Isobel (7 page)

"For this I'm going to kill you, MacVeigh," he said; and in spite of
Billy's contempt for the man there was a quality in the low voice that
sent a curious shiver through him. "You can send me from the service,
but you're going to die for doing it!"

Billy made no reply, and Bucky did not wait for one. He set off at the
head of the sledge, with Conway a step behind them. Billy followed
with Walker until they reached the foot of the ridge. There they shook
hands, and Billy stood watching them until they passed over the cap of
the ridge.

He returned to the camp slowly. Deane had emerged from the tent,
supported by Isobel. They waited for him, and in Deane's face he saw
the look that had filled it after he had struck down Bucky Smith. For
a moment he dared not look at Isobel. She saw the change in him, and
her cheeks flushed. Deane would have extended his hands, but she was
holding them tightly in her own.

"You'd better go into the tent and keep quiet," advised Billy. "I
haven't had time yet to see if you're badly hurt."

"It's not bad," Deane assured him. "I bumped into a rock sliding down
the ridge, and it made me sick for a few minutes."

Billy knew that Isobel's eyes were on him, and he could almost feel
their questioning. He began to take wood from the sledge she had
loaded and throw it on the fire. He wished that Scottie and she had
remained in the tent for a little longer. His face burned and his
blood seemed like fire when he caught a glimpse of the steel cuffs
about Deane's wrists. Through the smoke he saw Isobel still clasping
her husband. He could see one of her little hands gripping at the
steel band, and suddenly he sprang across and faced them, no longer
fearing to meet Isobel's eyes or Deane's. Now his face was aflame, and
he half held out his arms to them as he spoke, as though he would
clasp them both to him in this moment of sacrifice and self-abnegation
and the dawning of new life.

"You know— you both know why I've done this!" he cried, "You heard
what I said back there, Deane— when you was in the box; an' all I
said was true. She came to me out of that storm like an angel— an'
I'll think of her as an angel all my life. I don't know much about
God— not the God they have down there, where they take an eye for an
eye an' a tooth for a tooth and kill because some one else has killed.
But there's something up here in the big open places, something that
makes you think and makes you want to do what's right and square; an'
she's got all I know of God in that little Bible of mine— the blue
flower. I gave the blue flower to her, an' now an' forever she's my
blue flower. I ain't ashamed to tell you, Deane, because you've heard
it before, an' you know I'm not thinking it in a sinful way. It 'll
help me if I can see her face an' hear her voice and know there's such
love as yours after you're gone. For I'm going to let you go, Deane,
old man. That's what I came for, to save you from the others an' give
you back to her. I guess mebbe you'll know— now— how I feel—"

His voice choked him. Isobel's glorious eyes were looking into his
soul, and he looked straight back into them and saw all his reward
there. He turned to Deane. His key clicked in the locks to the
handcuffs, and as they fell into the snow the two men gripped hands,
and in their strong faces was that rarest of all things— love of man
for man.

"I'm glad you know," said Billy, softly. "It wouldn't be fair if you
didn't, Scottie. I can think of her now, an' it won't be mean and low.
And if you ever need help— if you're down in South America or
Africa— anywhere— I'll come if you send word. You'd better go to
South America. That's a good place. I'll report to headquarters that
you died— from the fall. It's a lie, but blue flower would do it, and
so will I. Sometimes, you know, the friend who lies is the only friend
who's true— and she'd do it— a thousand times— for you."

"And for you," whispered Isobel.

She was holding out her hands, her blue eyes streaming with tears of
happiness, and for a moment Billy accepted one of them and held it in
his own. He looked over her head as she spoke.

"God will bless you for this— some day," she said; and a sob broke in
her voice. "He will bring you happiness— happiness— in what you have
dreamed of. You will find a blue flower— sweet and pure and loyal—
and then you will know, even more fully, what life means to me with
him."

And then she broke down, sobbing like a child, and with her face
buried in her hands turned into the tent.

"Gawd!" whispered Billy, drawing a deep breath.

