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

favour? 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 side-walk 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

humming-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 gaiety.

She had been buoyant of spirit beside the beds of the sick, and her words

were full of raillery and humour, 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 manny a good man needin' her. Mother o' Moses, how

manny! 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 not so big

enough to see—hein?" 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 parlour

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 honour." 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 veranda, 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, where civilisation 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 the 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 humour 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

maneuvering. "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.

"Helas! He is there in the hospital," he answered, and nodded towards

a building not far away, which had been part of an old Hudson's 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 towards 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 recognised 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 recognise 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.

"Broken as a man's neck is broken by hanging—dislocation, really—the

disjointing of the medulla oblongata, if you don't mind technicalities,"

he said. "But I kept him living just the same. Time enough for him to

repent in and get ready to go. A most interesting case. He was a

criminal, too, and wanted to die; but you have to keep life going if

you can, to the last inch of resistance."

The priest looked thoughtfully out of the window; Finden's eyes were

screwed up in a questioning way, but neither made any response to

Varley's remarks. There was a long minute's silence. They were all

three roused by hearing a light footstep on the veranda.

Father Bourassa put down his glass and hastened into the hallway. Finden

caught a glimpse of a woman's figure, and, without a word, passed

abruptly from the dining-room where they were, into the priest's study,

leaving Varley alone. Varley turned to look after him, stared, and

shrugged his shoulders.

"The manners of the West," he said good-humouredly, and turned again to

the hallway, from whence came the sound of the priest's voice. Presently

there was another voice—a woman's. He flushed slightly and

involuntarily straightened himself.

"Valerie," he murmured.

An instant afterwards she entered the room with the priest. She was

dressed in a severely simple suit of grey, which set off to advantage her

slim, graceful figure. There seemed no reason why she should have been

called the little widow of Jansen, for she was not small, but she was

very finely and delicately made, and the name had been but an expression

of Jansen's paternal feeling for her. She had always had a good deal of

fresh colour, but to-day she seemed pale, though her eyes had a strange

disturbing light. It was not that they brightened on seeing this man

before her; they had been brighter, burningly bright, when she left the

hospital, where, since it had been built, she had been the one visitor of

authority—Jansen had given her that honour. She had a gift of smiling,

and she smiled now, but it came from grace of mind rather than from

humour. As Finden had said, "She was for ever acting, and never doin'

any harm by it."

Certainly she was doing no harm by it now; nevertheless, it was acting.

Could it be otherwise, with what was behind her life—a husband who had

ruined her youth, had committed homicide, had escaped capture, but who

had not subsequently died, as the world believed he had done, so

circumstantial was the evidence. He was not man enough to make the

accepted belief in his death a fact. What could she do but act, since

the day she got a letter from the Far North, which took her out to

Jansen, nominally to nurse those stricken with smallpox under Father

Bourassa's care, actually to be where her wretched husband could come

to her once a year, as he had asked with an impossible selfishness?

Each year she had seen him for an hour or less, giving him money,

speaking to him over a gulf so wide that it seemed sometimes as though

her voice could not be heard across it; each year opening a grave to look

at the embalmed face of one who had long since died in shame, which only

brought back the cruellest of all memories, that which one would give

one's best years to forget. With a fortitude beyond description she had

faced it, gently, quietly, but firmly faced it—firmly, because she had

to be firm in keeping him within those bounds the invasion of which would

have killed her. And after the first struggle with his unchangeable

brutality it had been easier: for into his degenerate brain there had

come a faint understanding of the real situation and of her. He had

kept his side of the gulf, but gloating on this touch between the old

luxurious, indulgent life, with its refined vices, and this present

coarse, hard life, where pleasures were few and gross. The free Northern

life of toil and hardship had not refined him. He greedily hung over

this treasure, which was not for his spending, yet was his own—as though

in a bank he had hoards of money which he might not withdraw.

So the years had gone on, with their recurrent dreaded anniversaries,

carrying misery almost too great to be borne by this woman mated to the

loathed phantom of a sad, dead life; and when this black day of each year

was over, for a few days afterwards she went nowhere, was seen by none.

Yet, when she did appear again, it was with her old laughing manner, her

cheerful and teasing words, her quick response to the emotions of others.

So it had gone till Varley had come to follow the open air life for four

months, after a heavy illness due to blood-poisoning got in his surgical

work in London. She had been able to live her life without too great a

struggle till he came. Other men had flattered her vanity, had given her

a sense of power, had made her understand her possibilities, but nothing

more—nothing of what Varley brought with him. And before three months

had gone, she knew that no man had ever interested her as Varley had

done. Ten years before, she would not have appreciated or understood

him, this intellectual, clean-shaven, rigidly abstemious man, whose

pleasures belonged to the fishing-rod and the gun and the horse, and who

had come to be so great a friend of him who had been her best friend—

Father Bourassa. Father Bourassa had come to know the truth—not from

her, for she had ever been a Protestant, but from her husband, who,

Catholic by birth and a renegade from all religion, had had a moment of

spurious emotion, when he went and confessed to Father Bourassa and got

absolution, pleading for the priest's care of his wife. Afterwards

Father Bourassa made up his mind that the confession had a purpose behind

it other than repentance, and he deeply resented the use to which he

thought he was being put—a kind of spy upon the beautiful woman whom

Jansen loved, and who, in spite of any outward flippancy, was above

reproach.

In vital things the instinct becomes abnormally acute, and, one day, when

the priest looked at her commiseratingly, she had divined what moved him.

However it was, she drove him into a corner with a question to which he

dare not answer yes, but to which he might not answer no, and did not;

and she realised that he knew the truth, and she was the better for his

knowing, though her secret was no longer a secret. She was not aware

that Finden also knew. Then Varley came, bringing a new joy and interest

in her life, and a new suffering also, for she realised that if she were

free, and Varley asked her to marry him, she would consent.

But when he did ask her, she said no with a pang that cut her heart in

two. He had stayed his four months, and it was now six months, and he

was going at last-tomorrow. He had stayed to give her time to learn to

say yes, and to take her back with him to London; and she knew that he

would speak again to-day, and that she must say no again; but she had

kept him from saying the words till now. And the man who had ruined her

life and had poisoned her true spirit was come back broken and battered.

He was hanging between life and death; and now—for he was going

to-morrow—Varley would speak again.

