Part 4

However, Jenny's future was already provided. "You needn't to worry," Carter said. "The doctor's fixed things. He and his wife have neither chick nor child of their own; they'll take her in."

The girl exclaimed her surprised gladness. To her, indeed, the entire incident was a revelation. Here three rough frontiersmen had banded successfully together to protect a wronged child and keep her within their rough social pale. Through all they had exhibited a tact and delicacy not always found in finer social stratas, and the lesson went far in modifying certain caste ideas--would have gone farther could she have known the fulness of their delicacy.

Only once was the cause of Jenny's illness ever hinted at among the three; that when Carter and Bender lay waiting for the doctor in the stable.

"You don't happen to have made a guess at the man?" Carter had asked.

"She hain't mentioned him," the giant answered, a little stiffly.

But he thawed when Carter answered: "You'll pardon me. I was just wondering if a rope might help her case."

Bender had shaken his head. "Las' year, you'll remember, one of Molyneux's remittance-men uster drive her out while Jed had her hired out to Leslie's. But he's gone back to England."

Also Helen had learned to look beneath Bender's scarred surface. Every day, while Jenny lay in his shanty, he would slip in between loads of hay to see her. At first the presence of so much femininity embarrassed him. One petticoat hanging on the wall while another floats over the floor is enough to upset any bachelor. Only when sitting with Jenny did he find his tongue; then, giant of the camps, he prattled like a school-boy, freeing thoughts and feelings that had been imprisoned through all his savage years. It was singularly strange, too, to see how Jenny reciprocated his feelings. She liked Helen, but all of her petting could not bring the smile that came for Bender, in whom she sensed a kindred shy simplicity.

Helen was to get yet one other light from these unpromising surfaces, a light bright as those of Scripture which are said to shine as lamps to the feet. A few days after Jenny's departure Bender rode up to the door where Carter sat talking with Morrill.

"Got any stock to sell?" he inquired. "Cows in calf?"

"Going in for butter-making?" Carter inquired, grinning.

"Nope!" The giant laughed. "'Tain't for myself I'm asking. I'm a lumberman born an' bred; the camps draw me like salt-licks pull the deer. I'd never have time to look after them. Farming's play with me. On'y I was thinking as it wouldn't be so bad if that little gal had a head or two of her own growing inter money. You kin let 'em run with your band summers, an' I'll put up winter hay for them an' the increase. How are you, miss?" He nodded as Helen came to the door.

It was her first experience in such free giving, and she was astonished to see how devoid his manner was of philanthropic consciousness. Plainly he regarded the whole affair as very ordinary business. Carter's answer accentuated the novel impression--"What's the matter with me contributing them heifers?"

"Da--beg pardon, miss." Bender blushed. "No you don't. This is my funeral. But I'm no hawg. Now if you wanter throw in a couple of calves--"

Thus, without deed, oath, or mortgage, but with a certainty that none of these forms could afford, did little Jenny Hines become a young lady of property. The matter disposed of, Bender called Carter off to the stable, where, after many mysterious fumblings, he produced from a package a gorgeous silk kerchief of rainbow hues.

"You'll give Miss Morrill this?"

But Carter balked, grinning. "Lordy, man; do your own courting."

"Say!" the giant ejaculated, shocked. "You don't reckon she'd take it that way?"

Carter judiciously considered the question, and after mature deliberation replied: "I've seen breach-of-promise suits swing on less. But I reckon you're safe enough--if you explain your motive."

The giant sighed his relief. "Did you ever give a gal anything, Carter?"

"Did I? Enough to stock a farm if 'twas collected."

"How'd you go about it?"

"Why, jes' give it to her. You're bigger'n she is; kain't hurt you."

"Oh, Lordy, I don't know." Bender sighed again. "It's surprising what them small things kin do to you. Say, there's a good feller. You take it in?"

But Carter sternly refused, and five minutes later Bender might have been seen, stern and rigid from the desperate nature of his enterprise, sitting on one of Helen's soap-boxes. In the hour he talked with Morrill, he never once relaxed a death-grip on his hat. His eye never once strayed towards Helen, and it was late that evening when she found the kerchief under his box.