He looked Deane in the eyes; and Deane smiled, a rare and beautiful
smile.

For a quarter of an hour they talked alone, and then Billy drew a
wallet from his pocket.

"You'll need money, Scottie," he said. "I don't want you to lose a
minute in getting out of the country. Make for Vancouver. I've got
three hundred dollars here. You've got to take it or I'll shoot you!"

He thrust the money into Deane's hands as Isobel came out of the tent.
Her eyes were red, but she was smiling; and she held something in her
hand. She showed it to the two men. It was the blue flower Billy had
given her. But now its petals were torn apart, and nine of them lay in
the palm of her hand.

"It can't go with one." She spoke softly and the smile died on her
lips. "There are nine petals, three for each of us."

She gave three to her husband and three to Billy, and for a moment the
men stared at them as they lay in their rough and calloused palms.
Then Billy drew out the bit of buckskin in which he had placed the
strands of Isobel's hair and slipped the blue petals in with them.
Deane had drawn a worn envelope from his pocket. Billy spoke low to
Deane.

"I want to be alone for a while— until dinner-time. Will you go into
the tent— with her? "

When they were gone Billy went to the spot where he had dropped his
pack before crawling up on Deane. He picked it up and slipped it over
his shoulders as he walked. He went swiftly back over his old trail,
and this time it was with a heart leaden with a deep and terrible
loneliness. When he reached the ridge he tried to whistle, but his
lips seemed thick, and there was something in his throat that choked
him. From the cap of the ridge he looked down. A thin mist of smoke
was rising from out of the spruce. It blurred before his eyes, and a
sobbing break came in his low cry of Isobel's name. Then he turned
once more back into the loneliness and desolation of his old life.

"I'm coming, Pelly," he laughed, in a strained, hard way. "I haven't
given you exactly a square deal, old man, but I'll hustle and make up
for lost time!"

A wind was beginning to moan in the spruce tops again. He was glad of
that. It promised storm. And a storm would cover up all trails.

Away up at Fullerton Point amid the storm and crash of the arctic
gloom Pelliter fought himself through day after day of fever, waiting
for MacVeigh. At first he had been filled with hope. That first
glimpse of the sun they had seen through the little window on the
morning that Billy left for Fort Churchill had come just in time to
keep reason from snapping in his head. For three days after that he
looked through the window at the same hour and prayed moaningly for
another glimpse of that paradise in the southern sky. But the storm
through which Isobel had struggled across the Barren gathered over his
head and behind him, day after day of it, rolling and twisting and
moaning with the roar of the cracking fields of ice, bringing back
once more the thick death-gloom of the arctic night that had almost
driven him mad. He tried to think only of Billy, of his loyal
comrade's race into the south, and of the precious letters he would
bring back to him; and he kept track of the days by making pencil
marks on the door that opened out upon the gray and purple desolation
of the arctic sea.

At last there came the day when he gave up hope. He believed that he
was dying. He counted the marks on the door and found that there were
sixteen. Just that many days ago Billy had set off with the dogs. If
all had gone well he was a third of the way back, and within another
week would be "home."

Pelliter's thin, fever-flushed face relaxed into a wan smile as he
counted the pencil marks again. Long before that week was ended he
figured that he would be dead. The medicines— and the letters— would
come too late, probably four or five days too late. Straight out from
his last mark he drew a long line, and at the end of it added in a
scrawling, almost unintelligible, hand: "Dear Billy, I guess this is
going to be my last day." Then he staggered from the door to the
window.