The half-hour she had just spent in the hospital with Meydon had tried

her cruelly. She had left the building in a vortex of conflicting

emotions, with the call of duty and of honour ringing through a thousand

other voices of temptation and desire, the inner pleadings for a little

happiness while yet she was young. After she married Meydon, there had

only been a few short weeks of joy before her black disillusion came,

and she had realised how bitter must be her martyrdom.

When she left the hospital, she seemed moving in a dream, as one,

intoxicated by some elixir, might move unheeding among event and accident

and vexing life and roaring multitudes. And all the while the river

flowing through the endless prairies, high-banked, ennobled by living

woods, lipped with green, kept surging in her ears, inviting her,

alluring her—alluring her with a force too deep and powerful for weak

human nature to bear for long. It would ease her pain, it said; it would

still the tumult and the storm; it would solve her problem, it would give

her peace. But as she moved along the river-bank among the trees, she

met the little niece of the priest, who lived in his house, singing as

though she was born but to sing, a song which Finden had written and

Father Bourassa had set to music. Did not the distant West know Father

Bourassa's gift, and did not Protestants attend Mass to hear him play the

organ afterwards? The fresh, clear voice of the child rang through the

trees, stealing the stricken heart away from the lure of the river:

"Will you come back home, where the young larks are singin'?

The door is open wide, and the bells of Lynn are ringin';

There's a little lake I know,

And a boat you used to row

To the shore beyond that's quiet—will you come back home?

Will you come back, darlin'? Never heed the pain and blightin',

Never trouble that you're wounded, that you bear the scars of

fightin';

Here's the luck o' Heaven to you,

Here's the hand of love will brew you

The cup of peace—ah, darlin', will you come back home?"

She stood listening for a few moments, and, under the spell of the fresh,

young voice, the homely, heart-searching words, and the intimate

sweetness of the woods, the despairing apathy lifted slowly away. She

started forwards again with a new understanding, her footsteps quickened.

She would go to Father Bourassa. He would understand. She would tell

him all. He would help her to do what now she knew she must do, ask

Leonard Varley to save her husband's life—Leonard Varley to save her

husband's life!

When she stepped upon the veranda of the priest's house, she did not know

that Varley was inside. She had no time to think. She was ushered into

the room where he was, with the confusing fact of his presence fresh upon

her. She had had but a word or two with the priest, but enough for him

to know what she meant to do, and that it must be done at once.

Varley advanced to meet her. She shuddered inwardly to think what a

difference there was between the fallen creature she had left behind in

the hospital and this tall, dark, self-contained man, whose name was

familiar in the surgeries of Europe, who had climbed from being the son

of a clockmaker to his present distinguished place.

"Have you come for absolution, also?" he asked with a smile; "or is it

to get a bill of excommunication against your only enemy—there couldn't

be more than one?"

Cheerful as his words were, he was shrewdly observing her, for her

paleness, and the strange light in her eyes, gave him a sense of anxiety.

He wondered what trouble was on her.

"Excommunication?" he repeated.

The unintended truth went home. She winced, even as she responded with

that quaint note in her voice which gave humour to her speech. "Yes,

excommunication," she replied; "but why an enemy? Do we not need to

excommunicate our friends sometimes?"

"That is a hard saying," he answered soberly. Tears sprang to her eyes,

but she mastered herself, and brought the crisis abruptly.

"I want you to save a man's life," she said, with her eyes looking

straight into his. "Will you do it?"

His face grew grave and eager. "I want you to save a man's happiness,"

he answered. "Will you do it?"

"That man yonder will die unless your skill saves him," she urged.

"This man here will go away unhappy and alone, unless your heart

befriends him," he replied, coming closer to her.

"At sunrise to-morrow he goes." He tried to take her hand.

"Oh, please, please," she pleaded, with a quick, protesting gesture.

"Sunrise is far off, but the man's fate is near, and you must save him.

You only can do so, for Doctor Hadley is away, and Doctor Brydon is sick,

and in any case Doctor Brydon dare not attempt the operation alone. It

is too critical and difficult, he says."

"So I have heard," he answered, with a new note in his voice, his

professional instinct roused in spite of himself. "Who is this man?

What interests you in him?"

"To how many unknown people have you given your skill for nothing—your

skill and all your experience to utter strangers, no matter how low or

poor! Is it not so? Well, I cannot give to strangers what you have

given to so many, but I can help in my own way."

"You want me to see the man at once?"

"If you will."

"What is his name? I know of his accident and the circumstances."

She hesitated for an instant, then said, "He is called Draper—a trapper

and woodsman."

"But I was going away to-morrow at sunrise. All my arrangements are

made," he urged, his eyes holding hers, his passion swimming in his eyes

again.

"But you will not see a man die, if you can save him?" she pleaded,

unable now to meet his look, its mastery and its depth.

Her heart had almost leaped with joy at the suggestion that he could not

stay; but as suddenly self-reproach and shame filled her mind, and she

had challenged him so. But yet, what right had she to sacrifice this man

she loved to the perverted criminal who had spoiled her youth and taken

away from her every dear illusion of her life and heart? By every right

of justice and humanity she was no more the wife of Henry Meydon than if

she had never seen him. He had forfeited every claim upon her, dragged

in the mire her unspotted life—unspotted, for in all temptation, in her

defenceless position, she had kept the whole commandment; she had, while

at the mercy of her own temperament, fought her way through all, with a

weeping heart and laughing lips. Had she not longed for a little home

with a great love, and a strong, true man? Ah, it had been lonely,

bitterly lonely! Yet she had remained true to the scoundrel, from whom

she could not free herself without putting him in the grasp of the law to

atone for his crime. She was punished for his crimes; she was denied the

exercise of her womanhood in order to shield him. Still she remembered

that once she had loved him, those years ago, when he first won her heart

from those so much better than he, who loved her so much more honestly;

and this memory had helped her in a way. She had tried to be true to it,

that dead, lost thing, of which this man who came once a year to see her,

and now, lying with his life at stake in the hospital, was the repellent

ghost.

"Ah, you will not see him die?" she urged.

"It seems to move you greatly what happens to this man," he said, his

determined dark eyes searching hers, for she baffled him. If she could

feel so much for a, "casual," why not a little more feeling for him?

