Part 33

"You should have heard the fellers laugh at that! They still talk about it! 'Tom Lillywhite, he wants a man', they say. It's quite a word in the country. 'Tom Lillywhite wants a man!'"

The old freighter went off into an interminable chuckling over the antique jest.

It was inexpressibly painful to Natalie to have Garth there, a witness to her humiliation; but she would not stop the story-teller, nor let Garth stop him.

"However, thinks I, you can sometimes make a man out of unpromisin' mater'al," he resumed. "And in the end I took him for his grub. That was Bert Mabyn. For three months I didn't regret it; he was used to horses, and was first-rate company on the trail. I didn't give him no money--said he didn't want none--but I fed him up good, and he soon got fat and sassy. I give him other things too. I couldn't stand for the poor wretch a shiverin' by my fire in his buttoned-up coat, so I give him blankets; and afterward an outfit of clothes.

"What do you think was the first thing he ever ast me for?--a razor and a glass! And every day after that he used to shave hisself--every day mind you, if we was in the thickest part of the bush! And forever trimmin' of his nails, and polishin' 'em to make 'em shine! Wasn't that remarkable?

"He was a great talker. Nights around the fire he used to tell me all about himself. Seems he comes of real high-toned folks outside; but went to the bad young. Said he come West three years before that again, full of good resolutions, which lasted just so long as his money. Since then he'd been a grub-rider 'round the ranches, and dish-washer in hotels, and, 'scusin' your presence, Miss, worse than that--but he hadn't no shame about it!

"I liked the feller. He wasn't no good, but he had that persuasive way with him! And he knew so much more than me! You'd think a man 'ud feel shame to tell such stories on himself; but no! he'd make out as you ought to like him for bein' such a good-for-nothing waster; and by Gum! in the end you did! Never see such a feller!

"Well, all summer we travelled, me and him; him always behind me on the trail; and I hadn't any fault to find. But come September I had a rush lot up to Whitefish Lake; and at the same time there was some stuff wanted in a hurry in Pentland's camp over on the Great Smoky. So for the first time we divided. I sent him to Pentland's over this very trail!

"I got back long before he did. After a while word come from Pentland, where in thunder were the goods? It was after the first snow before Mabyn come back. He was a wreck and the horses were just alive, and no more. He told a story how his wagon capsized in the river, and he lost everything; but the whiskey gave the lie to that. By and by we found he'd buried a keg of it, outside the Settlement. In the Spring when it was too late to do anything, it all come out through a breed. Seems away up by Fort St. Pierre, he met one of them crooked traders, that sometimes sneaks acrost the mountains; and he sold him the stuff for a keg of rot-gut. When I hear that I was thankful he brought back the horses at all. The business near busted me; for I had to make good three hundred worth of groceries to Pentland; and sacrificed the second team, 'count of the shape they were in. That was what Bert Mabyn cost me!"

"Didn't you have him arrested?" asked Garth indignantly.

Tom shrugged. "What were the use of that? The inspector was after me to prosecute; but it was too late to get my money back, and put flesh on the horses--besides, I was too busy. Of course, it weren't just the same as robbin' me in cold blood," he added in the tone of one who must be fair; "for it were the whiskey, you see."

Natalie kept her face averted from the old man. "And what has become of this man since?" she asked, steadily controlling her voice.

"Oh, he hung around the Settlement, sponging on one and another till he were kicked out; then he come down to the breeds. It was a great honour for them to have a white man of any kind runnin' after them, you see, so they put up with him. Then he drifted West, up Ostachegan way; and lately, I understand, he's taken up a deserted shack he found on Clearwater Lake, away up on the bench there, northwest of the Spirit. There they tell me he lives all alone; but no one's seen him in a dog's age."

* * * * *

Garth and Natalie avoided everything beyond the merest commonplaces to each other until they were alone; and even after Tom Lillywhite, bidding them farewell, had driven off, chirping to his horses, it was a long time before either had the courage to make a move toward overcoming the ghastly constraint his story had caused between them.

