Part 17

In the same way Molyneux excluded from thought everything that conflicted with his intention--the first rudeness that lost him Helen's maiden confidence, his insidious attempts to wean her from her husband, her undoubted right to reject his advances. He twisted his own crime to her demerit. "She didn't know about that when she was drawing me on!" he exclaimed, whenever Jenny's letter thrust into his meditation. "Why should it cut any ice now? It is just an excuse to throw me a second time. But she sha'n't do it, by God! no, she sha'n't, she sha'n't! She's a coquette!--a damned coquette! I'll--" Then a red rage, a heaving, tumultuous passion, would drown articulate thought so that his intention never took form in words. But one thing is certain--he was thoroughly dangerous. In that mood Helen would have fared as illy at his hands as the lamb at the paws of the wolf.

The sudden stoppage of his ponies, midway of the bridge, broke up his reverie. As the moon struck full in his own face, he saw the two men only as shadows; but there was no mistaking Bender's bulk, and, after a single startled glance, Molyneux hailed him. "Is that you, Mr. Bender?"

"It's me, all right. Where might _you_ be heading for?"

It was the usual trail greeting, preliminary to conversation, but Molyneux sensed a difference of tone, savor of command, menace of authority, that galled his haughty spirit. Vexed by the impossibility of explanation, his disdain of the settler tribe in general would not permit him to lie; from which conflict of feeling his stiff answer was born.

"I don't see that it is any of your business."

"You don't?" Equally stiff, the reply issued from the huge, dim shape. "Well, I'll make it mine. You're going to Lone Tree."

Puzzled, Molyneux glanced from Bender's indefiniteness to the Cougar's dim crouch. He was not afraid. In him the courage of his vices was reinforced by enormous racial and family pride--the combination that made the British fool the finest of officers until mathematics and quick-firing artillery replaced the sword and melee. Mistaking the situation, he attempted to carry it off with a laugh.

"What have you chaps been drinking? Here; pass the bottle."

"Not till we wet your wedding," the Cougar interjected, dryly.

Astonished now, as well as puzzled, Molyneux yet rejected a sudden suspicion as impossible. Out of patience, galled by this mysterious opposition, he said, testily: "Are you crazy? I do not intend--"

"--To go to Lone Tree," Bender interrupted. "Yes, we know. You was heading up for Glaves's place."

Seriously disconcerted, Molyneux hid it under an ironical laugh. "I must say that I marvel at your intimate knowledge of my affairs. And since you are so well posted, perhaps you can tell me why I am going to Lone Tree?"

"I kin that." The huge, dim figure, with its crouched, attendant shadow, moved a pace nearer, then the man's stern bass launched on the quivering moonlight, reciting to an accompaniment of rushing waters this oldest of woodland sagas. Beginning at the night he picked Jenny up on the trail, he told all--Jed Hines's cruel fury; birth and burial of his, Molyneux's child; the outcast girl's subsequent illness; Helen's kindness; the doctor's philanthropy; the kindly conspiracy that protected her from social infamy. "An' us that saw her through her trouble," he finished, "are bound to see her righted."

If the lime-lights of history and fiction were thrown more often upon motives and psychology, and less on deeds and action, characters would not appear in such hard colors of black and white. It were false to paint Molyneux irredeemably black. "_Your child!_" He winced at the phrase, and, perhaps for the first time, an inkling of the enormity of his offence was borne in upon him. _His_ child? It was the flesh of his own loins that had suffered midnight burial at the hands of Carter and the kindly priest! The thought struck with enormous force--then faded. For back of him was that vicious generation whose most cultured exponent wrote to his own son that a seduction or two was necessary to the education of a gentleman. Through pride of family, the dead hands of haughty and licentious forebears reached to throttle remorse.

Was he to be called to account by common settlers, the _savages_ of the scornful English phrase? Anger colored his next remark: "Waited till you were good and ready, didn't you? Your diligence falls short of your zeal, my friends, or--"

"Don't flatter yourself," Bender sternly interrupted. "You kin thank her for the delay. If we'd known, you'd long ago have been either dead or married. But she kep' her own counsel till she thought as some one else's welfare called her to speak. 'Twasn't needed. T'other'd already found you out for herself."