Suddenly, as he drew her eyes to him again, there came the conviction

that they were full of feeling for him. They were sending a message, an

appealing, passionate message, which told him more than he had ever heard

from her or seen in her face before. Yes, she was his! Without a spoken

word she had told him so. What, then, held her back? But women were a

race by themselves, and he knew that he must wait till she chose to have

him know what she had unintentionally conveyed but now.

"Yes, I am moved," she continued slowly. "Who can tell what this man

might do with his life, if it is saved! Don't you think of that? It

isn't the importance of a life that's at stake; it's the importance of

living; and we do not live alone, do we?"

His mind was made up. "I will not, cannot promise anything till I have

seen him. But I will go and see him, and I'll send you word later what

I can do, or not do. Will that satisfy you? If I cannot do it, I will

come to say good-by."

Her face was set with suppressed feeling. She held out her hand to him

impulsively, and was about to speak, but suddenly caught the hand away

again from his thrilling grasp and, turning hurriedly, left the room.

In the hall she met Father Bourassa.

"Go with him to the hospital," she whispered, and disappeared through the

doorway.

Immediately after she had gone, a man came driving hard to bring Father

Bourassa to visit a dying Catholic in the prairie, and it was Finden who

accompanied Varley to the hospital, waited for him till his examination

of the "casual" was concluded, and met him outside.

"Can it be done?" he asked of Varley. "I'll take word to Father

Bourassa."

"It can be done—it will be done," answered Varley absently. "I do not

understand the man. He has been in a different sphere of life. He tried

to hide it, but the speech—occasionally! I wonder."

"You wonder if he's worth saving?"

Varley shrugged his shoulders impatiently. "No, that's not what I

meant."

Finden smiled to himself. "Is it a difficult case?" he asked.

"Critical and delicate; but it has been my specialty."

"One of the local doctors couldn't do it, I suppose?"

"They would be foolish to try."

"And you are going away at sunrise to-morrow?"

"Who told you that?" Varley's voice was abrupt, impatient.

"I heard you say so-everybody knows it. . . . That's a bad man

yonder, Varley." He jerked his thumb towards the hospital. "A terrible

bad man, he's been. A gentleman once, and fell down—fell down hard.

He's done more harm than most men. He's broken a woman's heart and

spoilt her life, and, if he lives, there's no chance for her, none at

all. He killed a man, and the law wants him; and she can't free herself

without ruining him; and she can't marry the man she loves because of

that villain yonder, crying for his life to be saved. By Josh and by

Joan, but it's a shame, a dirty shame, it is!"

Suddenly Varley turned and gripped his arm with fingers of steel.

"His name—his real name?"

"His name's Meydon—and a dirty shame it is, Varley."

Varley was white. He had been leading his horse and talking to Finden.

He mounted quickly now, and was about to ride away, but stopped short

again. "Who knows—who knows the truth?" he asked.

"Father Bourassa and me—no others," he answered. "I knew Meydon thirty

years ago."

There was a moment's hesitation, then Varley said hoarsely, "Tell me—

tell me all."

When all was told, he turned his horse towards the wide waste of the

prairie, and galloped away. Finden watched him till he was lost to view

beyond the bluff.

"Now, a man like that, you can't guess what he'll do," he said

reflectively. "He's a high-stepper, and there's no telling what

foolishness will get hold of him. It'd be safer if he got lost on the

prairie for twenty-four hours. He said that Meydon's only got twenty-

four hours, if the trick isn't done! Well—"

He took a penny from his pocket. "I'll toss for it. Heads he does it,

and tails he doesn't."

He tossed. It came down heads. "Well, there's one more fool in the

world than I thought," he said philosophically, as though he had settled

the question; as though the man riding away into the prairie with a dark

problem to be solved had told the penny what he meant to do.

Mrs. Meydon, Father Bourassa, and Finden stood in the little waiting-room

of the hospital at Jansen, one at each window, and watched the wild

thunderstorm which had broken over the prairie. The white heliographs of

the elements flashed their warnings across the black sky, and the roaring

artillery of the thunder came after, making the circle of prairie and

tree and stream a theatre of anger and conflict. The streets of Jansen

were washed with flood, and the green and gold things of garden and field

and harvest crumbled beneath the sheets of rain.

The faces at the window of the little room of the hospital, however, were

but half-conscious of the storm; it seemed only an accompaniment of their

thoughts, to typify the elements of tragedy surrounding them.

For Varley there had been but one thing to do. A life might be saved,

and it was his duty to save it. He had ridden back from the prairie as

the sun was setting the night before, and had made all arrangements at

the hospital, giving orders that Meydon should have no food whatever till

the operation was performed the next afternoon, and nothing to drink

except a little brandy-and-water.

The operation was performed successfully, and Varley had issued from the

operating-room with the look of a man who had gone through an ordeal

which had taxed his nerve to the utmost, to find Valerie Meydon waiting,

with a piteous, dazed look in her eyes. But this look passed when she

heard him say, "All right!" The words brought a sense of relief,

for if he had failed it would have seemed almost unbearable in the

circumstances—the cup of trembling must be drunk to the dregs.

Few words had passed between them, and he had gone, while she remained

behind with Father Bourassa, till the patient should wake from the sleep

into which he had fallen when Varley left.

But within two hours they sent for Varley again, for Meydon was in

evident danger. Varley had come, and had now been with the patient for

some time.

At last the door opened and Varley came in quickly. He beckoned to Mrs.

Meydon and to Father Bourassa. "He wishes to speak with you," he said to

her. "There is little time."

Her eyes scarcely saw him, as she left the room and passed to where

Meydon lay nerveless, but with wide-open eyes, waiting for her. The eyes

closed, however, before she reached the bed. Presently they opened

again, but the lids remained fixed. He did not hear what she said.

………………….

In the little waiting-room, Finden said to Varley, "What happened?"

"Food was absolutely forbidden, but he got it from another patient early

this morning while the nurse was out for a moment. It has killed him."

"'Twas the least he could do, but no credit's due him. It was to be.

I'm not envying Father Bourassa nor her there with him."

Varley made no reply. He was watching the receding storm with eyes which

told nothing.

Finden spoke once more, but Varley did not hear him. Presently the door

opened and Father Bourassa entered. He made a gesture of the hand to

signify that all was over.

