Part 27

"Mrs. Bender, if you please," he corrected Carter, chuckling; and for once he permitted some one else to do the blushing. Wherein he showed great taste, as she did it right prettily, exhibiting, moreover, a much superior article.

Next day, Dorothy, becomingly mortified because the good news had come to her through her father out of Smythe. "To hear of it in such a roundabout way!" she declared. "You little traitor! and when I think of your speculations about his wife! Positively I had resolved never to forgive you, but--" Kisses, of course.

Thereafter, Brady, Big Hans, Carrots Smith--all more or less singed and nursing various breakages--ostensibly to see the boss, really to take a look at his pretty wife, whom, they decided, shamed the specifications.

Then, to everybody's astonishment--indeed, the Head shadowed the man along the corridor as though he were an anarchist with a bomb in his pocket--the _General Manager_! brisk, steel-like, yet twinkling. "Trounced us, didn't you?" he laughed. "Well, one never can tell when one has made an end. Competition? Perhaps, for a while; but wait till Jem Ball and I get a bellyful of fighting. However, by that time you'll be well cured of your desires for the public weal and be ready to listen to reason. Oh yes, you will! We all take 'em like chicken-pox or measles, but they are not fatal--unless you get 'em late in life. I feel so sure of your eventual recovery that I just dropped in to bury the hatchet. Fifty years won't see the finish of our plans, and whenever you feel a yearning for fresh enterprises, just look me up."

Therewith the gray cynic hurried away to plan and scheme, upbuild, tear down, without slack or satiety of enormous constructive appetite; to live in travail greater than the labor of woman, and give birth ceaselessly to innumerable works; to inundate the plains with seas of wheat and carry bread to Europe's teeming millions; to sow towns, villages, cities broadcast over the north, make farms for countless thousands; to join Occident and Orient with gleaming rails, clipper ships, to do evil consciously all his days and work unconscious good, crushing the individual for the weal of the race, and caring nothing for either; to live feared and die respected, leaving the world bigger and better than he found it.

Lastly, the cook, just down from the camp with news of Michigan Red. Flying in front of the fire, the black stallion had come in with the rat-tailed mare to be shot as a murderer after the Cree had tracked down the Thing that had been his master; and so, if there be aught in Cree mythology, the soul of the fierce brute would fight it out once more with the fiercer man in the place of the teamsters.

While beguiling the tedium, these tales and conversations failed to exclude from Carter's ear a distant hammering that attended the building of his station and freight-sheds. Also he could hear the hoarse coughing of locomotives going up and down his line. And as the _materia medica_ contains no tonics like happiness and success, small wonder that, as aforesaid, he demanded his clothes at the end of the week.

"Once you get hold of a fellow you are never satisfied till you have gone all through his clock-work," he replied to the Head's objections. "But though I sympathize with your industry, you'll have to wait for another go at mine. They are needed in my business."

First--Helen with him, of course--he directed his steps, or rather the wheels of a hack, to the new station where the ring of saws, hammering, noise and bustle of work, acted upon him like the draught of the elixir of life, bringing color to his cheeks, stiffness to his knees, sparkle to his eyes. Thence they drove for a conference to Greer & Smythe's; whereafter nothing would suit him but a long drive out to the prairies. It was a strenuous beginning, but fresh air and sunshine are ever potent. He gained color and strength under her anxious eyes; seemed fresher when he dropped her at Jean Glaves's house that evening than in the morning.

Throughout the happy day they had lived in the present. But though he had made no plan for the future, she had trusted, and her face lit up with flashing intuition when he said good-night.

"Mistress Morrill, you are to take the morning train to Lone Tree."

This was the "something he wanted to do."

*XXXII*

*THE TRAIL AGAIN*

Skipping that long if happy night, peep with dawn into Helen's bedroom, and see her up and singing small snatches of song that presently brought Jean Glaves, herself the earliest of birds, from bed to assist at the toilet. Should she wear this, that, or the other? There was the usual doubt which beset a young lady who wishes to look her best for occasion; but the result that went forth from big Jean's hug? A vision of healthy beauty that drew tentative smiles from a brace of drummers and attracted the stealthy regard of the entire station when she finally broke, like a burst of sunlight, on the platform. Continuing the figure, the smile, its crowning asset, faded like the afterglow when her anxious eyes refused her the tall familiar figure; and when the train pulled out without him, her disconsolate expression filled the aforesaid drummers with manly longings towards consolation.