Molyneux blinked under the savage contempt, but answered, stiffly enough: "Now listen. I deny nothing, though she received attentions from one of my pupils, and it might very well have been--"

"You lie!"

The lie never comes so unpleasantly as when asserting a truth; so, though he knew that he had lied, Molyneux's eyes glinted wickedly, his hand tightened on his whip. A glance right and left showed him the river, only a light hand-rail between him and dark waters. There was not room to turn; the giant blocked the way. Under constraint, he spoke quietly: "Neither do I profess sorrow. What is done is done. If the girl had taken me into her confidence--"

"Likely, wasn't it?"

A line of Jenny's letter, a damnable fact, flashed into Molyneux's mind, but he went on: "--I'd have taken care of her--am willing to do so yet, in a certain way. Marriage, of course, is out of the question. We are unfitted for each other--"

"No one's denying that."

He ignored the sarcasm. "--could not be happy together."

"Who said anything about your living together?"

The interruptions were most disconcerting, but he continued: "Now if you, as her representatives, self-appointed or otherwise"--he could not refrain from the sarcasm--"if you will name a sum--"

"_What?_"

Twenty rods away the camp now slept, steeped in the drug of labor--all but the cook, who came running out of his tent and was thus witness of the event. Looking up-stream, he saw them blackly silhouetted against the moonlit sky, a shadow show, play of marionettes upon the bridge.

"Out of my way! Let go!"

Followed the swish and crack of Molyneux's whip, as he lashed Bender over the face, then fell to flogging his horses. But stinging pain freed in the giant those bulldog passions that had made him king of the camps in other years. He hung on, while the plunging beasts drowned the river's roar in thunder of iron hoofs. Unable to break his grip, they reared--their smooth, elongated bodies conveying to the cook an odd impression of slugs reaching upward through moonlit dew--then, stooping quickly under the nigh beast, the mad giant took its full weight on his shoulder and with a mighty heave sent team and rig crashing sideways off the bridge.

A quick leap saved Molyneux--for the moment. All through the action had moved with kinetoscopic quickness, and it accelerated so that the cook could scarcely establish its sequence. Like an angry bull, Bender shook the hair from his eyes; then, as he rushed, came a report; a puff of smoke curled bluely up from Molyneux's hand; the giant thudded at length on the bridge. Followed a yell, a piercing cry suitable to the animal after which the Cougar was named. As Bender fell, he rushed. The pistol spoke again. While the cook was running twenty yards, a black, furious tangle writhed over the bridge, and as he came darting out from behind a bunch of willow scrub he saw that it was gone. Bender lay alone under the moonlight.

Now this was the cook of a lumber-camp, equivalent to saying that he was a man of parts. He had cooked on B Contract, Superior Construction Division of the Trunk Line, and so had seen a liberal sprinkling of his grumblers go into the dump--a grisly foundation for track, surely yet what better could the builders of the road desire than to be cradled under the ties and sleep, sleep, sleep, to the thundering lullaby of the fast express? Which intimacy with the pale terror is responsible for his prompt action in these unusual premises. Molyneux's bullet had merely grazed Bender's temple. He rose, staggering, as the cook made the bridge, and, seeing that he was too sick and dizzy to handle the situation, the latter took it into his own able hands.

As before mentioned, a drive camp sleeps in its boots, and the shots had brought a score out from their sleep on a hunt for causes. "Man drove offen the bridge!" he yelled. "An' Cougar went after him! They're both under the drive! Scatter down-stream an' skin your eyes for bubbles!"

Thus, on the spur of the moment, the cook wrote history--as accurately, perhaps, as the run of historians; for after the drive once closed serried ranks over the struggling men, they were never seen again, so none could rise with an opposing theory. When, a few days later, the water was drawn off at the first dam, the horses floated out on the shallows. But the men--? The river carried them to its secret places; buried them in some scour or pothole, free at last, one of his passions--the incubus of his generations--the other from his pain. That night, if such things be, the Cougar was joined, after his years of suffering, in perfect knowledge with his "little girl."

