Part 21

"Oh yes, I know. And whatever he is, you've said that you will save him. I'm straight, you know that. Somehow, what I felt from his preaching--well, everything got sort of mixed up with him, and he was--was different. It was like the long dream of Walt and the baby, and he a part of it. I don't know what I felt, or what I might have felt for him. I'm a woman--I can't understand. But I know what I feel now. I never want to see him again on earth--or in heaven. It needn't be necessary even in heaven; but what happened between God and me through him stays, Tim; and so you must help him get away safe. It's in your hands--you say they left it to you."

"I don't trust that too much."

Suddenly he pointed out of the window toward the town. "See, I'm right; there they are, a dozen of 'em mounted. They're off, to run him down."

Her face paled; she glanced toward the Hill of Healing. "He's got an hour's start," she said; "he'll get into the mountains and be safe."

"If they don't catch him 'fore that."

"Or if you don't get to him first," she said, with nervous insistence.

He turned to her with a hard look; then, as he met her soft, fearless, beautiful eyes, his own grew gentle.

"It takes a lot of doing. Yet I'll do it for you, Laura," he said. "But it's hard on the Pioneers."

Once more her humor flashed, and it seemed to him that "getting religion" was not so depressing after all--wouldn't be, anyhow, when this nasty job was over.

"The Pioneers will get over it, Tim," she rejoined. "They've swallowed a lot in their time. Heaven's gate will have to be pretty wide to let in a real Pioneer," she added. "He takes up so much room--ah, Timothy Denton!" she added, with an outburst of whimsical merriment.

"It hasn't spoiled you--being converted--has it?" he said, and gave a quick little laugh, which somehow did more for his ancient cause with her than all he had ever said or done. Then he stepped outside and swung into his saddle.

* * * * *

It had been a hard and anxious ride, but Tim had won, and was keeping his promise. The night had fallen before he got to the mountains, which he and the Pioneers had seen the Faith Healer enter. They had had four miles' start of Tim, and had ridden fiercely, and they entered the gulch into which the refugee had disappeared still two miles ahead.

The invincibles had seen Tim coming, but they had determined to make a sure thing of it, and would themselves do what was necessary with the impostor, and take no chances. So they pressed their horses, and he saw them swallowed by the trees as darkness gathered. Changing his course, he entered the familiar hills, which he knew better than any Pioneer of Jansen, and rode a diagonal course over the trail they would take. But night fell suddenly, and there was nothing to do but to wait till morning. There was comfort in this--the others must also wait, and the refugee could not go far. In any case, he must make for settlement or perish, since he had left behind his sheep and his cow.

It fell out better than Tim hoped. The Pioneers were as good hunters as was he, their instinct was as sure, their scouts and trackers were many, and he was but one. They found the Faith Healer by a little stream, eating bread and honey, and, like an ancient woodlander, drinking from a horn--relic of his rank imposture. He made no resistance. They tried him, formally if perfunctorily; he admitted his imposture, and begged for his life. Then they stripped him naked, tied a bit of canvas round his waist, fastened him to a tree, and were about to complete his punishment when Tim Denton burst upon them.

Whether the rage Tim showed was all real or not; whether his accusations of bad faith came from so deeply wounded a spirit as he would have them believe, he was not likely to tell; but he claimed the prisoner as his own, and declined to say what he meant to do. When, however, they saw the abject terror of the Faith Healer as he begged not to be left alone with Tim--for they had not meant death, and Ingles thought he read death in Tim's ferocious eyes--they laughed cynically, and left it to Tim to uphold the honor of Jansen and the Pioneers.

As they disappeared, the last thing they saw was Tim with his back to them, his hands on his hips, and a knife clasped in his fingers.

"He'll lift his scalp and make a monk of him," chuckled the oldest and hardest of them.

"Dat Tim will cut his heart out, I t'ink--_bagosh_!" said Nicolle Terasse, and took a drink of white whiskey.

For a long time Tim stood looking at the other, until no sound came from the woods whither the Pioneers had gone. Then at last, slowly and with no roughness, as the terror-stricken impostor shrank and withered, he cut the cords.

"Dress yourself," he said, shortly, and sat down beside the stream, and washed his face and hands as though to cleanse them from contamination. He appeared to take no notice of the other, though his ears keenly noted every movement.

The impostor dressed nervously, yet slowly; he scarce comprehended anything, except that he was not in immediate danger. When he had finished, he stood looking at Tim, who was still seated on a log plunged in meditation.

It seemed hours before Tim turned round, and now his face was quiet, if set and determined. He walked slowly over, and stood looking at his victim for some time without speaking. The other's eyes dropped, and a grayness stole over his features. This steely calm was even more frightening than the ferocity which had previously been in his captor's face. At length the tense silence was broken:

"Wasn't the old game good enough? Was it played out? Why did you take to this? Why did you do it, Scranton?"