"Haven't we heard enough?" said Garth quietly at last. "Need you go any further?"

Natalie in the interim had had time to pass her emotional crisis. She was very pale, and her eyes were big; but she was now calmer than he. "I have heard enough, surely," she said; "but after coming all this way it would seem cowardly, wouldn't it, to be satisfied with hearsay evidence?--and there is still my promise to his mother."

Her tone impressed Garth with the utter hopelessness of trying to dissuade her. "But how can I let you expose yourself to--to what we may find!" he groaned.

"I am not a child," said Natalie quietly. "And I shall not quail at the mere sight of ugliness." She turned away from him. "Besides," she added in a lower tone, "you know the worst now; and that was the hardest thing to bear--your hearing it I mean. No," she went on, facing him again, wistfully and valorously; "it promises to be very ugly, but then I undertook it, you see. I am going on."

They could not bear to meet each other's eyes; and miserably turning their backs, affected to busy themselves with small tasks. Natalie, quivering with the shame of the lash all unwittingly applied by old Tom, longed with an inexpressible longing to have Garth with a hint or a look assure her that he loved her, and so, thrusting the wretch Mabyn out of their charmed circle, reinstate her in her self-respect. But poor Garth in his clumsy, masculine delicacy thought that to obtrude himself at such a moment would only hurt her more. He kept silent, and he averted his eyes, and Natalie, misunderstanding, tasted the very dregs of shame.

XIII

THE NEWLY-MARRIED PAIR

Out on the bosom of that infinite prairie, which rolls its unmeasured miles north and west of the Spirit River, a last place of mystery and dreams, still unharnessed by the geographers, and reluctantly written down "unexplored" on their maps, two human figures were riding slowly, with their horses' heads turned away from the last habitations of men. The prairie undulated about them like a sea congealed in motion--but seemingly vaster than the sea; for at sea the horizon is ever near at hand; while here the very unevenness of the ground marked, and fixed, and opened up the awful distances. The grass was short, rich and browned by the summer sun; and it mantled the distant rounds and hollows with the changing lights of beaver fur. The only breaks in its expanse were here and there, springing in the sheltered hollows, coppices or bluffs of slender poplar saplings, with crowding stems, as close and even as hair. The leaves were yellowed by the first frosts.

The man rode ahead, slouching on the back of his wretched cayuse, with eyes blank alike of inward thought or outward observation. He was not yet forty years old, but bore the cast of premature decay, more aged than age. What showed of his hair beneath his hat was sparse and faded; and of his visible teeth he had no more than a perishing stump or two left in his jaws. His discontented, satiated, exhausted mien, had a strange look there in the fresh and potent wilderness.

The girl who followed with a travoise dragging at her pony's heels, was, on the other hand, in harmony with the land. Of the extremes to which the breeds run in looks, she was of the rare beauties of that strange race. Her features were moulded in a delicate, definite harmony that would have marked her out in any assemblage of beauty; and the spirit of beauty was there too. There were actually pride and dignity under the arched brows--so capricious is Nature in shaping her wilder daughters--and in the deep soft eyes brooded, even when she was happiest, a heart-disquieting quality of wistfulness. She was happy now; and ever and anon she raised her eyes to the slouching back of the man riding ahead with a look of passionate abandon in which there was nothing civilized at all. She was slenderer than the run of brown maidens, and her clumsy print dress could not hide the girlish, perfect contour of her shoulders. In her dusky cheeks there glowed a tinge of deep rose; testimony to the lingering influence of the white blood in her veins.

Topping a rise, the man paused for her to overtake him.

"Here we are, Rina," he said indifferently. His voice was oddly cracked. His manner toward her expressed a good-humoured tolerance. His eyes approved her casually; inner tenderness there was none.

The girl apparently was sensible of no lack--but the breeds do not bring up their daughters to expect tenderness. Her eyes sparkled. "How pretty it is, 'Erbe't!" she breathed. "Ver' moch good land!" She spoke the pretty, clipped English of the convent school.