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

“Don’t be long, Dolores.”

She stood silently for a few moments to make sure that no one would see her. Then she moved swiftly to the ice bridge and out into the starlighted ghostliness of the night. Wapi followed close behind her, and dropping a hand to her side she called softly to him. In an instant Wapi’s muzzle was against her mitten, and his great body quivered with joy at her direct speech to him. She saw the response in his red eyes and stopped to stroke him with both mittened hands, and over and over again she spoke his name. “Wapi—Wapi—Wapi.” He whined. She could feel him under her touch as if alive with an electrical force. Her eyes shone. In the white starlight there was a new emotion in her face. She had found a friend, the one friend she and Peter had, and it made her braver.

At no time had she actually been afraid—for herself. It was for Peter. And she was not afraid now. Her cheeks flushed with exertion and her breath came quickly as she neared Blake’s cabin. Twice she had made excuses to go ashore—just because she was curious, she had said—and she believed that she had measured up Blake pretty well. It was a case in which her woman’s intuition had failed her miserably. She was amazed that such a man had marooned himself voluntarily on the arctic coast. She did not, of course, understand his business—entirely. She thought him simply a trader. And he was unlike any man aboard ship. By his carefully clipped beard, his calm, cold manner of speech, and the unusual correctness with which he used his words she was convinced that at some time or another he had been part of what she mentally thought of as “an entirely different environment.”

She was right. There was a time when London and New York would have given much to lay their hands on the man who now called himself Blake.

Dolores, excited by the conviction that Blake would help her when he heard her story, still did not lose her caution. Rydal had given her another twenty-four hours, and that was all. In those twenty-four hours she must fight out their salvation, her own and Peter’s. If Blake should fail—

Fifty paces from his cabin she stopped, slipped the big fur mitten from her right hand and unbuttoned her coat so that she could quickly and easily reach an inside pocket in which was Peter’s revolver. She smiled just a bit grimly, as her fingers touched the cold steel. It was to be her last resort. And she was thinking in that flash of the days “back home” when she was counted the best revolver shot at the Piping Rock. She could beat Peter, and Peter was good. Her fingers twined a bit fondly about the pearl-handled thing in her pocket. The last resort—and from the first it had given her courage to keep the truth from Peter!

She knocked at the heavy door of the igloo cabin. Blake was still up, and when he opened it, he stared at her in wide-eyed amazement. Wapi hung outside when Dolores entered, and the door closed. “I know you think it strange for me to come at this hour,” she apologized, “but in this terrible gloom I’ve lost all count of hours. They have no significance for me any more. And I wanted to see you—alone.”

She emphasized the word. And as she spoke, she loosened her coat and threw back her hood, so that the glow of the lamp lit up the ruffled mass of gold the hood had covered. She sat down without waiting for an invitation, and Blake sat down opposite her with a narrow table between them. Her face was flushed with cold and wind as she looked at him. Her eyes were blue with the blue of a steady flame, and they met his own squarely. She was not nervous. Nor was she afraid.

“Perhaps you can guess—why I have come?” she asked.

He was appraising her almost startling beauty with the lamp glow flooding down on her. For a moment he hesitated; then he nodded, looking at her steadily. “Yes, I think I know,” he said quietly. “It’s Captain Rydal. In fact, I’m quite positive. It’s an unusual situation, you know. Have I guessed correctly?”

She nodded, drawing in her breath quickly and leaning a little toward him, wondering how much he knew and how he had come by it.

“A very unusual situation,” he repeated. “There’s nothing in the world that makes beasts out of men—most men—more quickly than an arctic night, Mrs. Keith. And they’re all beasts out there—now—all except your husband, and he is contented because he possesses the one white woman aboard ship. It’s putting it brutally plain, but it’s the truth, isn’t it? For the time being they’re beasts, every man of the twenty, and you—pardon me!—are very beautiful. Rydal wants you, and the fact that your husband is dying—”

“He is not dying,” she interrupted him fiercely. “He shall not die! If he did—”

“Do you love him?” There was no insult in Blake’s quiet voice. He asked the question as if much depended on the answer, as if he must assure himself of that fact.

“Love him—my Peter? Yes!”

She leaned forward eagerly, gripping her hands in front of him on the table. She spoke swiftly, as if she must convince him before he asked her another question. Blake’s eyes did not change. They had not changed for an instant. They were hard, and cold, and searching, unwarmed by her beauty, by the luster of her shining hair, by the touch of her breath as it came to him over the table.