Outside, the sun was breaking through the clouds upon the Western

prairie, and there floated through the evening air the sound of a child's

voice singing beneath the trees that fringed the river:

"Will you come back, darlin'? Never heed the pain and blightin',

Never trouble that you're wounded, that you bear the scars of

fightin';

Here's the luck o' Heaven to you,

Here's the hand of love will brew you

The cup of peace-ah, darlin', will you come back home?"

WATCHING THE RISE OF ORION

"In all the wide border his steed was the best," and the name and fame of

Terence O'Ryan were known from Strathcona to Qu'appelle. He had ambition

of several kinds, and he had the virtue of not caring who knew of it. He

had no guile, and little money; but never a day's work was too hard for

him, and he took bad luck, when it came, with a jerk of the shoulder and

a good-natured surprise on his clean-shaven face that suited well his

wide grey eyes and large, luxurious mouth. He had an estate, half ranch,

half farm, with a French Canadian manager named Vigon, an old prospector

who viewed every foot of land in the world with the eye of the

discoverer. Gold, coal, iron, oil, he searched for them everywhere,

making sure that sooner or later he would find them. Once Vigon had

found coal. That was when he worked for a man called Constantine Jopp,

and had given him great profit; but he, the discoverer, had been put off

with a horse and a hundred dollars. He was now as devoted to Terence

O'Ryan as he had been faithful to Constantine Jopp, whom he cursed waking

and sleeping.

In his time O'Ryan had speculated, and lost; he had floated a coal mine,

and "been had"; he had run for the local legislature, had been elected,

and then unseated for bribery committed by an agent; he had run races at

Regina, and won—he had won for three years in succession; and this had

kept him going and restored his finances when they were at their worst.

He was, in truth, the best rider in the country, and, so far, was the

owner also of the best three-year-old that the West had produced. He

achieved popularity without effort. The West laughed at his enterprises

and loved him; he was at once a public moral and a hero. It was a legend

of the West that his forbears had been kings in Ireland like Brian

Borhoime. He did not contradict this; he never contradicted anything.

His challenge to all fun and satire and misrepresentation was, "What'll

be the differ a hundred years from now!"

He did not use this phrase, however, towards one experience—the advent

of Miss Molly Mackinder, the heiress, and the challenge that reverberated

through the West after her arrival. Philosophy deserted him then; he

fell back on the primary emotions of mankind.

A month after Miss Mackinder's arrival at La Touche a dramatic

performance was given at the old fort, in which the officers of the

Mounted Police took part, together with many civilians who fancied

themselves. By that time the district had realised that Terry O'Ryan

had surrendered to what they called "the laying on of hands" by Molly

Mackinder. It was not certain, however, that the surrender was complete,

because O'Ryan had been wounded before, and yet had not been taken

captive altogether. His complete surrender seemed now more certain to

the public because the lady had a fortune of two hundred thousand

dollars, and that amount of money would be useful to an ambitious man in

the growing West. It would, as Gow Johnson said, "Let him sit back and

view the landscape o'er, before he puts his ploughshare in the mud."

There was an outdoor scene in the play produced by the impetuous

amateurs, and dialogue had been interpolated by three "imps of fame" at

the suggestion of Constantine Jopp, one of the three, who bore malice

towards O'Ryan, though this his colleagues did not know distinctly. The

scene was a camp-fire—a starlit night, a colloquy between the three,

upon which the hero of the drama, played by Terry O'Ryan, should break,

after having, unknown to them, but in sight of the audience, overheard

their kind of intentions towards himself.

The night came. When the curtain rose for the third act there was

exposed a star-sown sky, in which the galaxy of Orion was shown with

distinctness, each star sharply twinkling from the electric power behind-

a pretty scene evoking great applause. O'Ryan had never seen this back

curtain—they had taken care that he should not—and, standing in the

wings awaiting his cue, he was unprepared for the laughter of the

audience, first low and uncertain, then growing, then insistent,

and now a peal of ungovernable mirth, as one by one they understood

the significance of the stars of Orion on the back curtain.

O'Ryan got his cue, and came on to an outburst of applause which shook

the walls. La Touche rose at him, among them Miss Molly Mackinder in the

front row with the notables.

He did not see the back curtain, or Orion blazing in the ultramarine

blue. According to the stage directions, he was to steal along the trees

at the wings, and listen to the talk of the men at the fire plotting

against him, who were presently to pretend good comradeship to his face.

It was a vigorous melodrama with some touches of true Western feeling.

After listening for a moment, O'Ryan was to creep up the stage again

towards the back curtain, giving a cue for his appearance.

When the hilarious applause at his entrance had somewhat subsided, the

three took up their parable, but it was not the parable of the play.

They used dialogue not in the original. It had a significance which the

audience were not slow to appreciate, and went far to turn "The Sunburst

Trail" at this point into a comedy-farce. When this new dialogue began,

O'Ryan could scarcely trust his ears, or realise what was happening.

"Ah, look," said Dicky Fergus at the fire, "as fine a night as ever I saw

in the West! The sky's a picture. You could almost hand the stars down,

they're so near."

"What's that clump together on the right—what are they called in

astronomy?" asked Constantine Jopp, with a leer.

"Orion is the name—a beauty, ain't it?" answered Fergus.

"I've been watching Orion rise," said the third—Holden was his name.

"Many's the time I've watched Orion rising. Orion's the star for me.

Say, he wipes 'em all out—right out. Watch him rising now."

By a manipulation of the lights Orion moved up the back curtain slowly,

and blazed with light nearer the zenith. And La Touche had more than the

worth of its money in this opening to the third act of the play. O'Ryan

was a favourite, at whom La Touche loved to jeer, and the parable of the

stars convulsed them.

At the first words O'Ryan put a hand on himself and tried to grasp the

meaning of it all, but his entrance and the subsequent applause had

confused him. Presently, however, he turned to the back curtain, as

Orion moved slowly up the heavens, and found the key to the situation.

He gasped. Then he listened to the dialogue which had nothing to do with

"The Sunburst Trail."

"What did Orion do, and why does he rise? Has he got to rise? Why was

the gent called Orion in them far-off days?" asked Holden.

"He did some hunting in his time—with a club," Fergus replied. "He kept

making hits, he did. Orion was a spoiler. When he took the field there

was no room for the rest of the race. Why does he rise? Because it is a

habit. They could always get a rise out of Orion. The Athens Eirenicon

said that yeast might fail to rise, but touch the button and Orion would

rise like a bird."

