"Gladly!" the priest laughed. "They are always down, son." So, seated by the humming stove with the jug steaming between them, the two settled down to exchange the news of the neighborhood – an elastic term that stretched over territory enough to set an Old-World kingdom up in business.
It was strange gossip. To the north of them – and not very far at that; old Fort Pelly lay within twenty miles – the Hudson Bay Company, the oldest of chartered traders, still lorded it over the tribes. In dark woods, on open prairies stood the forts with their storehouses, fur lofts waiting groups of Indians. There Factor, Clerk, the Bois Brulés still lived and loved in the primitive fashion, careless of the settlement, first wave of civilization that was lipping around their borders. So the talk ran on fur packs, mishaps by trail or river, sinister doings in the far north, where the aftermath of the Metis rebellion was still simmering. A wild budget! What between it and Carter's choring, dark was settling as he and the priest entered Morrill's cabin.
Both started at what they saw. Despite Carter's optimism in Helen's presence, he had been fully alive to Morrill's condition, yet – he now stood, shocked, grieved in the presence of the expected.
The sick man was wellnigh spent, yet the stroke of death brought only a spark from his iron courage. "Another hemorrhage!" he whispered. "Shortly after you left. No, don't go for Helen. She gets so little pleasure. It is all over. I'll be all right to-morrow."
But it was not all over – though it would be "right" on the morrow. The rising moon saw Carter's ponies scouring the ghostly snows.
It had been a jolly party, skating in the afternoon, music and dancing in the evening; then, as reserve thawed under the prolonged association, they had fallen to playing Christmas games. Forfeits were being "declared" as Carter reined in at the door, and Mrs. Leslie's merry tones fell like blasphemy upon his ear.
"Fine or superfine?"
"Superfine? Then that must be Helen! Captain Molyneux will – " The penalty was drowned in uproar, which also smothered his knock. Followed loud laughter, and the door quivered under the impact of struggling bodies.
"Don't – please!"
Now, under Christmas license no girl is particularly averse to being kissed, and had Molyneux gone a little more gently about it, Helen had probably offered no more than the conventional resistance. But when he forced her head back so that her lips would come up to his with all the abandon of lovers, she broke his grip, and when pinned again against the door, struggled madly.
"Don't!"
There was no mistaking her accent. A flame of anger, leaping, confusing, blinded Carter. His every muscle contorted. From his unconscious pressure, hasp and handle flew from the door; as Mrs. Leslie shrieked her surprise, his hand dropped on Helen's shoulder, and from that small leverage his elbow sent Molyneux staggering back to the wall.
The action cleared his brain, calmed the great muscles that quivered under his furs with primordial impulse to break and tear. The flush faded from his tan, the flash from his eye. The hasp lay on the floor with the handle he had forgotten to turn. He saw neither them nor the guests in their postures of uneasy astonishment. Before his mental vision rose the scene he had just left, the priest kneeling in prayer beside a dying man.
The reaction of his shove had thrown Helen in against him, and her touch recalled his mission. "Your brother – " he began, then paused. He had meant to break it gently, but the confusion of conflicting emotions left him nothing but the fact. "Is – " he went on, then, appalled by a sudden sense of the ruthlessness of it, he stopped. But, reading the truth in his eyes, she collapsed on his arm.
To Carter, waiting outside in the moonlight for Helen, came Molyneux, and the door closing behind him shut in the hum of wonder and the sobbing that came from the bedroom where the women were putting on their wraps.
Molyneux was smoking, though, to give him his due, he did not require that invaluable aid to a cool bearing. Regarding the spirals, curling sharply blue in the moonlight, he remarked, "I don't quite understand your methods, my friend." The insolence of the "my friend" is indescribable. "It may be fashionable in Stump town to announce bad news by breaking down a gentleman's door, but with us – it savors of roughness."
"Roughness?" Carter scrutinized the dim horizon. "It wasn't all on one side of the door —my friend." His mimicry was perfect.
The captain hummed, cleared his throat. "A little Christmas foolery – perfectly allowable."
Carter's gaze shifted to the nimbus about the moon, a clear storm warning. "Foolery becomes roughness when it ain't agreeable to both parties."
"Who told you it wasn't?"
"My ear. If yours didn't – it needs training."
Molyneux smoked out a pause that perhaps covered a slight confusion. "Well, I don't care to accept you for a music-master. Under the distressing circumstances, I shall have to let it pass – for the present. But I shall not forget."
Carter smiled at the moon. "Looks like storm?"
VII
MR. FLYNN STEPS INTO THE BREACH
After putting forth a feeble straggle on the morning of the funeral, the pale winter sun retired for good as the north wind began to herd the drift over vast white steppes. Though fire had been kept up all night in Merrill's cabin by Mrs. Flynn, who had come in to perform the last offices, a pail of water had frozen solid close to the stove. After a quarter of an hour in the oven, a loaf of bread yet showed frost crystals in its centre at breakfast; a drop of coffee congealed as it fell in the saucer.
It was, indeed, the hardest of weather. By noon a half-inch of ice levelled the window-panes with the sash; pouring through the key-hole a spume of fine drift laid a white finger across the floor. Outside, the spirit thermometer registered forty-five below. The very air was frozen, blanketing the snow with lurid frost clouds. Yet, though a pair of iridescent "sun-dogs" gave storm warnings, a score of Canadian settlers, men and women, assembled for the service in the cabin. Severe, silent, they sat around on boards and boxes, eying Mrs. Leslie and other English neighbors with great disfavor, inwardly critical of the funeral arrangements. For ceremony and service had been stripped of the lugubrious attributes which gave mournful satisfaction to the primitive mind. Helen herself, in her quiet grief, was a disappointment; and she wore no black or other grievous emblem. Worse! The casket-lid was screwed down, and, filched of their prerogative of "viewing the corpse," they turned gloomy faces to the theological student who had come out from Lone Tree.
Here was an additional disappointment. Afterwards, in the stable, it was held that he had not improved the occasion. Of Morrill, who had been so lax in his attendance at occasional preachings as to justify a suspicion of atheism, he could have made an edifying text, thrilling his hearers with doubts as to whether the man was altogether fallen short of grace. But there was none of this. Just a word on the brother's sunny nature and brave fight against wasting sickness, and he was passed without doubt of title to mansions in the skies.
"I don't call that no sermon," Hines growled, as he thrust a frosty bit into his pony's mouth. "Missed all the good points, he did."
"Never heerd the like," said Shinn, his neighbor, nearest in disposition as well as location. "Not a bit of crape for the pall-bearers. I know a person that ain't going to be missed much."
"I've heerd," another man said, "as he doubted the Scriptures. If that is so – Is it true as the Roman priest was with him at the last?"
Hines despondently nodded. "We'll hope for the best," he said, with an accent that murdered the hope.
Shinn, however, who never could compass the art of suggestion, gave plainer terms to his thought. "There ain't a doubt in my mind. It's a warning to turn from the paths he trod."
"You needn't be scairt." From the gloom of the far corner, where he was harnessing the team that was to draw the burial sleigh, Bender's voice issued. "You needn't be scairt. There ain't a damn one of you travelling his trail."
Ensued a silence,