The voice quavered a little in reply: "I don't know. Something sort of pushed me into it."

"How did you come to start it?"

There was a long silence, then the husky reply came:

"I got a sickener last time--"

"Yes, I remember, at Waywing."

"I got into the desert, and had hard times--awful for a while. I hadn't enough to eat, and I didn't know whether I'd die by hunger or fever or Indians--or snakes."

"Oh, you were seeing snakes!" said Tim, grimly.

"Not the kind you mean; I hadn't anything to drink--"

"No, you never did drink, I remember--just was crooked, and slopped over women. Well, about the snakes?"

"I caught them to eat, and they were poison-snakes often. And I wasn't quick at first to get them safe by the neck--they're quick, too."

Tim laughed inwardly. "Getting your food by the sweat of your brow--and a snake in it, same as Adam! Well, was it in the desert you got your taste for honey, too, same as John the Baptist--that was his name, if I recomember?" He looked at the tin of honey on the ground.

"Not in the desert, but when I got to the grass-country."

"How long were you in the desert?"

"Close to a year."

Tim's eyes opened wider. He saw that the man was speaking the truth.

"Got to thinking in the desert, and sort of willing things to come to pass, and mooning along, you and the sky and the vultures and the hot hills and the snakes and the flowers--eh?"

"There weren't any flowers till I got to the grass-country."

"Oh, cuss me, if you ain't simple for your kind! I know all about that. And when you got to the grass-country you just picked up the honey and the flowers, and a calf and a lamb and a mule here and there, 'without money and without price,' and walked on--that it?"

The other shrank before the steel in the voice, and nodded his head.

"But you kept thinking in the grass-country of what you'd felt and said and done--and willed, in the desert, I suppose?"

Again the other nodded.

"It seemed to you in the desert as if you'd saved your own life a hundred times, as if you'd just willed food and drink and safety to come; as if Providence had been at your elbow?"

"It was like a dream, and it stayed with me. I had to think in the desert things I'd never thought before," was the half-abstracted answer.

"You _felt_ good in the desert?"

The other hung his head in shame.

"Makes you seem pretty small, doesn't it? You didn't stay long enough, I guess, to get what you were feeling for; you started in on the new racket too soon. You never got really possessed that you was a sinner. I expect that's it."

The other made no reply.

"Well, I don't know much about such things. I was loose brought up; but I've a friend"--Laura was before his eyes--"that says religion's all right, and long ago as I can remember my mother used to pray three times a day--with grace at meals, too. I know there's a lot in it for them that need it; and there seems to be a lot of folks needing it, if I'm to judge by folks down there at Jansen, 'specially when there's the laying-on of hands and the Healing Springs. Oh, that was a pigsty game, Scranton, that about God giving you the Healing Springs, like Moses and the rock! Why, I discovered them springs myself two years ago, before I went South, and I guess God wasn't helping me any--not after I've kept out of His way as I have. But, anyhow, religion's real; that's my sense of it; and you can get it, I bet, if you try. I've seen it got. A friend of mine got it--got it under your preaching; not from you; but you was the accident that brought it about, I expect. It's funny--it's merakilous, but it's so. Kneel down!" he added, with peremptory suddenness. "Kneel, Scranton!"

In fear the other knelt.

"You're going to get religion now--here. You're going to pray for what you didn't get--and almost got--in the desert. You're going to ask forgiveness for all your damn tricks, and pray like a fanning-mill for the Spirit to come down. You ain't a scoundrel at heart--a friend of mine says so. You're a weak vessel--cracked, perhaps. You've got to be saved, and start right over again--and 'Praise God from whom all blessings flow!' Pray--pray, Scranton, and tell the whole truth, and get it--get religion. Pray like blazes. You go on, and pray out loud. Remember the desert, and Mary Jewell, and your mother--did you have a mother, Scranton?--say, did you have a mother, lad?"

Tim's voice suddenly lowered before the last word, for the Faith Healer had broken down in a torrent of tears.

"Oh, my mother--O God!" he groaned.

"Say, that's right--that's right--go on," said the other and drew back a little, and sat down on a log.

The man on his knees was convulsed with misery. Denton, the world, disappeared. He prayed in agony.

Presently Tim moved uneasily, then got up and walked about; and at last, with a strange, awed look, when an hour was past, he stole back into the shadow of the trees while still the wounded soul poured out its misery and repentance.

Time moved on. A curious shyness possessed Tim now, a thing which he had never felt in his life. He moved about self-consciously, awkwardly, until at last there was a sudden silence over by the brook.

Tim looked, and saw the face of the kneeling man cleared and quiet and shining. He hesitated, then stepped out, and came over.

"Have you got it?" he asked, quietly. "It's noon now."

"May God help me to redeem my past," answered the other, in a new voice.