“I have gone everywhere with him—everywhere,” she began. “Peter writes books, you know, and we have gone into all sorts of places. We love it—both of us—this adventuring. We have been all through the country down there,” she swept a hand to the south, “on dog sledges, in canoes, with snowshoes, and pack-trains. Then we hit on the idea of coming north on a whaler. You know, of course, Captain Rydal planned to return this autumn. The crew was rough, but we expected that. We expected to put up with a lot. But even before the ice shut us in, before this terrible night came, Rydal insulted me. I didn’t dare tell Peter. I thought I could handle Rydal, that I could keep him in his place, and I knew that if I told Peter, he would kill the beast. And then the ice—and this night—” She choked.

Blake’s eyes, gimleting to her soul, were shot with a sudden fire as he, too, leaned a little over the table. But his voice was unemotional as rock. It merely stated a fact. “That’s why Captain Rydal allowed himself to be frozen in,” he said. “He had plenty of time to get into the open channels, Mrs. Keith. But he wanted you. And to get you he knew he would have to lay over. And if he laid over, he knew that he would get you, for many things may happen in an arctic night. It shows the depth of the man’s feelings, doesn’t it? He is sacrificing a great deal to possess you, losing a great deal of time, and money, and all that. And when your husband dies—”

Her clenched little fist struck the table. “He won’t die, I tell you! Why do you say that?”

“Because—Rydal says he is going to die.”

“Rydal—lies. Peter had a fall, and it hurt his spine so that his legs are paralyzed. But I know what it is. If he could get away from that ship and could have a doctor, he would be well again in two or three months.”

“But Rydal says he is going to die.”

There was no mistaking the significance of Blake’s words this time. Her eyes filled with sudden horror. Then they flashed with the blue fire again. “So—he has told you? Well, he told me the same thing today. He didn’t intend to, of course. But he was half mad, and he had been drinking. He has given me twenty-four hours.”

“In which to—surrender?”

There was no need to reply.

For the first time Blake smiled. There was something in that smile that made her flesh creep. “Twenty-four hours is a short time,” he said, “and in this matter, Mrs. Keith, I think that you will find Captain Rydal a man of his word. No need to ask you why you don’t appeal to the crew! Useless! But you have hope that I can help you? Is that it?”

Her heart throbbed. “That is why I have come to you, Mr. Blake. You told me today that Fort Confidence is only a hundred and fifty miles away and that a Northwest Mounted Police garrison is there this winter—with a doctor. Will you help me?”

“A hundred and fifty miles, in this country, at this time of the year, is a long distance, Mrs. Keith,” reflected Blake, looking into her eyes with a steadiness that at any other time would have been embarrassing. “It means the McFarlane, the Lacs Delesse, and the Arctic Barren. For a hundred miles there isn’t a stick of timber. If a storm came—no man or dog could live. It is different from the coast. Here there is shelter everywhere.” He spoke slowly, and he was thinking swiftly. “It would take five days at thirty miles a day. And the chances are that your husband would not stand it. One hundred and twenty hours at fifty degrees below zero, and no fire until the fourth day. He would die.”

“It would be better—for if we stay—” she stopped, unclenching her hands slowly.

“What?” he asked.

“I shall kill Captain Rydal,” she declared. “It is the only thing I can do. Will you force me to do that, or will you help me? You have sledges and many dogs, and we will pay. And I have judged you to be—a man.”

He rose from the table, and for a moment his face was turned from her. “You probably do not understand my position, Mrs. Keith,” he said, pacing slowly back and forth and chuckling inwardly at the shock he was about to give her. “You see, my livelihood depends on such men as Captain Rydal. I have already done a big business with him in bone, oil, pelts—and Eskimo women.”

Without looking at her he heard the horrified intake of her breath. It gave him a pleasing sort of thrill, and he turned, smiling, to look into her dead-white face. Her eyes had changed. There was no longer hope or entreaty in them. They were simply pools of blue flame. And she, too, rose to her feet.

“Then—I can expect—no help—from you.”

“I didn’t say that, Mrs. Keith. It shocks you to know that I am responsible. But up here, you must understand the code of ethics is a great deal different from yours. We figure that what I have done for Rydal and his crew keeps sane men from going mad during the long months of darkness. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to help you—and Peter. I think I shall. But you must give me a little time in which to consider the matter—say an hour or so. I understand that whatever is to be done must be done quickly. If I make up my mind to take you to Fort Confidence, we shall start within two or three hours. I shall bring you word aboard ship. So you might return and prepare yourself and Peter for a probable emergency.”

She went out dumbly into the night, Blake seeing her to the door and closing it after her. He was courteous in his icy way but did not offer