It speaks well for her that she did not laugh at its gorgeous colors; and her smile as she scribbled a little note of thanks that was delivered by Carter was far too tender for ridicule. Truly she was learning.

*VI*

*THE SHADOW*

Down a half-mile furrow that gleamed wetly black against the dull brown of "broken" prairie, Carter followed his oxen. He was "back-setting," deep-ploughing the sod that had lain rotting through the summer. For October, it was hot; an acrid odor, ammoniacal from his sweating beasts, mingled with the tang of the soil and the strong hay scent of scorching prairies. Summer was making a desperate spurt from winter's chill advance, and, as though realizing it, bird, beast, insects, as well as men, went busily about their business. The warm air was freighted with the boom of bees, vibrated to the whir of darting prairie-chicken, the yells of distant ploughmen; for, stimulated by an answer from the railroad gods, the settlers were striving to add to their wheat acreage.

"In certain contingencies," the general manager answered the petition, "we will build through Silver Creek next summer."

Judging by a remark dropped to his third assistant, "uncertain" would have expressed his meaning more correctly. "A little hope won't hurt them, and ought to go a long way in settling up the country. By-the-way, who signed these statistics? Cummings? That wasn't the tall Yankee who spoke so well. He never would have sent in such a jumble."

Blissfully ignorant, however, of railroad methods, the settlers interpreted the guarded answer as an iron promise. Forgetting Carter's

## part in getting them a hearing, Cummings and his fellows plumed

themselves upon their diplomacy, took to themselves the credit--in which they evidenced the secret malevolence that a rural community holds against the man who rises above its intellectual level. Human imperfection is invariable through the ages. Plebeian Athens ostracised the just Aristides. Similarly, Silver Creek evidenced its petty jealousy against its best brains. "Oh, he's too damned smart!" it exclaimed, whenever Carter was mentioned for the council, school trustee, or other public office, nor paused to consider its logic.

Slowly, with heavy gaspings, the oxen stopped at the end of the furrow, and as he sat down on the plough while they rested, Carter blessed the happy chance that had caused him to "break" clear down to Morrill's boundary. Helen sat in the shade of her cabin, thus affording him delicious glimpses of a scarlet mouth, slightly pursed over her sewing, a loose curl that glowed like a golden bar amid the creamy shadows of her neck, the palpitant life of the feminine figure. Small wonder that he lingered on that turn.

"It's that warm," he hypocritically remarked, fanning himself, "those poor critters' tongues are hanging to their knees."

The girl bowed to hide her smile. "They always seem to tire at this end of the field."

"Discerning brutes," he answered, nowise nonplussed.

She broke a silence. "It is considered bad manners to stare."

"Yes?" he cheerfully inquired. "I'll make a note of that."

A few moments later she remarked, "You have a poor memory."

"Thank you for telling. In what way?"

"You were staring."

"N-o."

"You were."

"Beg your pardon. It takes two to make a stare. If I keep on looking you in the eye--that's staring. If I'm looking when you ain't supposed to know it--that's--that's--"

"Well?" she prompted.

"Mighty pleasant," he finished, rising.

As he moved off she looked curiously after. While he was talking, some fleeting expression, trick of speech had recalled him as she first saw him at Lone Tree--a young man, tall, sunburned, soft of speech, ungrammatical, and the picture had awakened her to a change in herself. In this her fourth month in the settlement she felt she had lost the keen freshness of the stranger's point of view. She now scarcely noticed his idiom, accent, grammatical lapses. Oddities of speech and manner that at first would have provoked surprise or laughter no longer challenged her attention. If the land's vast rawness still impressed, she was losing the clarity of first perceptions.

She was being absorbed; her individuality was slowly undergoing the inevitable process of addition and cancellation. How dim, indefinite the past already seemed. Some other girl might have lived it, gone through the round of parties, balls, associated with the well-groomed men, refined girls of her acquaintance. How vivid, concrete was the present! She contemplated her hands, roughened by dish-washing. Did it foretell her future? Would this equilibration with environment end by leaving her peer of the gaunt, labor-stricken women of the settlements? She shuddered. The thought stamped her mood so that, returning on the other round, Carter passed on, thinking her offended.