At that instant the galaxy jerked up the back curtain again, and when the

audience could control itself, Constantine Jopp, grinning meanly, asked:

"Why does he wear the girdle?"

"It is not a girdle—it is a belt," was Dicky Fergus's reply. "The gods

gave it to him because he was a favourite. There was a lady called

Artemis—she was the last of them. But he went visiting with Eos,

another lady of previous acquaintance, down at a place called Ortygia,

and Artemis shot him dead with a shaft Apollo had given her; but she

didn't marry Apollo neither. She laid Orion out on the sky, with his

glittering belt, around him. And Orion keeps on rising."

"Will he ever stop rising?" asked Holden.

Followed for the conspirators a disconcerting moment; for, when the

laughter had subsided, a lazy voice came from the back of the hall,

"He'll stop long enough to play with Apollo a little, I guess."

It was Gow Johnson who had spoken, and no man knew Terry O'Ryan better,

or could gauge more truly the course he would take. He had been in many

an enterprise, many a brush with O'Ryan, and his friendship would bear

any strain.

O'Ryan recovered himself from the moment he saw the back curtain, and

he did not find any fun in the thing. It took a hold on him out of all

proportion to its importance. He realised that he had come to the

parting of the ways in his life. It suddenly came upon him that

something had been lacking in him in the past; and that his want of

success in many things had not been wholly due to bad luck. He had been

eager, enterprising, a genius almost at seeing good things; and yet

others had reaped where he had sown. He had believed too much in his

fellow-man. For the first time in his life he resented the friendly,

almost affectionate satire of his many friends. It was amusing, it was

delightful; but down beneath it all there was a little touch of ridicule.

He had more brains than any of them, and he had known it in a way; he had

led them sometimes, too, as on raids against cattle-stealers, and in a

brush with half-breeds and Indians; as when he stood for the legislature;

but he felt now for the first time that he had not made the most of

himself, that there was something hurting to self-respect in this prank

played upon him. When he came to that point his resentment went higher.

He thought of Molly Mackinder, and he heard all too acutely the vague

veiled references to her in their satire. By the time Gow Johnson spoke

he had mastered himself, however, and had made up his mind. He stood

still for a moment.

"Now, please, my cue," he said quietly and satirically from the trees

near the wings.

He was smiling, but Gow Johnson's prognostication was right; and ere long

the audience realised that he was right. There was standing before them

not the Terry O'Ryan they had known, but another. He threw himself fully

into his part—a young rancher made deputy sheriff, who by the occasional

exercise of his duty had incurred the hatred of a small floating

population that lived by fraud, violence, and cattle-stealing. The

conspiracy was to raid his cattle, to lure him to pursuit, to ambush him,

and kill him. Terry now played the part with a naturalness and force

which soon lifted the play away from the farcical element introduced into

it by those who had interpolated the gibes at himself. They had gone a

step too far.

"He's going large," said Gow Johnson, as the act drew near its close,

and the climax neared, where O'Ryan was to enter upon a physical struggle

with his assailants. "His blood's up. There'll be hell to pay."

To Gow Johnson the play had instantly become real, and O'Ryan an injured

man at bay, the victim of the act—not of the fictitious characters of

the play, but of the three men, Fergus, Holden, and Constantine Jopp, who

had planned the discomfiture of O'Ryan; and he felt that the victim's

resentment would fall heaviest on Constantine Jopp, the bully, an old

schoolmate of Terry's.

Jopp was older than O'Ryan by three years, which in men is little, but in

boys, at a certain time of life, is much. It means, generally, weight

and height, an advantage in a scrimmage. Constantine Jopp had been the

plague and tyrant of O'Ryan's boyhood. He was now a big, leering fellow

with much money of his own, got chiefly from the coal discovered on his

place by Vigon, the half-breed French Canadian. He had a sense of dark

and malicious humour, a long horse-like face, with little beady eyes and

a huge frame.

Again and again had Terry fought him as a boy at school, and often he had

been badly whipped, but he had never refused the challenge of an insult

when he was twelve and Jopp fifteen. The climax to their enmity at

school had come one day when Terry was seized with a cramp while bathing,

and after having gone down twice was rescued by Jopp, who dragged him out

by the hair of the head. He had been restored to consciousness on the

bank and carried to his home, where he lay ill for days. During the

course of the slight fever which followed the accident his hair was cut

close to his head. Impetuous always, his first thought was to go and

thank Constantine Jopp for having saved his life. As soon as he was able

he went forth to find his rescuer, and met him suddenly on turning a

corner of the street. Before he could stammer out the gratitude that was

in his heart, Jopp, eyeing him with a sneering smile, said drawlingly:

"If you'd had your hair cut like that I couldn't have got you out, could

I? Holy, what a sight! Next time I'll take you by the scruff, putty-

face—bah!"

That was enough for Terry. He had swallowed the insult, stuttered his

thanks to the jeering laugh of the lank bully, and had gone home and

cried in shame and rage.

It was the one real shadow in his life. Ill luck and good luck had been

taken with an equable mind; but the fact that he must, while he lived,

own the supreme debt of his life to a boy and afterwards to a man whom he

hated by instinct was a constant cloud on him. Jopp owned him. For some

years they did not meet, and then at last they again were thrown together

in the West, when Jopp settled at La Touche. It was gall and wormwood to

Terry, but he steeled himself to be friendly, although the man was as

great a bully as the boy, as offensive in mind and character; but withal

acute and able in his way, and with a reputation for commercial sharpness

which would be called by another name in a different civilisation. They

met constantly, and O'Ryan always put a hand on himself, and forced

himself to be friendly. Once when Jopp became desperately ill there had

been—though he fought it down, and condemned himself in every term of

reproach—a sense of relief in the thought that perhaps his ancient debt

would now be cancelled. It had gone on so long. And Constantine Jopp

had never lost an opportunity of vexing him, of torturing him, of giving

veiled thrusts, which he knew O'Ryan could not resent. It was the

constant pin-prick of a mean soul, who had an advantage of which he could

never be dispossessed—unless the ledger was balanced in some inscrutable

way.