"You've got it--sure?" Tim's voice was meditative.

"God has spoken to me," was the simple answer.

"I've got a friend'll be glad to hear that," he said; and once more, in imagination, he saw Laura Sloly standing at the door of her home, with a light in her eyes he had never seen before.

"You'll want some money for your journey?" Tim asked.

"I want nothing but to go away--far away," was the low reply.

"Well, you've lived in the desert--I guess you can live in the grass-country," came the dry response, "Good-bye--and good-luck, Scranton."

Tim turned to go, moved on a few steps, then looked back.

"Don't be afraid--they'll not follow," he said. "I'll fix it for you all right."

But the man appeared not to hear; he was still on his knees.

Tim faced the woods once more.

He was about to mount his horse when he heard a step behind him. He turned sharply--and faced Laura.

"I couldn't rest. I came out this morning. I've seen everything," she said.

"You didn't trust me," he said, heavily.

"I never did anything else," she answered.

He gazed half-fearfully into her eyes. "Well?" he asked. "I've done my best, as I said I would."

"Tim," she said, and slipped a hand in his, "would you mind the religion--if you had me?"

THE LITTLE WIDOW OF JANSEN

Her advent to Jansen was propitious. Smallpox in its most virulent form had broken out in the French-Canadian portion of the town, and, coming with some professional nurses from the East, herself an amateur, to attend the sufferers, she worked with such skill and devotion that the official thanks of the Corporation were offered her, together with a tiny gold watch, the gift of grateful citizens. But she still remained on at Jansen, saying always, however, that she was "going East in the spring."

Five years had passed, and still she had not gone East, but remained perched in the rooms she had first taken, over the Imperial Bank, while the town grew up swiftly round her. And even when the young bank manager married, and wished to take over the rooms, she sent him to the right-about from his own premises in her gay, masterful way. The young manager behaved well in the circumstances, because he had asked her to marry him, and she had dismissed him with a warning against challenging his own happiness--that was the way she had put it. Perhaps he was galled the less because others had striven for the same prize, and had been thrust back, with an almost tender misgiving as to their sense of self-preservation and sanity. Some of them were eligible enough, and all were of some position in the West. Yet she smiled them firmly away, to the wonder of Jansen, and to its satisfaction, for was it not a tribute to all that she would distinguish no particular unit by her permanent favor? But for one so sprightly and almost frivolous in manner at times, the self-denial seemed incongruous. She was unconventional enough to sit on the sidewalk with a half-dozen children round her blowing bubbles, or to romp in any garden, or in the street, playing Puss-in-the-ring; yet this only made her more popular. Jansen's admiration was at its highest, however, when she rode in the annual steeplechase with the best horsemen of the province. She had the gift of doing as well as of being.

"'Tis the light heart she has, and slippin' in and out of things like a hummin'-bird, no easier to ketch and no longer to stay," said Finden, the rich Irish landbroker, suggestively to Father Bourassa, the huge French-Canadian priest who had worked with her through all the dark weeks of the smallpox epidemic, and who knew what lay beneath the outer gayety. She had been buoyant of spirit beside the beds of the sick, and her words were full of raillery and humor, yet there was ever a gentle note behind all; and the priest had seen her eyes shining with tears as she bent over some stricken sufferer bound upon an interminable journey.

"Bedad! as bright a little spark as ever struck off the steel," added Finden to the priest, with a sidelong, inquisitive look, "but a heart no bigger than a marrowfat pea--selfishness, all self. Keepin' herself for herself when there's many a good man needin' her. Mother o' Moses, how many! From Terry O'Ryan, brother of a peer, at Latouche, to Bernard Bapty, son of a millionaire, at Vancouver, there's a string o' them. All pride and self; and as fair a lot they've been as ever entered for the Marriage Cup. Now isn't that so, father?"

Finden's brogue did not come from a plebeian origin. It was part of his commercial equipment, an asset of his boyhood spent among the peasants on the family estate in Galway.

Father Bourassa fanned himself with the black broadbrim hat he wore, and looked benignly but quizzically on the wiry, sharp-faced Irishman.

"You t'ink her heart is leetla. But perhaps it is your mind is not so big enough to see--_hien_?" The priest laughed noiselessly, showing white teeth. "Was it so selfish in Madame to refuse the name of Finden--_n'est-ce pas_?"

Finden flushed, then burst into a laugh. "I'd almost forgotten I was one of them--the first almost. Blessed be he that expects nothing, for he'll get it sure. It was my duty, and I did it. Was she to feel that Jansen did not price her high? Bedad, father, I rose betimes and did it, before anny man should say he set me the lead. Before the carpet in the parlor was down, and with the bare boards soundin' to my words, I offered her the name of Finden."