*XXI*

*PERSECUTION*

Yes, the cook made history, for though the event furnished gossip for the ninety days which, on the lonely frontier, corresponds with the world's nine days' wonder, his story was never questioned. The truth lay buried between him and Bender, and if either visited her grave, it was never in company with the other. Up to the time that delirium tremens removed the cook from the snows of a Rocky Mountain camp to a sphere where pots are said to boil with or without watching, Bender never knew just how much or little he really knew.

To others the event appeared under varying complexions. Helen and Jenny were shocked at Molyneux's death, the latter without astonishment, though her firm belief that sin had at last received its full wage was without trace of malignance; both were sorrier than they had any right to be; and both mourned the Cougar. As for the settlers, they regarded the affair rather in the light of a special dispensation of Providence. Flocking to the auction of Molyneux's effects a month later, they caballed against high bidding, paid for chattels they bought at ridiculous prices in long-time notes, for that was the "Black Year," and throughout Manitoba nothing could be sold for cash.

Poverty, sociologists tell us, is the mother of crime, and as those hard times subsequently influenced the settlers in their attitude towards Helen, they are surely worthy of mention. To begin, the country was practically bankrupt. The frost of the preceding fall had left the wheat useless, and but for the fact that the provincial government had imported and distributed free seed, not an acre of grain would have been sown that year. The seriousness of the crisis may be gauged by the legislature's further action in enacting an exemption law that practically excluded all of a farmer's goods and chattels from legal execution. This was good, but in that it was not, nor could be made retroactive, it benefited only the new-comers and left the pioneers, who had spent their little all opening up the country, still liable to foreclosure and execution.

On the northern settlers times had borne particularly hard. During boom years all had assumed loan indebtedness, and whereas creditors had bided patiently successive lean seasons on the chance of a branch railroad and bumper crop, now that the country's credit, its very future was trembling in the balance; implement-men and store-keepers raced with twenty-per-cent. Shylocks to grab what they could from the wreck. That spring the sheriff of Brandon was the busiest man in the country-side. He and his deputies sowed summonses, executions, foreclosures broadcast over the land. Wolves of the law, they harried the farmers till the optimism of the brilliant emigration pamphlets was swamped, submerged beneath inky pessimism. Small wonder that--coupled with idleness, breeder of mischief, in the slack season that Glaves feared between seeding and haying--small wonder that some of the rancor bred by hard conditions should be vented upon Helen.

She may be said to have stood in an uncomfortable position as lightning conductor between this cloud of spleen and the earth, upon which it should have properly been discharged. And looking back, one may see the storm gathering over her fair head, observing in its approach all of the natural phenomena: first the cold wind, social disfavor, the whispers; next, heavy drops thudding in the dust, the snubs and slights; lastly, thunder, lightning, rain, downright persecution.

The whispers, of course, she did not hear, but she could not overlook the difference in trail greetings, which were either far too warm or much too cool, according to the years and disposition of the greeter. Coldness was endurable, but the rude stares, conscious laughter of the younger boors often caused her to fly the hot colors of angry shame. Yet even this hurt less than the sudden, shy suspicion of her pupils. Whereas they were wont to hang upon her skirts, they now held aloof in play hours, and ran straight home from school.

"Mother says I'm not to walk with you any more," one tot explained her haste. How that stung! Having only the faintest of ideas, little more than a suspicion of the strength and nature of this uncomfortable prejudice, she resented it as bitter injustice, and held a proud head until a thing happened that almost broke her spirit.

Of all the settler women, Ruth Murchison was the one girl with whom Helen had been, or could be, on anything like terms of intimacy. Quiet and thoughtful, Ruth had gone through the English common schools, and had taken the Junior Oxford Examination, to which passable education a taste for good reading had formed a further bond. Wherefore Helen was delighted when, one day, news drifted into the post-office that Ruth was to be married to the Probationer, the young minister who preached Merrill's funeral sermon.

