Back to God's Country and Other Stories - James Oliver Curwood (summer reads .txt) 📗

Perhaps she was thirty, or thirty-two, or thirty-five. If some one had asked Philip to describe her, he would have said simply that she was glorious. Yet her entrance had caused no stir. Few had looked at her until she had uttered that sharp cry. There were a score of women under the brilliantly lighted chandeliers possessed of more spectacular beauty, Barrow had partly turned in his seat, and now, with careful breeding, he faced his companion again.

“Do you know her?” Philip asked.

Barrow shook his head.

“No.” Then he added: “Did you see what made her cry out like that?”

“I believe so,” said Philip, and he turned purposely so that the four people at the next table could hear him. “I think she twisted her ankle. It’s an occasional penance the women make for wearing these high-heeled shoes, you know.”

He looked at her again. Her form was bent toward the white-haired man who was with her. The man was staring straight over at Philip, a strange searching look in his face as he listened to what she was saying. He seemed to question Philip through the short distance that separated them. And then the woman turned her head slowly, and once more Philip met her eyes squarely—deep, dark, glowing eyes that thrilled him to the quick of his soul. He did not try to understand what he saw in them. Before he turned his glance to Barrow he saw that color had swept back into her face; her lips were parted; he knew that she was struggling to suppress a tremendous emotion.

Barrow was looking at him curiously—and Philip went on with his story of Peter God. He told it in a lower voice. Not until he had finished did he look again in the direction of the other table. The woman had changed her position slightly, so that he could not see her face. The uptilt of her hat revealed to him the warm soft glow of shining coils of brown hair. He was sure that her escort was keeping watch of his movements.

Suddenly Barrow drew his attention to a man sitting alone a dozen tables from them.

“There’s DeVoe, one of the Amalgamated chiefs,” he said. “He has almost finished, and I want to speak to him before he leaves. Will you excuse me a minute—or will you come along and meet him?”

“I’ll wait,” said Philip.

Ten seconds later, the woman’s white-haired escort was on his feet. He came to Philip’s table, and seated himself casually in Barrow’s chair, as though Philip were an old friend with whom he had come to chat for a moment.

“I beg your pardon for the imposition which I am laying upon you,” he said in a low, quiet voice. “I am Colonel McCloud. The lady with me is my daughter. And you, I believe, are a gentleman. If I were not sure of that, I should not have taken advantage of your friend’s temporary absence. You heard my daughter cry out a few moments ago? You observed that she was—disturbed?”

Philip nodded.

“I could not help it. I was facing her. And since then I have thought that I—unconsciously—was the cause of her perturbation. I am Philip Curtis, Colonel McCloud, from Fort MacPherson, two thousand miles north of here, on the Mackenzie Kiver. So you see, if it is a case of mistaken identity—”

“No—no—it is not that,” interrupted the older man. “As we were passing your table we—my daughter—heard you speak a name. Perhaps she was mistaken. It was—Peter God.”

“Yes. I know Peter God. He is a friend of mine.”

Barrow was returning. The other saw him over Philip’s shoulder, and his voice trembled with a sudden and subdued excitement as he said quickly:

“Your friend is coming’ back. No one but you must know that my daughter is interested in this man—Peter God. She trusts you. She sent me to you. It is important that she should see you tonight and talk with you alone. I will wait for you outside. I will have a taxicab ready to take you to our apartments. Will you come?”

He had risen. Philip heard Barrow’s footsteps behind him.

“I will come,” he said.

A few minutes later Colonel McCloud and his daughter left the cafe. The half-hour after that passed with leaden slowness to Philip. The fortunate arrival of two or three friends of Barrow gave him an opportunity to excuse himself on the plea of an important engagement, and he bade the Mica King good-night. Colonel McCloud was waiting for him outside the cafe, and as they entered a taxicab, he said:

“My daughter is quite unstrung tonight, and I sent her home. She is waiting for us. Will you have a smoke, Mr. Curtis?”

With a feeling that this night had set stirring a brew of strange and unforeseen events for him, Philip sat in a softly lighted and richly furnished room and waited. The Colonel had been gone a full quarter-hour. He had left a box half filled with cigars on a table at Philip’s elbow, pressing him to smoke. They were an English brand of cigar, and on the box was stamped the name of the Montreal dealer from whom they had been purchased.

“My daughter will come presently,” Colonel McCloud had said.

A curious thrill shot through Philip as he heard her footsteps and the soft swish of her skirt. Involuntarily he rose to his feet as she entered the room. For fully ten seconds they stood facing each other without speaking. She was dressed in filmy gray stuff. There was lace at her throat. She had shifted the thick bright coils of her hair to the crown of her head; a splendid glory of hair, he thought. Her cheeks were flushed, and with her hands against her breast, she seemed crushing back the strange excitement that glowed in her eyes. Once he had seen a fawn’s eyes that looked like hers. In them were suspense, fear—a yearning that was almost pain. Suddenly she came to him, her hands outstretched. Involuntarily, too, he took them. They were warm and soft. They thrilled him—and they clung to him.