Apparently bent on amusement only, and hiding his hatred from his

colleagues, Jopp had been the instigator and begetter of the huge joke of

the play; but it was the brains of Dick Fergus which had carried it out,

written the dialogue, and planned the electric appliances of the back

curtain—for he was an engineer and electrician. Neither he nor Holden

had known the old antipathy of Terry and Constantine Jopp. There was

only one man who knew the whole truth, and that was Gow Johnson, to whom

Terry had once told all. At the last moment Fergus had interpolated

certain points in the dialogue which were not even included at rehearsal.

These referred to Apollo. He had a shrewd notion that Jopp had an idea

of marrying Molly Mackinder if he could, cousins though they were; and he

was also aware that Jopp, knowing Molly's liking for Terry, had tried to

poison her mind against him, through suggestive gossip about a little

widow at Jansen, thirty miles away. He had in so far succeeded that,

on the very day of the performance, Molly had declined to be driven home

from the race-course by Terry, despite the fact that Terry had won the

chief race and owned the only dog-cart in the West.

As the day went on Fergus realised, as had Gow Johnson, that Jopp had

raised a demon. The air was electric. The play was drawing near to its

climax—an attempt to capture the deputy sheriff, tie him to a tree, and

leave him bound and gagged alone in the waste. There was a glitter in

Terry's eyes, belying the lips which smiled in keeping with the character

he presented. A look of hardness was stamped on his face, and the

outlines of the temples were as sharp as the chin was set and the

voice slow and penetrating.

Molly Mackinder's eyes were riveted on him. She sat very still, her

hands clasped in her lap, watching his every move. Instinct told her

that Terry was holding himself in; that some latent fierceness and iron

force in him had emerged into life; and that he meant to have revenge on

Constantine Jopp one way or another, and that soon; for she had heard the

rumour flying through the hall that her cousin was the cause of the

practical joke just played. From hints she had had from Constantine that

very day she knew that the rumour was the truth; and she recalled now

with shrinking dislike the grimace accompanying the suggestion. She had

not resented it then, being herself angry with Terry because of the

little widow at Jansen.

Presently the silence in the hall became acute; the senses of the

audience were strained to the utmost. The acting before them was more

realistic than anything they had ever seen, or were ever likely to see

again in La Touche. All three conspirators, Fergus, Holden, and Jopp,

realised that O'Ryan's acting had behind it an animal anger which

transformed him. When he looked into their eyes it was with a steely

directness harder and fiercer than was observed by the audience. Once

there was occasion for O'Ryan to catch Fergus by the arm, and Fergus

winced from the grip. When standing in the wings with Terry he ventured

to apologise playfully for the joke, but Terry made no answer; and once

again he had whispered good-naturedly as they stood together on the

stage; but the reply had been a low, scornful laugh. Fergus realised

that a critical moment was at hand. The play provided for some dialogue

between Jopp and Terry, and he observed with anxiety that Terry now

interpolated certain phrases meant to warn Constantine, and to excite

him to anger also.

The moment came upon them sooner than the text of the play warranted.

O'Ryan deliberately left out several sentences, and gave a later cue, and

the struggle for his capture was precipitated. Terry meant to make the

struggle real. So thrilling had been the scene that to an extent the

audience was prepared for what followed; but they did not grasp the full

reality—that the play was now only a vehicle for a personal issue of a

desperate character. No one had ever seen O'Ryan angry; and now that the

demon of rage was on him, directed by a will suddenly grown to its full

height, they saw not only a powerful character in a powerful melodrama,

but a man of wild force. When the three desperadoes closed in on O'Ryan,

and, with a blow from the shoulder which was not a pretence, he sent

Holden into a far corner gasping for breath and moaning with pain, the

audience broke out into wild cheering. It was superb acting, they

thought. As most of them had never seen the play, they were not

surprised when Holden did not again join the attack on the deputy

sheriff. Those who did know the drama—among them Molly Mackinder—

became dismayed, then anxious. Fergus and Jopp knew well from the blow

O'Ryan had given that, unless they could drag him down, the end must be

disaster to some one. They were struggling with him for personal safety

now. The play was forgotten, though mechanically O'Ryan and Fergus

repeated the exclamations and the few phrases belonging to the part.

Jopp was silent, fighting with a malice which belongs to only half-breed,

or half-bred, natures; and from far back in his own nature the distant

Indian strain in him was working in savage hatred. The two were

desperately hanging on to O'Ryan like pumas on a grizzly, when suddenly,

with a twist he had learned from Ogami the Jap on the Smoky River, the

slim Fergus was slung backward to the ground with the tendons of his arm

strained and the arm itself useless for further work. There remained now

Constantine Jopp, heavier and more powerful than O'Ryan.

For O'Ryan the theatre, the people, disappeared. He was a boy again on

the village green, with the bully before him who had tortured his young

days. He forgot the old debt to the foe who saved his life; he forgot

everything, except that once again, as of old, Constantine Jopp was

fighting him, with long, strong arms trying to bring him to the ground.

Jopp's superior height gave him an advantage in a close grip; the

strength of his gorilla-like arms was difficult to withstand. Both were

forgetful of the world, and the two other injured men, silent and awed,

were watching the, fight, in which one of them, at least, was powerless

to take part.

The audience was breathless. Most now saw the grim reality of the scene

before them; and when at last O'Ryan's powerful right hand got a grip

upon the throat of Jopp, and they saw the grip tighten, tighten, and

Jopp's face go from red to purple, a hundred people gasped. Excited men

made as though to move toward the stage; but the majority still believed

that it all belonged to the play, and shouted "Sit down!"

Suddenly the voice of Gow Johnson was heard "Don't kill him—let go,

boy!"

The voice rang out with sharp anxiety, and pierced the fog of passion and

rage in which O'Ryan was moving. He realised what he was doing, the real

sense of it came upon him. Suddenly he let go the lank throat of his

enemy, and, by a supreme effort, flung him across the stage, where Jopp

lay resting on his hands, his bleared eyes looking at Terry with the fear

and horror still in them which had come with that tightening grip on his

throat.

Silence fell suddenly on the theatre. The audience was standing. A

woman sobbed somewhere in a far corner, but the rest were dismayed and

speechless. A few steps before them all was Molly Mackinder, white and

frightened, but in her eyes was a look of understanding as she gazed at

Terry. Breathing hard, Terry stood still in the middle of the stage, the

red fog not yet gone out of his eyes, his hands clasped at his side,

vaguely realising the audience again. Behind him was the back curtain in

which the lights of Orion twinkled aggressively. The three men who had

attacked him were still where he had thrown them.