Borrowing a beast from Glaves, she rode north one evening to offer congratulations, and as the Murchisons lived several miles north of Silver Creek Valley, night fell while she still lacked half a mile of the homestead. From that distance the windows' yellow blaze advised of fuss and busy preparation. Drawing nearer, voices, laughter, the whir of an egg-beater, clatter of cooking-gear came down the trail merrily freighting the dusk. Infected by the cheer, she gave a shrill halloa, spurred to a gallop, and drew in at the door with a clatter of hoofs.

"Ruth! Oh, Ruth!" she called. "Ruth-y!"

Instantly the voices hushed, then, after an uncomfortable pause, she heard Mrs. Murchison say, in thin, constrained tones, "Mrs. Carter is out there, father."

Followed a shuffling, and the door opened revealing Murchison framed in yellow light. Stout, robust, ruddy, with that mottled-beef English complexion, he came of that stout yeoman stock whose twanging long-bows sounded France's knell at Crecy and Poitiers, of that rich blood the slow drainage of which to her colonies has left England flabby, ensemic, flaccid. He had not wished to leave, but the motherland had become industrial without further place for her yeoman. Over fields that were enriched by the tilth of thirty Murchison generations, a thousand factories were depositing soot and blighting acids. American wheat and beeves had wiped out profits, while enormous rents ate up the farmer's substance. So Murchison, England's best, had become partner in exile with the remittance-men, her worst. Undoubtedly, there was no symptom of remittance weakness in the scowl he turned on Helen.

Behind him Helen could see Ruth, red and embarrassed, hanging her head over the egg-beater. A half-dozen girls and neighboring women, who had come in to help in the baking and brewing, were exchanging meaning glances across the table.

"Ruth? She's well," Murchison answered her question.

She knew what to expect now, but nerved herself to face the situation. "Can't I see her?"

"No."

"Why?"

"Because she don't run with your kind."

"Oh, Mr. Murchison!"

He felt the heart sickness, yet glowered relentlessly, for it had been the habit of his forebears to thrash their women into good behavior. He itched to do it now for the good of her soul, but, lacking the power, he growled:

"If you don't like it--keep better company."

If he had been alone, she would undoubtedly have challenged his reproach and, while clearing herself in his eyes, have turned away future trouble. But a titter from within fired her pride. "Very well, please give her my congratulations." And turning she rode away.

Good-hearted as rough, Murchison stared after, stricken with sudden compunction. He knew that she must have intended to stay the night, and here she was a timorous woman riding out into the darkness. "Here!" he shouted. "Come back!"

But she held on, eyes snapping, cheeks aflame, throat convulsed under the strain of suppressing imminent hysteria. Beyond earshot she broke down, venting her injured loneliness in broken speech between bursts of sobbing. "They hate--me. Condemn me--because--my husband left me. It wasn't my--fault--that is, altogether." She hastily corrected herself. "Of course--I failed him. But I was--sorry--would have done better--if he had--given me a chance. He's so stern--and stiff--" She would not even let this undoubted truth pass unmodified. "But then--he thought I didn't--love him. Perhaps I didn't--then. I was a little fool. But I do! I do!" She stretched wild arms to the darkness. "I do! I do! I do!" But the velvet night returned nothing to her embrace and she collapsed, sobbing, upon the pony's neck. Still the cry did her good, tided over hysteria, composed and quieted her so that she was able to meet the trustee's glance of spectacled inquiry as she entered the cabin.

Kindliness as well as curiosity inhered in his glance, for, besides the cash and educational prestige which she had brought to his cabin, Jimmy had come to like her for herself. The frost and grizzle of fifty winters thawed under his smile as he threw a Winnipeg paper across the table. "Catch! Just kem in. Yes, there's a story 'bout him. Now, don't eat it."