“I am Josephine McCloud,” she said. “My father has explained to you? You know—a man—who calls himself—God?”

Her fingers clung more tightly to his, and the sweetness of her hair, her breath, her eyes were very close as she waited.

“Yes, I know a man who calls himself Peter God.”

“Tell me—what he is like?” she whispered. “He is tall—like you?”

“No. He is of medium height.”

“And his hair? It is dark—dark like yours?”

“No. It is blond, and a little gray.”

“And he is young—younger than you?”

“He is older.”

“And his eyes—are dark?”

He felt rather than heard the throbbing of her heart as she waited for him to reply. There was a reason why he would never forget Peter God’s eyes.

“Sometimes I thought they were blue, and sometimes gray,” he said; and at that she dropped his hands with a strange little cry, and stood a step back from him, a joy which she made no effort to keep from him flaming in her face.

It was a look which sent a sudden hopelessness through Curtis—a stinging pang of jealousy. This night had set wild and tumultous emotions aflame in his breast. He had come to Josephine McCloud like one in a dream. In an hour he had placed her above all other women in the world, and in that hour the little gods of fate had brought him to his knees in the worship of a woman. The fact did not seem unreal to him. Here was the woman, and he loved her. And his heart sank like a heavily weighted thing when he saw the transfiguration of joy that came into her face when he said that Peter God’s eyes were not dark, but were sometimes blue and sometimes gray.

“And this Peter God?” he said, straining to make his voice even. “What is he to you?”

His question cut her like a knife. The wild color ebbed swiftly out of her cheeks. Into her eyes swept a haunting fear which he was to see and wonder at more than once. It was as if he had done something to frighten her. “We—my father and I—are interested in him,” she said. Her words cost her a visible effort. He noticed a quick throbbing in her throat, just above the filmy lace. “Mr. Curtis, won’t you pardon this—this betrayal of excitement in myself? It must be unaccountable to you. Perhaps a little later you will understand. We are imposing on you by not confiding in you what this interest is, and I beg you to forgive me. But there is a reason. Will you believe me? There is a reason.”

Her hands rested lightly on Philip’s arm. Her eyes implored him.

“I will not ask for confidences which you are not free to give,” he said gently.

He was rewarded by a soft glow of thankfulness.

“I cannot make you understand how much that means to me,” she cried tremblingly. “And you will tell us about Peter God? Father—”

She turned.

Colonel McCloud had reentered the room.

With the feeling of one who was not quite sure that he was awake, Philip paused under a street lamp ten minutes after leaving the McCloud apartments, and looked at his watch. It was a quarter of two o’clock. A low whistle of surprise fell from his lips. For three hours he had been with Colonel McCloud and his daughter. It had seemed like an hour. He still felt the thrill of the warm, parting pressure of Josephine’s hand; he saw the gratitude in her eyes; he heard her voice, low and tremulous, asking him to come again tomorrow evening. His brain was in a strange whirl of excitement, and he laughed—laughed with gladness which he had not felt before in all the days of his life.

He had told a great many things about Peter God that night; of the man’s life in the little cabin, his loneliness, his aloofness, and the mystery of him. Philip had asked no questions of Josephine and her father, and more than once he had caught that almost tender gratitude in Josephine’s eyes. And at least twice he had seen the swift, haunting fear—the first time when he told of Peter God’s coming and goings at Port MacPherson, and again when he mentioned a patrol of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police that had passed Peter God’s cabin while Philip was there, laid up during those weeks of darkness and storm with a fractured leg.

Philip told how tenderly Peter God nursed him, and how their acquaintance grew into brotherhood during the long gray nights when the stars gleamed like pencil-points and the foxes yapped incessantly. He had seen the dewy shimmer of tears in Josephine’s eyes. He had noted the tense lines in Colonel McCloud’s face. But he had asked them no questions, he had made no effort to unmask the secret which they so evidently desired to keep from him.

Now, alone in the cool night, he asked himself a hundred questions, and yet with a feeling that he understood a great deal of what they had kept from him. Something had whispered to him then—and whispered to him now—that Peter God was not Peter God’s right name, and that to Josephine McCloud and her father he was a brother and a son. This thought, so long as he could think it without a doubt, filled his cup of hope to overflowing. But the doubt persisted. It was like a spark that refused to go out. Who was Peter God? What was Peter God, the half-wild fox-hunter, to Josephine McCloud? Yes—he could be but that one thing! A brother. A black sheep. A wanderer. A son who had disappeared—and was now found.