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Chapter Eight

The winter came slowly, with crisp frosty days that tingled the blood and made Kirk too conscious of himself. At the Livery Stables they found him quarrelsome and wrong-headed, although too useful to lose. The White Pass and Yukon Company, which for years had carried the winter mails three times a week, were economizing now. It didn't pay, they said, what with the small number of passengers and the upkeep of thirteen road-houses with their attendant men, and the travelling vet. Even yet there were almost one hundred and fifty horses, including the freight and feed teams and the travelling blacksmith's outfit. And the Government subsidy for the mails had always been something of a gold brick, said Dupree, watching Kirk administer a horse-ball without applying the twitch. It was much to have a man who understood horses like that and could bring them in from exercise with hocks uncut by the hard surface snow.

Yet Dupree found this young man difficult to handle, and as Kirk stepped back now, drawing a hairy arm across his sweating forehead and surveying the horse with satisfaction, he wondered how many of the ugly stories about him were true. That women ran after him was probable enough. He had the kind of hot life and bold good looks they liked, and a curious nervous superstition at times that gave him tenderness. He was always tender with animals, and they loved him. Here in the hot dusky stable horses turned their big soft eyes as he came in and whinnied gently. Dupree thought that probably women were something like that with Kirk Regard. Word had come down from the Kanana that there had been trouble between Regard and old MacDonald's daughter, and there was likely to be trouble between Regard and Dierdre Cass, who had lately married the engineer on No. Two Dredge. They were always about together, and she generally page 187rode one of the horses to exercise. Dupree hoped that Wagner wouldn't shoot him up or something when he found out what people were saying; and for the rest he was minded to let Kirk alone as much as possible, knowing as well as old Thomas Aquinas ever did that "In every manne there lurketh his Wilde beaste."

In the Stables Kirk was happier than anywhere else through the days when the Patrol waited for the snow to harden, and he tried to forget Tamsin in Dierdre's kisses. It had come to that again now in the last week before he was to go, for Dierdre found a stealthy excitement in discovering how much further a married woman dared venture than a girl, and Kirk was a reckless guide and her Charlie still supremely content. She rode with Kirk daily. He took her to the Orpheum Picture House when her men were on night-shift; and together they laughed over The Kid from the Klondyke, and Kirk told her in whispers of Cornell shooting the plaster cupids in the Tinky-Tink so long ago.

"That was the real stuff," he said. "I can remember Lily Maud walking away now, and Cornell sobbing as he pulled out his gun. I wonder what they did with him. I guess I never heard."

"I believe you'd shoot a man for a woman's sake," whispered Dierdre. They were holding hands in the hot dark as they always had done, and he turned the ring on her finger, answering absently:

"Likely … if I cared enough."

He knew that he was caring more than ever for Tamsin, even while trying to drown her memory in Dierdre's smiles. He had never heard what had happened on the Kanana when he left, nor did he know what Tamsin had heard about him since. But he could guess. All Dawson was now looking on Charlie Wagner as a too-complacent husband, and Sergeant Plume and others had tried to warn Kirk. But he was not in a mood to take warnings. The dark past and the dark future were page 188shadowing too close about him now, and soon he would have to go out into the great silence, with the cold and the endless mountains pressing about him, and the thought of dead Olafssen ahead to wake the unquiet superstitions in his blood. Dierdre loved to play on those superstitions. They broke down his selfish arrogance and brought him nearer for the time, and although she had married Wagner because her youth was passing and he was an easy choice, she never cared for him as she did for this hot-eyed careless-tongued man.

"I think your forefathers must have broken a great many laws," she told him once, "and you're paying for all their defiance. You have a dark spirit, Kirk, for all you laugh and joke so much." She looked at him from the corners of her eyes. "I love that darkness. It makes you different from everyone else," she said.

