He was haggard, his buckskins were torn, his hair was dishevelled, and he limped a little; but he was a massive and striking figure, and MacFee watched him closely, for there was that in his eyes which meant trouble. “You said, ‘Come back in an hour,’ Nance, and I come back, as I said I would,” he went on. “You didn’t stand to your word. I’ve come to git it. I’m goin’ North, Nance, and I bin waitin’ for four years for you to go with me. Are you comin’?”
His voice was quiet, but it had a choking kind of sound, and it struck strangely in the ears of all. MacFee came nearer.
“Are you comin’ with me, Nance, dear?”
She reached a hand towards Lambton, and he took it, but she did not speak. Something in Abe’s eyes overwhelmed her—something she had never seen before, and it seemed to stifle speech in her. Lambton spoke instead.
“She’s going East with me,” he said. “That’s settled.”
MacFee started. Then he caught Abe’s arm. “Wait!” he said peremptorily. “Wait one minute.” There was something in his voice which held Abe back for the instant.
“You say she is going East with you,” MacFee said sharply to Lambton. “What for?” He fastened Lambton with his eyes, and Lambton quailed. “Have you told her you’ve got a wife—down East? I’ve got your history, Lambton. Have you told her that you’ve got a wife you married when you were at college—and as good a girl as ever lived?”
It had come with terrible suddenness even to Lambton, and he was too dazed to make any reply. With a cry of shame and anger Nancy started back. Growling with rage and hate, Abe Hawley sprang toward Lambton, but the master of the troopers stepped between.
No one could tell who moved first, or who first made the suggestion, for the minds of all were the same, and the general purpose was instantaneous; but in the fraction of a minute Lambton, under menace, was on his hands and knees crawling to the riverside. Watchful, but not interfering, the master of the troopers saw him set adrift in a canoe without a paddle, while he was pelted with mud from the shore.
The next morning at sunrise Abe Hawley and the girl he had waited for so long started on the North trail together, MacFee, master of the troopers and justice of the peace, handing over the marriage lines.
THE STROBE OF THE HOUR
“They won’t come to-night—sure.”
The girl looked again towards the west, where, here and there, bare poles, or branches of trees, or slips of underbrush marked a road made across the plains through the snow. The sun was going down golden red, folding up the sky a wide soft curtain of pink and mauve and deep purple merging into the fathomless blue, where already the stars were beginning to quiver. The house stood on the edge of a little forest, which had boldly asserted itself in the wide flatness. At this point in the west the prairie merged into an undulating territory, where hill and wood rolled away from the banks of the Saskatchewan, making another England in beauty. The forest was a sort of advance-post of that land of beauty.
Yet there was beauty too on this prairie, though there was nothing to the east but snow and the forest so far as eye could see. Nobility and peace and power brooded over the white world.
As the girl looked, it seemed as though the bosom of the land rose and fell. She had felt this vibrating life beat beneath the frozen surface. Now, as she gazed, she smiled sadly to herself, with drooping eyelids looking out from beneath strong brows.
“I know you—I know you,” she said aloud. “You’ve got to take your toll. And when you’re lying asleep like that, or pretending to, you reach up-and kill. And yet you can be kind-ah, but you can be kind and beautiful! But you must have your toll one way or t’other.” She sighed and paused; then, after a moment, looking along the trail—“I don’t expect they’ll come to-night, and mebbe not to-morrow, if—if they stay for THAT.”
Her eyes closed, she shivered a little. Her lips drew tight, and her face seemed suddenly to get thinner. “But dad wouldn’t—no, he couldn’t, not considerin’—” Again she shut her eyes in pain.
Her face was now turned from the western road by which she had expected her travellers, and towards the east, where already the snow was taking on a faint bluish tint, a reflection of the sky deepening nightwards in that half-circle of the horizon. Distant and a little bleak and cheerless the half-circle was looking now.
“No one—not for two weeks,” she said, in comment on the eastern trail, which was so little frequented in winter, and this year had been less travelled than ever. “It would be nice to have a neighbour,” she added, as she faced the west and the sinking sun again. “I get so lonely—just minutes I get lonely. But it’s them minutes that seem to count more than all the rest when they come. I expect that’s it—we don’t live in months and years, but just in minutes. It doesn’t take long for an earthquake to do its work—it’s seconds then. … P’r’aps dad won’t even come to-morrow,” she added, as she laid her hand on the latch. “It never seemed so long before, not even when he’s been away a week.” She laughed bitterly. “Even bad company’s better than no company at all. Sure. And Mickey has been here always when dad’s been away past times. Mickey was a fool, but he was company; and mebbe he’d have been better company if he’d been more of a scamp and less a fool. I dunno, but I really think he would. Bad company doesn’t put you off so.”
There was a scratching at the inside of the door. “My, if I didn’t forget Shako,” she said, “and he dying for a run!”
She opened the door quickly, and out jumped a Russian dog of almost full breed, with big, soft eyes like those of his mistress, and with the air of the north in every motion—like his mistress also.
“Come, Shako, a run—a run!”
An instant after she was flying off on a path towards the woods, her short skirts flying and showing limbs as graceful and shapely as those of any woman of that world of social grace which she had never seen; for she was a prairie girl through and through, born on the plains and fed on its scanty fare—scanty as to variety, at least. Backwards and forwards they ran, the girl shouting like a child of ten—she was twenty-three, her eyes flashing, her fine white teeth showing, her hands thrown up in sheer excess of animal life, her hair blowing about her face-brown, strong hair, wavy and plentiful.
Fine creature as she was, her finest features were her eyes and her hands. The eyes might have been found in the most savage places; the hands, however, only could have come through breeding. She had got them honestly; for her mother was descended from an old family of the French province. That was why she had the name of Loisette—and had a touch of distinction. It was the strain of the patrician in the full blood of the peasant; but it gave her something which made her what she was—what she had been since a child, noticeable and besought, sometimes beloved. It was too strong a nature to compel love often, but it never failed to compel admiration. Not greatly a creature of words, she had become