Metaphorically, she did, indeed, devour the article, and while she read the trustee watched with something of puzzled astonishment the lovely tide that flowed out from the lace at her neck, and drowned her pale creams to the roots of her hair. He had ample opportunity for study as the article was long. Just then Carter's line, with its promise of competition, focussed the interest of the entire province, and some enterprising scribe had risen to the opportunity afforded by a visit west of the general manager of the trunk line, to interview him upon the probable action of his road in proceedings to condemn a crossing of its right of way. Time, however, had not abated one iota of the manager's sphinx like quality. While affable, he had declined to discuss railroad politics, remarking that his company did not "cross bridges before they were built." Interviewed in his turn upon the significance of the aforesaid remark, Carter had ventured the opinion that the trunk-line people would not oppose the crossing, and thereby had provoked a flaming editorial upon his artlessness.

"If the people behind Mr. Carter imagine that the greediest monopoly in history will loose its grip on this province till the law's crowbar pries off its fingers one by one, they are mightily mistaken," the editor hotly declared. "Forewarned is forearmed, and we hereby present them, gratis, with this piece of information--while they are running their grades in peaceful confidence that will be most appropriate in the innocent age when lion and lamb lie down together, the monopoly is gathering men and means, preparing to crush their enterprise by force should the crooked enginery of the law fail its purpose. Why else have five hundred extra men been distributed among the sections on either side of the proposed crossing? Why does a gravel-train stand there permanently across the proposed right of way? Soon Mr. Carter will receive unmistakable answer to these questions."

"He's dead right there, that editor man," the trustee said when, all rosy red, Helen looked up from her reading. "Old Brass-Bowels was born with a nateral insight into the nater of a dead cinch."

"But won't the law support my"--she paused, then proudly finished--"my husband? Can't he compel a crossing?"

"The law?" Sniffing, Jimmy indicated the legal patchwork on the wall with a comprehensive sweep of his pipe. "The law said as I was to pay them, but did I? Humph!"

"But they'll hardly dare to fly in the face of the province? Public opinion is a great moral force." She quoted a sentence from the editorial with gusto.

"Yes, but 'tain't much of a club. Did you ever see one of my hawgs stan' aside, even when he was full, to let another have a go at the trough? Not till I hit him on the snout. Well, they ain't agoin' to cross the trunk line these two years, an' for my part I don't care if they never cross."

"Why?" Her eyes dilated widely. "Wouldn't a competing line benefit you--all of the province?"

Nodding, he regarded her from half-shut eyes. "Oh, I ain't expecting to walk on gold this side o' the pearly gates. As for my reasons, they ain't a mile away from here. I'm not wishing too much success for a man that deserts his wife."

Touched and very much flushed as to the face by his genuine, if crabbed sympathy, the Reasons yet shook her head and spoke up for the recreant husband stoutly as she had defended him against herself. She made, however, small headway against his obduracy.

"Well, that's the way I see it. By-the-way," he added, heading off a disposition for further argument, "did you see the evangelist? Pitched his tent over by Flynn's. You want to go. Beats a three-ring circus when old man Cummings hits up to his gait."

"Jimmy! Jimmy!" His wife looked up from her ironing; then daunted, perhaps, by his twinkle, she addressed Helen. "He hadn't orter talk that away, my dear. If Mr. Cummings does go on the rampage a bit when he gets het up, at least he's sincere. As for him--" She turned a severe eye on her husband. "We'll get him yet."

"Yes, I see myself. Her idea of heaven"--he shrugged at the ironing-board--"is an eternal class-meeting with everybody giving their experience--love-feast she calls it. I like something solider. Give me plenty to eat, a pipe by a warm fire, an' something to read, an' I'll sign away my harp an' crown." Ignoring his better-half's remark that he would not lack the fire, he finished: "She's going. Wouldn't miss a meeting. Kedn't keep her away with a club. So if you'd alike to see some fun--"

"If 'twas jes' out of curiosity I'd ask her to stay at home," his wife interrupted. "But she's not that kind, an' I'll be glad to take her."

"If you will?" Helen assented, and so, returning to the analogy, placed herself directly beneath the leaden belly of the lowering storm.

*XXII*

*DENUNCIATION*