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

but it’s impossible. I’m an outlaw. The law won’t excuse my killing of the cobra. We’d have to hide. All our lives we’d have to hide. And—some day—they might get me. There’s just one thing to do. Go back to her. Tell her Peter God is dead. And—make her happy—if you can.”

For the first time something rose and overwhelmed the love in Philip’s breast.

“She wants to come to you,” he cried, and he leaned toward Peter God, white-faced, clenching his hands. “She wants to come!” he repeated. “And the law won’t find you. It’s been seven years—and God knows no word will ever go from me. It won’t find you. And if it should, you can fight it together, you and Josephine.”

Peter God held out his hands.

“Now I know I need have no fear in sending you back,” he said huskily. “You’re a man. And you’ve got to go. She can’t come to me, Curtis. It would kill her—this life. Think of a winter here—madness—the yapping of the foxes—”

He put a hand to his head, and swayed.

“You’ve got to go. Tell her Peter God is dead—”

Philip sprang forward as Peter God crumpled down on his bunk.

After that came the long dark hours of fever and delirium. They crawled along into days, and day and night Philip fought to keep life in the body of the man who had given the world to him, for as the fight continued he began more and more to accept Josephine as his own. He had come fairly. He had kept his pledge. And Peter God had spoken.

“You must go. You must tell her Peter God is dead.”

And Philip began to accept this, not altogether as his joy, but as his duty. He could not argue with Peter God when he rose from his sick bed. He would go back to Josephine.

For many days he and Peter God fought with the “red death” in the little cabin. It was a fight which he could never forget. One afternoon—to strengthen himself for the terrible night that was coming—he walked several miles back into the stunted spruce on his snowshoes. It was mid-afternoon when he returned with a haunch of caribou meat on his shoulder. Three hundred yards from the cabin something stopped him like a shot. He listened. From ahead of him came the whining and snarling of dogs, the crack of a whip, a shout which he could not understand. He dropped his burden of meat and sped on. At the southward edge of a level open he stopped again. Straight ahead of him was the cabin. A hundred yards to the right of him was a dog team and a driver. Between the team and the cabin a hooded and coated figure was running in the direction of the danger signal on the sapling pole.

With a cry of warning Philip darted in pursuit. He overtook the figure at the cabin door. His hand caught it by the arm. It turned—and he stared into the white, terror-stricken face of Josephine McCloud!

“Good God!” he cried, and that was all.

She gripped him with both hands. He had never heard her voice as it was now. She answered the amazement and horror in his face.

“I sent you a letter,” she cried pantingly, “and it didn’t overtake you. As soon as you were gone, I knew that I must come—that I must follow—that I must speak with my own lips what I had written. I tried to catch you. But you traveled faster. Will you forgive me—you will forgive me—”

She turned to the door. He held her.

“It is the smallpox,” he said, and his voice was dead.

“I know,” she panted. “The man over there—told me what the little flag means. And I’m glad—glad I came in time to go in to him—as he is. And you—you—must forgive!”

She snatched herself free from his grasp. The door opened. It closed behind her. A moment later he heard through the sapling door a strange cry—a woman’s cry—a man’s cry—and he turned and walked heavily back into the spruce forest.

THE MOUSE

“Why, you ornery little cuss,” said Falkner, pausing with a forkful of beans half way to his mouth. “Where in God A’mighty’s name did YOU come from?”

It was against all of Jim’s crude but honest ethics of the big wilderness to take the Lord’s name in vain, and the words he uttered were filled more with the softness of a prayer than the harshness of profanity. He was big, and his hands were hard and knotted, and his face was covered with a coarse red scrub of beard. But his hair was blond, and his eyes were blue, and just now they were filled with unbounded amazement. Slowly the fork loaded with beans descended to his plate, and he said again, barely above a whisper:

“Where in God A’mighty’s name DID you come from?”

There was nothing human in the one room of his wilderness cabin to speak of. At the first glance there was nothing alive in the room, with the exception of Jim Falkner himself. There was not even a dog, for Jim had lost his one dog weeks before. And yet he spoke, and his eyes glistened, and for a full minute after that he sat as motionless as a rock. Then something moved—at the farther end of the rough board table. It was a mouse—a soft, brown, bright-eyed little mouse, not as large as his thumb. It was not like the mice Jim had been accustomed to see in the North woods, the larger, sharp-nosed, rat-like creatures which sprung his traps now and then, and he gave a sort of gasp through his beard.

“I’m as crazy as a loon if it isn’t a sure-enough down-home mouse, just like we used to catch in the kitchen down in Ohio,” he told himself. And for the third time he asked. “Now where in God A’mighty’s name DID YOU come from?”