"Why so grave, sis?" Her brother smiled down upon her from the doorway. Since her arrival he had had many ups and downs, alternating between bed-fast and apparent convalescence. To-day the fires of life would flare high, to flicker down to-morrow like a guttering candle that wastes the quicker to its end. Not for the world would she increase his anxiety with her foreboding. Hiding the dejection with a quick smile, she turned his question with another.

"Bert, why does Mr. Carter dislike Captain Molyneux, the Leslies, and--"

"The English crowd in general?" he finished for her. "Does he? I never heard him say much against them."

"No, he's one of your silent men. But actions count more than words. When he drives me to or from Leslies' he invariably refuses the invitation to come in, pleading hurry."

"Well, he has been pretty busy."

Morrill stated a fact. Carter had spent the haying months in the forest sloughs, where they cut the bulk of their fodder. There, with the deep woods smothering every errant breeze, mercury at a hundred, the fat marsh sweating underfoot, he had moved, raked, or pitched while sand-flies took toll of his flesh by day and mosquitoes converted his homeward journey into a feast of blood. Eighty head of cattle, his and Merrill's, had to be provided for, and he alone to do it. And it was from these heavy labors that he had stolen time to drive Helen back and forth.

"But he repels their every attempt at friendliness!" she protested. "Positively snubbed Captain Molyneux the other day."

Morrill laughed. "Why do they persist in their overtures? Carter is flesh and blood of the frontier, which makes no bones over its likes and dislikes. With him a friend is a friend. He has no use for civilization which calls upon its votaries to spread their friendship in a thin veneer over a vast acquaintance. Having, courteously enough, intimated that he doesn't desire closer acquaintance, he expects them to heed the hint. Failing, they may expect to have it stated in stronger terms. Molyneux has lived long enough in the north to know that." His answer, however, simply completed the circle and brought them back to the starting-point.

She restated the issue. "But why doesn't he like them?"

Morrill answered her question with another. "Why do you like them?"

"They are nice."

"Mrs. Leslie?" he catechised.

"A trifle frivolous, perhaps, but--I like her."

"Leslie, Danvers, Poole, and the rest of them?"

"Impractical," she admitted, "thoroughly impractical, all but Captain Molyneux. His farm is a model. Yet--I like them."

She spoke musingly, as though examining her feelings for cause, analysis of which would have shown that the wide differences between herself and her new acquaintances had added to the glamour and sparkle which are given off by fresh personalities. She liked their refinement, courtesy, subtleties, and grace of conduct which shone the brighter in that rough setting. To her their very speech was charming, with its broad vowels, leisurely drawled, so much softer than the clipped American idiom.

They were, indeed, over-refined. Five centuries ago the welding of Celt, Saxon, Roman, Norman into one homogeneous whole was full and complete; since then that potent mixture of blood had undergone slow stagnation. Noble privilege and laws of entail had checked in the motherland those selective processes which sweep the foolish, wicked, and vicious from the face of the earth. Protected by the aristocratic system, the fool, the idler, the roue had handed their undesirableness down the generations, a heavy mortgage on posterity. Ripe fruit of a vicious system, decay had touched them at the core; last links of a chain once strong, they had lacked the hot hammering from grim circumstance that alone could make them fit to hold and bind.