Out there was what was killing him— loneliness, a maddening
desolation, a lifeless world that reached for hundreds of miles
farther than his eyes could see. To the north and east there was
nothing but ice, piled-up masses and grinning mountains of it, white
at first, of a somber gray farther off, and then purple and almost
black. There came to him now the low, never-ceasing thunder of the
undercurrents fighting their way down from the Arctic Ocean, broken
now and then by a growling roar as the giant forces sent a crack, like
a great knife, through one of the frozen mountains. He had listened to
those sounds for five months, and in those five months he had heard no
other voice but his own and MacVeigh's and the babble of an Eskimo.
Only once in four months had he seen the sun, and that was on the
morning that MacVeigh went south. So he had gone half mad. Others had
gone completely mad before him. Through the window his eyes rested on
the five rough wooden crosses that marked their graves. In the service
of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police they were called heroes. And in
a short time he, Constable Pelliter, would be numbered among them.
MacVeigh would send the whole story down to her, the true little girl
a thousand miles south; and she would always remember him— her hero—
and his lonely grave at Point Fullerton, the northernmost point of the
Law. But she would never see that grave. She could never come to put
flowers on it, as she put flowers on the grave of his mother; she
would never know the whole story, not a half of it— his terrible
longing for a sound of her voice, a touch of her hand, a glimpse of
her sweet blue eyes before he died. They were to be married in August,
when his service in the Royal Mounted ended. She would be waiting for
him. And in August— or July— word would reach her that he had died.

With a dry sob he turned from the window to the rough table that he
had drawn close to his bunk, and for the thousandth time he held
before his red and feverish eyes a photograph. It was a portrait of a
girl, marvelously beautiful to Tommy Pelliter, with soft brown hair
and eyes that seemed always to talk to him and tell him how much she
loved him. And for the thousandth time he turned the picture over and
read the words she had written on the back:

"My own dear boy, remember that I am always with you, always
thinking of you, always praying for you; and I know, dear, that you
will always do what you would do if I were at your side."

"Good Lord!" groaned Pelliter. "I can't die! I can't! I've got to
live— to see her—"

He dropped back on his bunk exhausted. The fires burned in his head
again. He grew dizzy, and he talked to her, or thought he was talking,
but it was only a babble of incoherent sound that made Kazan, the
one-eyed old Eskimo dog, lift his shaggy head and sniff suspiciously.
Kazan had listened to Pelliter's deliriums many times since MacVeigh
had left them alone, and soon he dropped his muzzle between his
forepaws and dozed again. A long time afterward he raised his head
once more. Pelliter was quiet. But the dog sniffed, went to the door,
whined softly, and nervously muzzled the sick man's thin hand. Then he
settled back on his haunches, turned his nose straight up, and from
his throat there came that wailing, mourning cry, long-drawn and
terrible, with which Indian dogs lament before the tepees of masters
who are newly dead. The sound aroused Pelliter. He sat up again, and
he found that once more the fire and the pain had gone from his head.

"Kazan, Kazan," he pleaded, weakly, "it isn't time— yet!"

Kazan had gone to the window that looked to the west, and stood with
his forefeet on the sill. Pelliter shivered.

"Wolves again," he said, "or mebbe a fox."

He had grown into that habit of talking to himself, which is as common
as human life itself in the far north, where one's own voice is often
the one thing that breaks a killing monotony. He edged his way to the
window as he spoke and looked out with Kazan. Westward there stretched
the lifeless Barren illimitable and void, without rock or bush and
overhung by a sky that always made Pelliter think of a terrible
picture he had once seen of Doré's "Inferno." It was a low, thick sky,
like purple and blue granite, always threatening to pitch itself down
in terrific avalanches, and between the earth and this sky was the
thin, smothered worldrM which MacVeigh had once called God's insane
asylum.

Through the gloom Kazan's one eye and Pelliter's feverish vision could
not see far, but at last the man made out an object toiling slowly
toward the cabin. At first he thought it was a fox, and then a wolf,
and then, as it loomed larger, a straying caribou. Kazan whined. The
bristles along his spine rose stiff and menacing. Pelliter stared
harder and harder, with his face pressed close against the cold glass
of the window, and suddenly he gave a gasping cry of excitement. It
was a man who was toiling toward the cabin! He was bent almost double,
and he staggered in a zigzag fashion as he advanced. Pelliter made his
way feebly to the door, unbarred it, and pushed it partly open.
Overcome by weakness he fell back then on the edge of his bunk,