The mouse made no answer. It had humped itself up into a little ball, and was eyeing Jim with the keenest of suspicion.

“You’re a thousand miles from home, old man,” Falkner addressed it, still without a movement. “You’re a clean thousand miles straight north of the kind o’ civilization you was born in, and I want to know how you got here. By George—is it possible—you got mixed up in that box of stuff SHE sent up? Did you come from HER?”

He made a sudden movement, as if he expected an answer, and in a flash the mouse had scurried off the table and had disappeared under his bunk.

“The little cuss!” said Falkner. “He’s sure got his nerve!”

He went on eating his beans, and when he had done he lighted a lamp, for the half Arctic darkness was falling early, and began to clear away the dishes. When he had done he put a scrap of bannock and a few beans on the corner of the table.

“I’ll bet he’s hungry, the little cuss,” he said. “A thousand miles—in that box!”

He sat down close to the sheet-iron box stove, which was glowing red-hot, and filled his pipe. Kerosene was a precious commodity, and he had turned down the lamp wick until he was mostly in gloom. Outside a storm was wailing down across the Barrens from the North. He could hear the swish of the spruce-boughs overhead, and those moaning, half-shrieking sounds that always came with storm from out of the North, and sometimes fooled even him into thinking they were human cries. They had seemed more and more human to him during the past three days, and he was growing afraid. Once or twice strange thoughts had come into his head, and he had tried to fight them down. He had known of men whom loneliness had driven mad—and he was terribly lonely. He shivered as a piercing blast of wind filled with a mourning wail swept over the cabin.

And that day, too, he had been taken with a touch of fever. It burned more hotly in his blood tonight, and he knew that it was the loneliness—the emptiness of the world about him, the despair and black foreboding that came to him with the first early twilights of the Long Night. For he was in the edge of that Long Night. For weeks he would only now and then catch a glimpse of the sun. He shuddered.

A hundred and fifty miles to the south and east there was a Hudson’s Bay post. Eighty miles south was the nearest trapper’s cabin he knew of. Two months before he had gone down to the post, with a thick beard to cover his face, and had brought back supplies—and the box. His wife had sent up the box to him, only it had come to him as “John Blake” instead of Jim Falkner, his right name. There were things in it for him to wear, and pictures of the sweet-faced wife who was still filled with prayer and hope for him, and of the kid, their boy. “He is walking now,” she had written to him, “and a dozen times a day he goes to your picture and says ‘Pa-pa—Pa-pa’—and every night we talk about you before we go to bed, and pray God to send you back to us soon.”

“God bless ‘em!” breathed Jim.

He had not lighted his pipe, and there was something in his eyes that shimmered and glistened in the dull light. And then, as he sat silent, his eyes clearing, he saw that the little mouse had climbed back to the edge of the table. It did not eat the food he had placed there for it, but humped itself up in a tiny ball again, and its tiny shining eyes looked in his direction.

“You’re not hungry,” said Jim, and he spoke aloud. “YOU’RE lonely, too—that’s it!”

A strange thrill shot through him at the thought, and he wondered again if he was mad at the longing that filled him—the desire to reach out and snuggle the little creature in his hand, and hold it close up to his bearded face, and TALK TO IT! He laughed, and drew his stool a little more into the light. The mouse did not run. He edged nearer and nearer, until his elbows rested on the table, and a curious feeling of pleasure took the place of his loneliness when he saw that the mouse was looking at him, and yet seemed unafraid.

“Don’t be scairt,” he said softly, speaking directly to it. “I won’t hurt you. No, siree, I’d—I’d cut off a hand before I’d do that. I ain’t had any company but you for two months. I ain’t seen a human face, or heard a human voice—nothing—nothing but them shrieks ‘n’ wails ‘n’ baby-cryings out there in the wind. I won’t hurt you—” His voice was almost pleading in its gentleness. And for the tenth time that day he felt, with his fever, a sickening dizziness in his head. For a moment or two his vision was blurred, but he could still see the mouse—farther away, it seemed to him.

“I don’t s’pose you’ve killed anyone—or anything,” he said, and his voice seemed thick and distant to him. “Mice don’t kill, do they? They live on—cheese. But I have—I’ve killed. I killed a man. That’s why I’m here.”

His dizziness almost overcame him, and he leaned heavily against the table. Still the little mouse did not move. Still he could see it through the strange gauze veil before his eyes.

“I killed—a man,” he repeated, and now he was wondering why the mouse did not say something at that remarkable confession. “I killed him, old man, an’ you’d have done the same if you’d been in my place. I didn’t mean to. I struck too