Morrill laid his thin finger on the spot. "All right, Nell, they are harmless." He laughed as he used the scornful term which the Canadian settlers applied to their English neighbors. "You must have some company. I don't dislike them myself, and would probably like them better if it was not for their insufferable national conceit and blind caste feeling. They look with huge contempt on all persons and things which cannot claim origin in the narrow bit of English society from which they sprang. I'm not denying their country's greatness. But, like the Buddhist, lost in contemplation of his own navel, they have turned their eyes inward till they're blind to all else. On we Americans they are particularly hard, regarding us with the easy tolerance that one may extend to the imperfections of an anthropoid ape. Now don't fire up! They have always been nice to me. Still I can feel the superiority beneath the surface. With Carter it is different. Him they classify with the Canadian settlers, and you may fancy the effect on a man who, in skill of hands and brain, character, all the things that count in life, stands waist-high above them. He sees them cheated, cozened by every shyster. Men in years, they are children in experience, and if help from home were withdrawn not one could stand on his own legs. They are the trimmings of their generation, encumbrances on the family estate or fortune, useless timber lopped off from the genealogical tree. Do you wonder that he despises them?"

"I think," she said, after a thoughtful pause, "that he is too stern in his judgments. Impracticability isn't a crime, Bert, and people ought not to be blamed for the conditions that made them."

"True, little wisehead."

"He ought," she went on, "to be more friendly. I'm sure Mrs. Leslie likes him."

Morrill smothered a laugh. "Carter's a mighty handsome man, young lady, and Mrs. Leslie is--a shade impressionable. But in social affairs women decide on women, men on men."

She nodded, puckering her brow. "Yes, but he behaved dreadfully to Captain Molyneux."

Her genuine distress prevented the laugh from escaping. "Tell me about it," he sympathized.

"It was the other evening when he came to drive me home. Despite his reserve, the younger boys all like him, and when Captain Molyneux brought me out he was telling Mr. Poole and Mr. Rhodes about a horse that Danvers had bought from Cummings. 'The critter,' Carter said, 'is blind, spavined, sweenied, and old enough to homestead.'

"'Well,' the captain added, 'Danvers has always needed a guardian, Mr. Carter.'"

"In his patronizing way?" Morrill commented.

"A little, perhaps," she admitted. "Then, looking straight at us, Carter answered, 'He could have picked a worse.' What did he mean, Bert? The captain reddened and the boys looked silly."

Morrill grinned. "Well--you see, Nell, Molyneux's income is mostly derived from the farming of pupils who are apprenticed to him by a firm of London lawyers while under the impression that colonial farming is a complex business that requires years of study. Having whacked up from five hundred to five thousand dollars premium, they find, on arrival, that they have simply paid for the privilege of doing ordinary farm work. You said Molyneux's place was a model. No wonder, when he draws pay where other men have to hire. No, the business isn't exactly dishonorable!" He anticipated her question. "He does teach them something, and prevents them from falling into the hands of Canuck shysters who would bleed them for hundreds when he takes fifties. But--well, it isn't a business I'd care to be in. But there! I've talked myself tired, and Molyneux is coming at three to drive you up to Leslie's. You have just half an hour to dress."

"But I won't go," she protested, "if you're not feeling well."

"Bosh!" he laughed. "I'm dying to be rid of you. Expect to get quiet sleep this afternoon."

But as, half an hour later, he watched her drive away, his face darkened, and he muttered: "This will never do. She can't settle down to this life. Just as soon--" A fit of coughing left him gasping; but, under the merciful hallucination that attends consumption, he finished, "I'll sell out as soon as I'm rid of this cough and go back to the law."

Carter also watched her go. As, dank with sweat, grimed with dust and labor, he "geed" his oxen around the "land," she went by, a flutter of billowy white, deliciously dainty, cool, and clean. The contrast emphasized the difference between them so strongly that a sudden feeling of bitter hopelessness caused him to return only a stern nod to her bow and smile. Surprised, she looked back, and gleaning, perhaps, an intuition of his feeling from the dogged set of his face and figure, she was swept with sudden pity.

For a mile she was quiet; but while the sun shines youth may not hobnob with care, and that was a perfect day. Autumn's crimsons mottled the tawny prairies; waves of sunshine chased one another over the brown grasses to the distant forest line; and as, with cheerful clatter of pole and harness, the buggy dipped, swallow-like, over the long earth rolls, her spirits rose. She laughed, chatted, within five miles was involved in a mild flirtation. That was wicked! Of course! Afterwards, in private, she mortified the strain of coquetry that made such shame possible. Yet it was very natural. Given a handsome man, a pretty maid, and isolation, what else should follow? Molyneux had travelled in far countries and talked well of them and their savage peoples. He knew London, the Mecca of womankind, like a book; abounded in anecdotes of people and places that had been awesome names to her. Also he was skilled in subtle flattery, never exceeding by a hair's-breadth the amount which her vanity--of which she had a pretty woman's rightful share--could easily assimilate. Small wonder if she forgot the grim figure at the ploughtail.

