen man in an ice-clogged dory had brought us our last news, one October day, just before the river stopped, and now, after five months, the curtain parted again.

I saw McGill, the lawyer, in the line ahead of me and noted the grayness of his cheeks, the nervous way his lips worked, and the futile, wandering, uselessness of his hands. Then I remembered. When his letter came the fall before it said the wife was very low, that the crisis was near, and that they would write again in a few days. He had lived this endless time with Fear stalking at his shoulder. He had lain down with it nightly and risen with it grinning at him in the slow, cold dawn. The boys had told me how well he fought it back week after week, but now, edging inch by inch toward the door behind which lay his message, it got the best of him.

I wrung his hand and tried to say something.

"I want to run away," he quavered. "But I'm afraid to."

When we got in at last we met men coming out, and in some faces we saw the marks of tragedy. Others smiled, and these put heart into us.

Old man Tomlinson had four little girls back in Idaho. He got two letters. One was a six-months-old tax-receipt, the other a laundry bill. That meant three months more of silence.

When my turn came and I saw the writing of the little woman something gripped me by the throat, while I saw my hands shake as if they belonged to somebody else. My news was good, though, and I read it slowly--some parts twice--then at last when I looked up I found McGill near me. Unconsciously we had both sought a quiet corner, but he had sunk on to a box. Now, as I glanced at him I saw what made me shiver. The Fear was there again--naked and ugly--for he held one lonesome letter, and its inscription was in no woman's hand. He had crouched there by my side all this time, staring, staring, staring at it, afraid to read--afraid to open it. Some men smile in their agony, shifting their pitiful masks to the last, others curse, and no two will take their blows alike.

McGill was plucking feebly at the end of his envelope, tearing off tiny bits, dropping the fragments at his feet. Now and then he stopped, and when he did he shuddered.

"Buck up, old pal," I said.

Then, recognizing me, he thrust the missive into my hand.

"Tell me--for God's sake--tell me quick. I can't--No, no--wait! Not yet. Don't tell me. I'll know from your face. They said she couldn't live--"