"Why did you come between us?" he asked, suddenly bending over her; "why did you do it?"

The calm light eyes looked down into the dark pa.s.sionate depths of the dying girl's pupils, and a long gaze pa.s.sed between them. What secrets of her soul were revealed to his in that instant when they stood face to face with only Death between? Then Katrine turned her head wearily.

"I don't know," she answered faintly; "mere devilry, I think." And she laughed.

The laugh shook the wounded lung. Her face turned from white to grey, her teeth clenched. There was a spasm as of a sudden wrenching loose from the body, then it sank back, collapsed, motionless, against Talbot's breast.

The two men carried her out between them. The crowd made way for them, standing on either side in respectful silence. Such incidents were not uncommon, and excited nothing more than a dull and transient interest.

They took her out, and the gold for which two lives had been sacrificed was left unheeded, scattered in the dust. They went out the way they had come, through the noisome court, up the narrow flight of rotten, slippery stairs into the pure icy air.

Stephen turned to Talbot and took the girl's body wholly into his arms.

"I want to carry her up to my cabin," he said in a choking voice, and the other nodded.

The night was glorious with the deadly glory of the Arctic regions; the air was still, and of a coldness that seemed to bite deep into the flesh; but overhead, in the impenetrable blackness of the sky, the stars shone with a brilliance found only in the north, throwing a cold light over the snowy ground. To the south and east, low down, burned two enormous planets, like fiery eyes watching them over the horizon.

Slowly the two men walked over the hard ground. Not another living being was within sight.

Stephen walked first with heavy, uneven steps, and his breath came quickly in suppressed and sobbing gasps. Talbot followed closely, deep in painful thought. All had happened so suddenly. The whole horrible tragedy had swept over them in a few minutes; she had pa.s.sed away from them both for ever. His brain seemed dazed by the shock. He could not realise it. He saw her dark head lying on Stephen's shoulder. It seemed as if she must lift it every second. He could not believe that she was lifeless, lifeless, this creature who had always been life itself, with her gay smiles, and light tones, and quick movements. Now, she and they were blotted out for all time. She had died against his breast, and for him. That was the horrible thought; it came into his brain after all the others, suddenly, and seemed as if it must burst it. And why, why should she have done it? Her last words rang in his ears, "mere devilry." So she had always been; reckless, open-handed, generous, she had often risked her life for another, and now she had given it for him. And in her last words she had tried to minimise her own act, tried to relieve him of the burden of a hopeless grat.i.tude. But for all that he would have to bear it, and it seemed crushing him now. That she should have given her life, so young, less than half his own, so full of value and promise, for his! It seemed as if a reproach must follow him to the end of his days.

He walked as in a dream. He had no sense of the distance they were going, hardly any of the direction, except that he was following mechanically Stephen's slow, uneven, halting footsteps, and watching that little head that lay on his shoulder. Once when Stephen paused, he stretched out his arms and offered to take the burden from him, but Stephen repulsed him fiercely, and then the two went on slowly as before, how long he did not know, it seemed a long time. Suddenly, in the middle of the narrow pathway before him, Talbot saw Stephen stagger, fall to his knees, and then sink heavily sideways in the snow, his arms still tightly locked round the rigid body of the girl. Talbot hurried forward and bent over him, feeling hastily in his own pockets for his flask. Stephen's eyes were wide open and gazed up at him with a hopeless, despairing determination that went to Talbot's heart and chilled it.

"I can't go any farther, not another step," he muttered.

Talbot had been searching hurriedly through all his pockets for the flask he always carried.

"Good G.o.d!" he exclaimed, "I haven't got it; I must have dropped it coming up here, or they stole it in that h.e.l.l down town."

Stephen feebly put up his hand.

"Don't trouble, I don't want it. I am just going to lie here and wait with her. Was she not lovely?" he muttered to himself, raising himself on his knees and laying the body before him on the snow.

The sky above them arched in pitchy blackness, but the starlight was so keen and brilliant that it lighted up the white silence round them.

Stephen, on his hands and knees, hung over the still figure and gazed down into the marble face. The short silky black hair made a little blot of darkness in the snow, the white face was turned upward to the starlight. Talbot, looking down, caught for an instant the sight of its pure oval, its regular lines, and the sweet mouth, and the pa.s.sionate, reasonless face of the man crouching over it, and then looked desperately up and down the narrow lonely trail. They were five miles from the town, a little over three from the cabins. Glistening whiteness lay all around, till the plains of snow grew grey in the distance; overhead, the burning, flashing, restless stars; and far off, where the two planets guarded the horizon, the red lights of the north began to quiver and flicker in the night.

The man on the ground noticed them, and straightening himself suddenly, looked towards them.

"The flare of h.e.l.l!" he muttered, with staring, straining eyes; "it's coming very near."

Talbot saw that his reason had gone, failed suddenly, as a light goes down under a blast; he was delirious with that sudden delirium born of the awful cold that seizes men like a wolf in the long night of the Arctic winters.

For a second the helplessness of his situation flashed in upon Talbot's brain--alone here at midnight on the frozen trail, with a madman and a corpse!

