"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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sure 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 gra.s.s 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 spa.r.s.e 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 a.s.semblage 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 pa.s.sionate 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.

At their feet lay a shallow valley, hidden close until the very moment of stumbling upon it. In it was a sparkling slough but large enough to be dignified with the name of lake. It was something the shape of a gourd, with a long end that curved out of sight below, a very girdle of blue velvet binding the waists of the brown hills. At their left the sh.o.r.es of the wider part of the lake, the bulb of the gourd, were, in unexpected contrast to the bareness of the uplands, heavily wooded with great cottonwood trees and spruce. A gra.s.sy islet ringed with willows seemed to be moored here like the barge of some woodland princess. Away beyond, elevated on a gra.s.sy terrace at the head of the lake, and overlooking its whole expanse, stood a tiny weather-beaten shack, startlingly conspicuous in that great expanse of untouched nature.

Sheltered by the hills from the howling blasts of the prairie above; and with wood, water and unlimited game at its door, it was a wholly desirable situation for a Northern dwelling--but it was seventy-five miles off the trail.

The girl brought her pony alongside Mabyn's; and slipped her hand into his. "It is jus' right!" she whispered. "We will be ver' happy, 'Erbe't!"

He let her hand fall carelessly. "It's d.a.m.n lonesome!" he grumbled.

All the shy boldness of an enamoured girl peeped out of Rina's eyes, as she whispered: "I'm glad it's lonesome! I don' want n.o.body to come--but you!"

Mabyn was unimpressed. He struck the ribs of his tired pony with his heels. "Come on," he said; and led the way down the incline.

Later, reaching the shack, on the threshold Rina spread out her arms with an unconscious gesture. "This is my home!" she cried. "I will jus'

love it!"

Mabyn looking around at the gaping walls, the empty panes and the foul litter, laughed jeeringly at her simplicity.

The girl was too happy to feel the sting. "I will fix it!" she said stoutly. "I will mak' it like an outside house. It will be as nice than the priest's parlour in the Settlement!" She clasped her hands against her breast in the intensity of her eagerness. "Jus' you wait, 'Erbe't!

Some day I will have white curtains in the window! and a piece of carpet on the floor! and a holy picture on the wall! Oh! I will work so hard!"

"Get about the supper, Rina," said Mabyn shortly.

She prepared the meal at the rough mud fireplace built across the corner of the shack, for they had no stove; and they ate squatting on the floor in the breed fashion, for neither was there a table. Afterward Mabyn dragged the bench--a relic of the former tenant, and sole article of furniture they possessed--outside the door; and sat upon it, smoking, yawning, looking across the lake with lack-l.u.s.tre eyes.

Rina having redd up the shack, came to the doorway, where she stood looking at him wistfully. Finally she hovered toward him and retreated; and her hands stole to her breast. She was longing mightily to sit beside him; but she did not dare. In a breed's wife it would have been highly presumptuous, and would very likely have been rewarded with a blow; but Rina had a dim notion that a white man's wife had the right to sit beside him--still she was afraid. In the end her desire overcame her fears; drifting hither and thither toward the bench like a frond of thistledown, she finally alighted on the edge, and her cheek dropped on his shoulder. The act must have been subtly suggested by the tincture of white blood in her veins, for it is not a redskin att.i.tude. The man neither repulsed nor welcomed her.

"'Erbe't," she whispered, "my head is so full of things I am near crazy wit' thoughts! And my tongue is in a snare; I cannot speak at all!"

Mabyn's only comment was a sort of grunt, which meant anything--or nothing.

Rina was encouraged to creep a little closer. "Oh, 'Erbe't, I love you!"

she whispered. "I am loving you every minute! I so glad you marry me, 'Erbe't!"

The man took his pipe out of his mouth, and uttered his brief, jeering cackle of laughter. "That wasn't altogether a matter of choice, my girl," he said. "It was a little preliminary insisted on by your father and mother."

Rina hardly took the sense of this. "But you do love me, 'Erbe't? jus' a little?" she pleaded.

"You're all right, Rina," he said patronizingly. "I never was one to make much of a fuss about a woman."

Little by little gathering courage, she began to pour out her soul for the man she loved. "I never love any man but you, 'Erbe't," so ran the nave confession; "the breed boys, they always come aroun' and show off.

I not lak them. They foolish and dirty; they eat same lak cocouche; and they know not'ing; but they think themself so fine. They mak' me sick!

My mot'er say to me; 'You eighteen year old, Rina; w'en you go to marry?' I say to my mot'er, 'I never marry a pig-man; I want to stay to you.'"

Her voice changed, borrowing the soft, pa.s.sionate music of the nightingale she had never heard. "Then bam-bye w'en the spring come, an'

we pitch by Ostachegan creek, an' the crocus flowers are coming up on Sah-ko-da-tah prairie so many as stars in the sky--then you come by our camp, 'Erbe't; and you so poor an' sick I feel ver' bad for you! An' you talk so pretty, and know so much, my heart him fly straight out of my breast like a bird, 'Erbe't; an' perch on your shoulder; an' him go everywhere you go; an' I got no heart any more. I empty lak a nest in the snow-time!

"So you stay to us," she went on, "and I mad to see all the men mock at you, an' treat you bad, an' mak' you eat after all have finished, and mak' you lie outside the fire. They t'ink themself better than a white man, hey! All the time you ask me to come away from the camp with you; an' you t'ink I don' want to come, but you don' know. Many, many nights I not sleep, 'Erbe't. I want so bad to come to the ot'er side of the tepee where you are, but I hold to my mot'er's blanket!"

The man looked up. "Hm! You did, eh?" he exclaimed. "If I had known!"

"But I t'ink I mos' not let you see I love you. So I mak' show I don'

care at all. An' it hurt me ver' moch in my empty breast, 'Erbe't. But why I do it?--I want you so to marry me! an' bam-bye you marry me; an' I so scare and happy lak I was lose my head! Four days I married now! You not mad at me, 'Erbe't, 'cause I mak' you marry me?"

He shrugged. "What's the diff?" he said carelessly.

Rina dared to let her arm creep around his shoulders. "But bam-bye you ver' glad you marry me," she whispered. "For I mak' me ver' nice! I white woman now. I go no more to the breeds. I spik only Engliss now; we will sit in chairs and eat pretty with knives and forks; and always say good morning and good night, lak white people. 'Erbe't, you will teach me all the ways of white people, lak they do outside? I want so bad to be ver' nice, jus' lak white woman!"

"Sure!" said Mabyn vaguely.

Rina was silent for a while. "'Erbe't," she said at last, "you never tell me about your folks; about your house where you live outside.