The silence was intense, the strain oppressive. But now a drawling voice

came from the back of the hall. "Are you watching the rise of Orion?"

it said. It was the voice of Gow Johnson.

The strain was broken; the audience dissolved in laughter; but it was not

hilarious; it was the nervous laughter of relief, touched off by a native

humour always present in the dweller of the prairie.

"I beg your pardon," said Terry quietly and abstractedly to the audience.

And the scene-shifter bethought himself and let down the curtain.

The fourth act was not played that night. The people had had more than

the worth of their money. In a few moments the stage was crowded with

people from the audience, but both Jopp and O'Ryan had disappeared.

Among the visitors to the stage was Molly Mackinder. There was a meaning

smile upon her face as she said to Dicky Fergus:

"It was quite wonderful, wasn't it—like a scene out of the classics—the

gladiators or something?"

Fergus gave a wary smile as he answered: "Yes. I felt like saying Ave

Caesar, Ave! and I watched to see Artemis drop her handkerchief."

"She dropped it, but you were too busy to pick it up. It would have been

a useful sling for your arm," she added with thoughtful malice. "It

seemed so real—you all acted so well, so appropriately. And how you

keep it up!" she added, as he cringed when some one knocked against his

elbow, hurting the injured tendons.

Fergus looked at her meditatively before he answered. "Oh, I think we'll

likely keep it up for some time," he rejoined ironically.

"Then the play isn't finished?" she added. "There is another act? Yes,

I thought there was, the programme said four."

"Oh yes, there's another act," he answered, "but it isn't to be played

now; and I'm not in it."

"No, I suppose you are not in it. You really weren't in the last act.

Who will be in it?"

Fergus suddenly laughed outright, as he looked at Holden expostulating

intently to a crowd of people round him. "Well, honour bright, I don't

think there'll be anybody in it except little Conny Jopp and gentle Terry

O'Ryan; and Conny mayn't be in it very long. But he'll be in it for a

while, I guess. You see, the curtain came down in the middle of a

situation, not at the end of it. The curtain has to rise again."

"Perhaps Orion will rise again—you think so?" She laughed in satire;

for Dicky Fergus had made love to her during the last three months with

unsuppressed activity, and she knew him in his sentimental moments; which

is fatal. It is fatal if, in a duet, one breathes fire and the other

frost.

"If you want my opinion," he said in a lower voice, as they moved towards

the door, while people tried to listen to them—"if you want it straight,

I think Orion has risen—right up where shines the evening star—Oh, say,

now," he broke off, "haven't you had enough fun out of me? I tell you,

it was touch and go. He nearly broke my arm—would have done it, if I

hadn't gone limp to him; and your cousin Conny Jopp, little Conny Jopp,

was as near Kingdom Come as a man wants at his age. I saw an elephant

go 'must' once in India, and it was as like O'Ryan as putty is to dough.

It isn't all over either, for O'Ryan will forget and forgive, and Jopp

won't. He's your cousin, but he's a sulker. If he has to sit up nights

to do it, he'll try to get back on O'Ryan. He'll sit up nights, but

he'll do it, if he can. And whatever it is, it won't be pretty."

Outside the door they met Gow Johnson, excitement in his eyes. He heard

Fergus's last words.

"He'll see Orion rising if he sits up nights," Gow Johnson said. "The

game is with Terry—at last." Then he called to the dispersing gossiping

crowd: "Hold on—hold on, you people. I've got news for you. Folks,

this is O'Ryan's night. It's his in the starry firmament. Look at him

shine," he cried, stretching out his arm towards the heavens, where the

glittering galaxy hung near the zenith. "Terry O'Ryan, our O'Ryan—he's

struck oil—on his ranch it's been struck. Old Vigon found it. Terry's

got his own at last. O'Ryan's in it—in it alone. Now, let's hear the

prairie-whisper," he shouted, in a great raucous voice. "Let's hear the

prairie-whisper. What is it?"

The crowd responded in a hoarse shout for O'Ryan and his fortune.

Even the women shouted—all except Molly Mackinder. She was wondering if

O'Ryan risen would be the same to her as O'Ryan rising. She got into her

carriage with a sigh, though she said to the few friends with her:

"If it's true, it's splendid. He deserves it too. Oh, I'm glad—I'm so

glad." She laughed; but the laugh was a little hysterical.

She was both glad and sorry. Yet as she drove home over the prairie she

was silent. Far off in the east was a bright light. It was a bonfire

built on O'Ryan's ranch, near where he had struck oil—struck it rich.

The light grew and grew, and the prairie was alive with people hurrying

towards it. La Touche should have had the news hours earlier, but the

half-breed French-Canadian, Vigon, who had made the discovery, and had

started for La Touche with the news, went suddenly off his head with

excitement, and had ridden away into the prairie fiercely shouting his

joy to an invisible world. The news had been brought in later by a

farmhand.

Terry O'Ryan had really struck oil, and his ranch was a scene of decent

revelry, of which Gow Johnson was master. But the central figure of it

all, the man who had, in truth, risen like a star, had become to La

Touche all at once its notoriety as well as its favourite, its great man

as well as its friend, he was nowhere to be found. He had been seen

riding full speed into the prairie towards the Kourmash Wood, and the

starlit night had swallowed him. Constantine Jopp had also disappeared;

but at first no one gave that thought or consideration.

As the night went on, however, a feeling began to stir which it is not

good to rouse in frontier lands. It is sure to exhibit itself in forms

more objective than are found in great populations where methods of

punishment are various, and even when deadly are often refined. But

society in new places has only limited resources, and is thrown back on

primary ways and means. La Touche was no exception, and the keener

spirits, to whom O'Ryan had ever been "a white man," and who so rejoiced

in his good luck now that they drank his health a hundred times in his

own whiskey and cider, were simmering with desire for a public reproval

of Constantine Jopp's conduct. Though it was pointed out to them by the

astute Gow Johnson that Fergus and Holden had participated in the

colossal joke of the play, they had learned indirectly also the whole

truth concerning the past of the two men. They realised that Fergus and

Holden had been duped by Jopp into the escapade. Their primitive sense

of justice exonerated the humourists and arraigned the one malicious man.

As the night wore on they decided on the punishment to be meted out by La

Touche to the man who had not "acted on the square."