"And so--the first of the long line! _Bien_, it is an honor." The priest paused a moment, looked at Finden with a curious reflective look, and then said, "And so you t'ink there is no one; that she will say yes not at all--no?"

They were sitting on Father Bourassa's verandah, on the outskirts of the town, above the great river, along which had travelled millions of bygone people, fighting, roaming, hunting, trapping; and they could hear it rushing past, see the swirling eddies, the impetuous currents, the occasional rafts moving majestically down the stream. They were facing the wild North, while civilization was hacking and hewing and ploughing its way to newer and newer cities, in an empire ever spreading to the Pole.

Finden's glance loitered on this scene before he replied. At length, screwing up one eye, and with a suggestive smile, he answered: "Sure, it's all a matter of time, to the selfishest woman. 'Tis not the same with women as with men; you see, they don't get younger--that's a point. But"--he gave a meaning glance at the priest--"but perhaps she's not going to wait for that, after all. And there he rides, a fine figure of a man, too, if I have to say it!"

"M'sieu' Varley?" the priest responded, and watched a galloping horseman to whom Finden had pointed till he rounded a corner of a little wood.

"Varley, the great London surgeon, sure! Say, father, it's a hundred to one she'd take him if--"

There was a curious look in Father Bourassa's face, a cloud in his eyes. He sighed. "London, it is ver' far away," he remarked, obliquely.

"What's to that? If she is with the right man, near or far is nothing."

"So far--from home," said the priest, reflectively, but his eyes furtively watched the other's face.

"But home's where man and wife are."

The priest now looked him straight in the eyes. "Then, as you say, she will not marry M'sieu' Varley--_hein_?"

The humor died out of Finden's face. His eyes met the priest's eyes steadily. "Did I say that? Then my tongue wasn't making a fool of me, after all. How did you guess I knew--everything, father?"

"A priest knows many t'ings--so."

There was a moment of gloom, then the Irishman brightened. He came straight to the heart of the mystery around which they had been manoeuvring. "Have you seen her husband--Meydon--this year? It isn't his usual time to come yet."

Father Bourassa's eyes drew those of his friend into the light of a new understanding and revelation. They understood and trusted each other.

[Illustration: "AS PURTY A WOMAN, TOO--AS PURTY AND AS STRAIGHT BEWHILES"]

"_Helas!_ He is there in the hospital," he answered, and nodded toward a building not far away, which had been part of an old Hudson Bay Company's fort. It had been hastily adapted as a hospital for the smallpox victims.

"Oh, it's Meydon, is it, that bad case I heard of to-day?"

The priest nodded again and pointed. "_Voila_, Madame Meydon, she is coming. She has seen him--her hoosban'."

Finden's eyes followed the gesture. The little widow of Jansen was coming from the hospital, walking slowly toward the river.

"As purty a woman, too--as purty and as straight bewhiles. What is the matter with him--with Meydon?" Finden asked, after a moment.

"An accident in the woods--so. He arrive, it is las' night, from Great Slave Lake."

Finden sighed. "Ten years ago he was a man to look at twice--before he did _It_ and got away. Now his own mother wouldn't know him--bad 'cess to him! I knew him from the cradle almost. I spotted him here by a knife-cut I gave him in the hand when we were lads together. A divil of a timper always both of us had, but the good-nature was with me, and I didn't drink and gamble and carry a pistol. It's ten years since he did the killing, down in Quebec, and I don't suppose the police will get him now. He's been counted dead. I recognized him here the night after I asked her how she liked the name of Finden. She doesn't know that I ever knew him. And he didn't recognize me--twenty-five years since we met before! It would be better if he went under the sod. Is he pretty sick, father?"

"He will die unless the surgeon's knife it cure him before twenty-four hours, and--"

"And Doctor Brydon is sick, and Doctor Hadley away at Winnipeg, and this is two hundred miles from nowhere! It looks as if the police'll never get him, eh?"

"You have not tell any one--never?"

Finden laughed. "Though I'm not a priest, I can lock myself up as tight as anny. There's no tongue that's so tied, when tying's needed, as the one that babbles most bewhiles. Babbling covers a lot of secrets."

"So you t'ink it better Meydon should die, as Hadley is away and Brydon is sick--_hein_?"

"Oh, I think--"

Finden stopped short, for a horse's hoofs sounded on the turf beside the house, and presently Varley, the great London surgeon, rounded the corner and stopped his horse in front of the veranda.

He lifted his hat to the priest. "I hear there's a bad case at the hospital," he said.

"It is ver' dangerous," answered Father Bourassa; "but, _voila_, come in! There is something cool to drink. Ah, yes, he is ver' bad, that man from the Great Slave Lake."

Inside the house, with the cooling drinks, Varley pressed his questions, and presently, much interested, told at some length of singular cases which had passed through his hands--one a man with his neck broken, who had lived for six months afterward.