Unpunctual? On such an occasion? And how silly she would look at Lone Tree! Slightly offended at first, she then grew alarmed. Perhaps he had suffered a relapse, was ill, dying! Be sure that her terrors compassed the possible and impossible during an hour's journey, and not until she saw a man come dashing across the tracks to the Lone Tree platform did she realize the fulness of his inspiration. He had taken the freight out the night before! If thinner, paler, he was very like the young man who had come to meet her three years ago. There, also, was the lone poplar that had christened the station; the ramshackle town with its clapboard hotels, false-fronted stores, grain-sheds, sitting in the midst of the plains that, flat and infinitely yellow, ran with the tracks over a boundless horizon. Lastly, there was Nels and his bleached grin, holding Death and the Devil, sleek, fat, and sinful as ever.

Carter's whispered greeting helped to keep her in the past. "Is this Miss Morrill?"

"Mr. Carter, I believe?" she had just time for the roguish answer, then their little comedy had to be laid aside till they were alone on trail. For the doctor came running from his office, the store-keeper plunged madly across tracks, Hooper, the agent, yelled, "Well, I swan!" and jumped to shake hands, while from a grain-shed emerged Jimmy Glaves, who had taken a lift in with Nels.

Wasn't she glad to see them? Yet a deeper happiness enveloped her when, looking back, she again saw Lone Tree, shrunken in the distance, its grain-sheds looking like red Noah's arks on a yellow carpet; when she heard only the pole and harness jigging a merry accompaniment to the beat of quick feet, whirring song of swift wheels.

It was very like that first occasion. Though stiff night frosts were now giving timely notice of winter's chill approach, the clerk of the weather had made special arrangements for a south wind; so it was warm as on that far day. Birds, animals, scenery, too, all helped to bring the happy past forward to the happy present, while Death and the Devil, those wicked ones, fostered the illusion by frequent boltings. Surely she remembered the ridge where her first coyote had caused her to cling to Carter, and earned a kiss by repetition of that shameful performance and faithful mimicry of his accent. "He shore looks hungry." Immediately thereafter they plunged out from among scattered farms into the "Dry Lands," but its yellow miles, generally a penance, flowed unnoticed under the buck-board. They were both astonished when, suddenly as before, they rattled through a bluff and dropped over the edge of the valley upon Father Francis at the mission door.

Nothing would suit but that they must dine with him while Louis, the half-breed stableman, fed and watered the ponies. But if the good priest's twinkle expressed knowledge that another of his day's works was come to fruitage, his quiet converse brought no jarring note into their communings.

Undisturbed, they began again at the ford and continued while the Park Lands rolled in great billows under the wheels. The Cree chimneys, Indian graveyards, other well-remembered objects passed in pleasant procession ere, coming to Flynn's, he looked at her. A shake of the head confirmed his doubt. Another time! So they swept on through vast, sun-washed spaces where cattle wandered freely as the whispering winds under flitting cloud-shadows, and so, about sundown, came to their own place with but a single interruption.

Passing Danvers at their own forks, he grinned his delight as he turned out to let them by and shouted after: "Say! I heard from Leslie! He's doing well on the Rand! Sends regards to both of you!"

While that bit of good news was still ringing in her ears, the house flashed out under the eaves of the forest, warm and bright under the setting sun. All was unchanged--the lake, stained just now a ruby red, the golden stubble fenced in by dark, environing woods. Within all was neat and clean as Nels's racial passion for soap and water could make it. So while he stabled the tired ponies, she donned one of her old aprons, rolled sleeves above dimpled elbows, and cooked supper; rather a superfluous performance aside from the grave pleasure he took in looking on.

Afterwards they sat on the doorstep, she between his knees, head pillowed against his breast, and looked at the copper moon that hung in the trees across the lake--watched it brighten to silver; listened to the harmonies of the night, the loon's weird alto, the bittern's bass, cry of a pivoting mallard, owl's solemn choral, a wilder, freer movement than was ever chained in a stave. Once a snuffle, soft-lapping, drifted in, and he replied to her start, "Bear-drinking." Otherwise they were silent up to the moment she arose, shivering.

"It is getting colder. I think I'll go in."

He stayed a little longer, stretched luxuriously out on the grass; was still there when, having made their bed, she came to the door. A vivid memory gave her pause. Just so had he looked--that night--dark, still, as the marble effigy of some old Crusader, with the moonlight quivering about him like an emanation.

"Are you coming, dear?" Perhaps the memory tinged her tone. Anyway, he sprang up, arms extended, and as she came running, he lifted her clear of the ground; carried her in and closed the door.

Her shiver had warrant. Within the hour the north wind began to herd luminous clouds across the moon. At midnight the cabin loomed darkly through a bridal veil of white.

THE END