Gow Johnson saw, too late, that he had roused a spirit as hard to appease

as the demon roused in O'Ryan earlier in the evening. He would have

enjoyed the battue of punishment under ordinary circumstances; but he

knew that Miss Molly Mackinder would be humiliated and indignant at the

half-savage penalty they meant to exact. He had determined that O'Ryan

should marry her; and this might be an obstruction in the path. It was

true that O'Ryan now would be a rich man—one of the richest in the West,

unless all signs failed; but meanwhile a union of fortunes would only be

an added benefit. Besides, he had seen that O'Ryan was in earnest, and

what O'Ryan wanted he himself wanted even more strongly. He was not

concerned greatly for O'Ryan's absence. He guessed that Terry had ridden

away into the night to work off the dark spirit that was on him, to have

it out with himself. Gow Johnson was a philosopher. He was twenty years

older than O'Ryan, and he had studied his friend as a pious monk his

missal.

He was right in his judgment. When Terry left the theatre he was like

one in a dream, every nerve in his body at tension, his head aflame, his

pulses throbbing. For miles he rode away into the waste along the

northern trail, ever away from La Touche and his own home. He did not

know of the great good fortune that had come to him; and if, in this

hour, he had known, he would not have cared. As he rode on and on

remorse drew him into its grasp. Shame seized him that he had let

passion be his master, that he had lost his self-control, had taken a

revenge out of all proportion to the injury and insult to himself. It

did not ease his mind that he knew Constantine Jopp had done the thing

out of meanness and malice; for he was alive to-night in the light of

the stars, with the sweet crisp air blowing in his face, because of an

act of courage on the part of his schooldays' foe. He remembered now

that, when he was drowning, he had clung to Jopp with frenzied arms and

had endangered the bully's life also. The long torture of owing this

debt to so mean a soul was on him still, was rooted in him; but suddenly,

in the silent searching night, some spirit whispered in his ear that this

was the price which he must pay for his life saved to the world, a

compromise with the Inexorable Thing. On the verge of oblivion and the

end, he had been snatched back by relenting Fate, which requires

something for something given, when laws are overridden and doom

defeated. Yes, the price he was meant to pay was gratitude to one of

shrivelled soul and innate antipathy; and he had not been man enough to

see the trial through to the end! With a little increased strain put

upon his vanity and pride he had run amuck. Like some heathen gladiator

he had ravaged in the ring. He had gone down into the basements of human

life and there made a cockpit for his animal rage, till, in the contest,

brain and intellect had been saturated by the fumes and sweat of fleshly

fury.

How quiet the night was, how soothing to the fevered mind and body, how

the cool air laved the heated head and flushed the lungs of the rheum of

passion! He rode on and on, farther and farther away from home, his back

upon the scenes where his daily deeds were done. It was long past

midnight before he turned his horse's head again homeward.

Buried in his thoughts, now calm and determined, with a new life grown up

in him, a new strength different from the mastering force which gave him

a strength in the theatre like one in delirium, he noticed nothing. He

was only conscious of the omniscient night and its warm penetrating

friendliness; as, in a great trouble, when no words can be spoken, a cool

kind palm steals into the trembling hand of misery and stills it, gives

it strength and life and an even pulse. He was now master in the house

of his soul, and had no fear or doubt as to the future, or as to his

course.

His first duty was to go to Constantine Jopp, and speak his regret like a

man. And after that it would be his duty to carry a double debt his life

long for the life saved, for the wrong done. He owed an apology to La

Touche, and he was scarcely aware that the native gentlemanliness in him

had said through his fever of passion over the footlights: "I beg your

pardon." In his heart he felt that he had offered a mean affront to

every person present, to the town where his interests lay, where his

heart lay.

Where his heart lay—Molly Mackinder! He knew now that vanity had

something to do, if not all to do, with his violent acts, and though

there suddenly shot through his mind, as he rode back, a savage thrill at

the remembrance of how he had handled the three, it was only a passing

emotion. He was bent on putting himself right with Jopp and with La

Touche. With the former his way was clear; he did not yet see his way as

to La Touche. How would he be able to make the amende honorable to La

Touche?

By and by he became somewhat less absorbed and enveloped by the

comforting night. He saw the glimmer of red light afar, and vaguely

wondered what it was. It was in the direction of O'Ryan's Ranch, but he

thought nothing of it, because it burned steadily. It was probably a

fire lighted by settlers trailing to the farther north. While the night

wore on he rode as slowly back to the town as he had galloped from it

like a centaur with a captive.

Again and again Molly Mackinder's face came before him; but he resolutely

shut it out of his thoughts. He felt that he had no right to think of

her until he had "done the right thing" by Jopp and by La Touche. Yet

the look in her face as the curtain came down, it was not that of one

indifferent to him or to what he did. He neared the town half-way

between midnight and morning. Almost unconsciously avoiding the main

streets, he rode a roundabout way towards the little house where

Constantine Jopp lived. He could hear loud noises in the streets,

singing, and hoarse shouts. Then silence came, then shouts, and silence

again. It was all quiet as he rode up to Jopp's house, standing on the

outskirts of the town. There was a bright light in the window of a room.

Jopp, then, was still up. He would not wait till tomorrow. He would do

the right thing now. He would put things straight with his foe before he

slept; he would do it at any sacrifice to his pride. He had conquered

his pride.

He dismounted, threw the bridle over a post, and, going into the garden,

knocked gently at the door. There was no response. He knocked again,

and listened intently. Now he heard a sound-like a smothered cry or

groan. He opened the door quickly and entered. It was dark. In another

room beyond was a light. From it came the same sound he had heard

before, but louder; also there was a shuffling footstep. Springing

forward to the half-open door, he pushed it wide, and met the terror-

stricken eyes of Constantine Jopp—the same look that he had seen at

the theatre when his hands were on Jopp's throat, but more ghastly.

Jopp was bound to a chair by a lasso. Both arms were fastened to the

chair-arm, and beneath them, on the floor, were bowls into which blood

dripped from his punctured wrists.

He had hardly taken it all in—the work of an instant—when he saw

crouched in a corner, madness in his eyes, his half-breed Vigon. He

grasped the situation in a flash. Vigon had gone mad, had lain in wait

in Jopp's house, and when the man he hated had seated himself in the

chair, had lassoed him, bound him, and was slowly bleeding him to death.