Forgetfulness, however, was not for Carter. As he followed the steady rhythm of his furrows in heat and dust, heavy thought now loosened, now tightened the corners of his mouth. But bitterness did not hold him long.

"Baby! You are going to get her. But that ain't the way to play the game," he said, as the buggy disappeared. And she saw only friendliness in his smile on her return that evening and the score of other occasions on which he watched her goings and comings.

He "played his game" like a man, and with a masterly hand. Never obtrusive, he was always kind, cheerful, hopefully sympathetic during Merrill's bad spells. At other times his dry humor kept her laughing. He was always helpful. When the snows blanketed the prairies he instructed her in the shifts of winter housekeeping--how to keep the cabin snug when the blizzard walled it in fleecy cloud; how to keep the frost out of the cellar and from the small stock of fruits in the pantry. Together they "froze down" a supply of milk against the time when it would be cruel to keep cows milking. A night's frost transmuted her pans of milk into oval cakes, which he piled out-doors like cordwood. A milk pile! The snows soon covered it, and how she laughed when, drawing home wood from the forest, he mistook the pile for a drift and so upset his load.

Indeed, he wrought well! Kindliness, good temper, consideration, these are splendid bases for love. Not that he ever hinted his hope. He was far too shrewdly circumspect. It speaks for the quality of his wit that he recognized that, given differences in rank and station, love must steal upon her from ambush. Startled, she would fly behind ramparts that would be proof against the small god's sharpest arrows. So he was very careful, masking his feeling under a gentle imperturbability; sure that, if not alarmed, she must turn to him in the coming time of trouble.

For Morrill had steadily failed since winter set in. During the Christmas week he rallied, recovered voice and color, improved so much that Helen yielded to his wish for her to attend a New Year's party at Mrs. Leslie's; and as she kissed him good-bye there was nothing to indicate that this was but the last flash, the leaping flame which precedes the darkness.

A genuine frontier party, it was to be an all-day affair, and Carter drove her up in the morning. New Year had broken beautifully: clear, bright, almost warm; for the first time in a month the mercury had thawed long enough to register twenty-eight below. There had been no wind or drift for a week, so the trail was packed hard, and as the ponies swept its curves, balancing the cutter on one or the other runner, rapid motion joined with pleasurable anticipation to raise the girl's spirits to the point of repentance.

"Here I'm laughing and chatting," she said, soberly, "when I ought to be home with Bert."

"Nonsense!" Carter glanced approvingly upon the glow which the keen air had brought to her cheeks. "You haven't been out for a month, and you were getting that pale and peaked. I shall be with him. Now you just go in for a good time."

His generous solicitude for her happiness, for she was going among people he did not like, touched her. "I wish you were coming," she said. Then she added, "Won't you come in--just for a little while--if Mrs. Leslie asks you?"

He returned her coaxing smile. "I'll see." And as the men were all away, clearing a slough for skating, he stayed long enough to drink a toast with Mrs. Leslie.

That lady's eyes shone with soft approval as, standing by the table that was already spread with glass, silver, and white napery, he bowed. "To your continued health and beauty."

"Now wasn't that pretty?" she exclaimed, after he was gone. "Do you know, standing there in his furs, so tall and strong, he reminded me of one of those old Norsemen who sometimes strayed into degenerate southern courts. You are happy in your cavalier, my dear. If he asked me, I believe I'd run away with him." And there was a sigh in her laugh. For though a good fellow, Leslie was prodigiously chuckle-headed, and she had moods when his simple foolishness was as unbearable as her own frivolity--dangerous moods for a woman of her light timber.