He saw he must get help at once, and the cabins were the nearest point where help could be found. He could get men who would carry Stephen by force if necessary, but would he ever live in the fangs of this pitiless cold till they could return to him? He stood for one moment irresolute, unwilling to leave him to meet his death, and that horrible fear that he read in those haggard eyes watching the horizon, alone; and in that moment Stephen looked up at him and met his eye, and the madness rolled back and stood off his brain for an instant. He beckoned to Talbot, and Talbot went down on his knees beside him on the snow.

"My claims," muttered Stephen; "those claims will be yours now, do you understand? I've arranged it all with that lawyer Hoskins, down town.

They were to be hers if anything happened to me, but we shall both go to-night, and they will be yours. She said I had sunk my soul in them, Talbot; she was right. The gold got me, I neglected her; I let her slip back into evil; I've murdered her for the claims. They are the price h.e.l.l paid me. But you keep them. All turns to good in your hands. They can't harm you. Keep them. They are my grave."

"Stephen, rouse yourself! You are alive! you've got to live," said Talbot desperately, shaking him by the shoulder. "I am going now to bring men back with me to help you home. You've got to live till I return, do you hear?"

Stephen had turned from him again and put his arms round the motionless form before them.

"They are coming nearer," Talbot heard him mutter; "but they shall burn through me first, little one;" and he stretched himself across the corpse as if to shield it from the approaching flames, and far off the red eyes of the planets sank nearer the horizon, but still seemed to watch them across the snowy waste.

Talbot felt the only one thin thread of hope was to go as fast as his fatigue-clogged feet could move up to the cabins, and he rose and faced the homeward trail. He felt the hope of saving Stephen was just the least faintest flicker that ever burned within a heart; still there was the chance--the chance that, even should he be already in the sleep that ends in death when he returned, they could rouse him from it and drag him into life again. He forced his heavy feet along, and with a great effort started into a run. His limbs felt like lead, and all his body like paper. The long hours of cold and fatigue, the excitement, the rush of changing emotions he had gone through, had been draining his vitality, but he called upon all that he had left and put it all into the effort to save his friend. He knew that any one second lost or gained might be the one to turn the balance of life or death, and he urged himself forward till a dull pain filled all his side, and his temples seemed bursting, and the great lights before him swam in a blood-red mist.

Stephen, left alone, raised his head and gazed round him once, then he laid his cheek down on the cold cheek, pressed his lips to the cold lips, and his breast upon the cold breast just over where the bullet had ploughed its way through the flesh and bone. The night gripped him tighter and tighter, and slowly he sank to sleep.

_L'ENVOI._

Noontide in June. A sky of the clearest, palest azure, and a rollicking, swelling, tumbling sea, full of smooth billowy waves chasing each other over its deep green surface--waves with their white crests blown backwards, throwing their spray high in the air and seeming to laugh and call to each other in gurgling voices; and between sea and sky the liquid golden sunlight filling the warm, throbbing air, spreading itself in dazzling sheets upon the water, and glinting in ten thousand glittering points on the flying spray thrown up by a steamer's screw. It was the steamer _Prince_, homeward-bound from Alaska, carrying pa.s.sengers and a cargo as rich and yellow as the sunshine. And as if it knew of its precious and costly charge, the steamer cut proudly through the turbulent water, cleaving its straight pa.s.sage homeward, homeward.

On the deck of the boat, leaning back idly in a long chair, his calm, grey eyes fixed on the receding sh.o.r.es, where the golden sunshine seemed palpitating on their perilous loveliness, Talbot was sitting, with the freshening breeze stirring his hair and bringing to him the breath of a thousand spring flowers on the land. He was returning, and returning successful, with his work accomplished, his toil over, his aim achieved, and amongst all the lines of pain stamped on his pale and quiet face there was written a certain triumph, that yet perhaps was not so much triumph as relief. It was just four months since that terrible night when he had lost both his comrades, just a little less than four months since he had seen them both laid side by side in their lonely grave in the west gulch; and those four months would ever be a blot of horrible blackness on his life. Should he ever be able to forget the blank desolation that had closed in upon him night after night as he sat by his lonely hearth or paced the floor, his steps alone breaking the awful stillness? Yet he had forced himself to stay and face it, had continued his work and his method of life unchanged. His men had noted little difference in him. He had stayed the time he had appointed for himself, had accomplished his self-appointed task, and at last, when the summer burst in upon the gulch and loosened all Nature's fetters, he found himself also free; and now, like a black curtain rent in twain and torn from the bright face of a picture, the clouds of the past seemed falling away, leaving his future clear to his gaze. It stretched before him bright as the laughing sunlit sea beneath his eyes. If they could but have shared his joy, if they could have had their home-coming, his fellow-toilers, his fellow-prisoners! and the salt tears stung his lids until he closed them, shutting out the vivid yellow light, as he thought of the desolate grave in the gulch.

The fresh, cool air fanned his face and the sun smiled upon him, a loose piece of canvas of an awning near him flapped backwards and forwards with a monotonous musical sound, the plash and gurgle of the tumbling waves fell soothingly on his ears. Gradually sleep came over him gently, and enwrapped his strained, wearied body, his sore bruised mind.

When he opened his eyes again it was afternoon. The steamer was still flying onward, but the sea was quiet and smooth, and lay still on every side in the sun's rays as a pool of liquid gold, and the sh.o.r.es of Alaska had vanished, lost in a burnished haze of light.

THE END.