"Maybe," said Kirk. He wondered, sitting with elbows on knees, and hands in the thick black forest of his hair. Something of sin and blackness and broken laws there must be born into his blood or he could never be betraying Tamsin as he was with this betrayal of Dierdre. They had ridden out to-day to Old Inn, which had had its roaring days when ten thousand men grubbed gold out of the Klondyke River faces, and gone in through the sagging door to the smell of rottenness and the chill of a dead place that had once been quick with life. Dierdre moved about, touching with thin impersonal fingers the things once handled by men long gone away, and his eyes followed her a little wonderingly. Perhaps there really was no more faith in women than there was in men. Perhaps Tamsin was already consoling herself with Stewart, and all his anguish of remorse and longing no more than one of the grim jokes life loves to play. Dierdre said, slowly:

"When the Russian Baranoff came with all the lords and ladies across Siberia and Behring Strait to make a Court in Sitka while their men killed the sea-otter, there was a daughter page 189who sat on Baranoff's knee. He put rich sea-otter skins on her and raw jewels and gold, and I guess she looked fine. But there was a Frenchman who had brought his sword way across the wilderness from Montreal, and he had just your tilt of the head, but Baranoff's daughter had your eyes. So they loved, and Baranoff killed them both, and the Indians smuggled their child away, and that's where you come from, Kirk."

"Maybe," he said again. He frowned, looking at her. Even now the physical part of her tormented him as Tamsin's fresh big generous young body had never done. Although he often hated her, he could not keep away from Dierdre. There was haunting in her narrow thin bones that he could so easily break, and in the queer cold scent that clung about her and the soft pressure of her red and narrow mouth. Her eyes were watching him now with her small sleek head turned over her shoulder, and in her he saw something mysterious, eternally feminine, alluring.

"You might be Baranoff's daughter yourself," he said, and held out his arms.

The horses whinnied at last against the increasing cold, and as the two went out to them a man came tramping over the shingle from No. Two Dredge. In this grey light which cast no shadow he looked gigantic in his furs … a strange neolithic animal full of hurrying vengeance. Dierdre leaned to Kirk as he lifted her into the saddle.

"Now we're in for it," she said, half-mocking. "Charlie made me promise last night I wouldn't go around with you any more."

"For God's sake! Why didn't you tell me?"

"I meant to show him where he gets off. An' I will." She laughed a little—a soft cruel laugh. "You leave him to me. I'll fix him."

"Not on your life!" Kirk was furious with her, with himself, with his luck. He had not guessed that Wagner was suspicious.

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"I can't leave you to it. Good heavens!" he cried. "Were you mad to take such a risk?"

"Never you mind what I was." She stooped suddenly and kissed his mouth. "My! I love you, Kirk! Now … get out of it, smart. I won't have you speaking to him now."

"I must. I … I …"

"Will you go, you fool?" Her long eyes blazed at him. "Think I can talk to him before you! Light out of it!"

Kirk swung himself up reluctantly. He said:

"Send him to me after. That's only fair."

But he rode away as he was told, seeing Dierdre turn her horse and go to meet her husband. He felt dazed and shaken. Like all men who follow their tempers hotly for a season, realization had come with a jolt. He had never meant to go too far. Over and over he told himself that, knowing that more than half the blame was with the woman, and yet he would never tell blundering honest Charlie Wagner so. I must take what he gives me, he thought, and then remembered that the matter would be no longer secret now. Everyone would know. Tamsin would know. He had a sudden vision of Tamsin. "Lover," she called him, standing with shining eyes on the great sunny hillside. "Eh, lover; now we'll do big things together, you and me…."

And this was what he had done.

He rode on under the grey sagging sky over the stony wilderness man had made of a once bright river. Rusty boilers and other scrapped machinery thrust grotesque angles out of the snow. Dredges already snugged down for the winter had wandered abroad here, spewing up behind them huge mountains of shingle to choke the small streams creeping blindly down. The pale mountains gleamed coldly with frost, but the stunted timber along the shores was black. A dead place….

Under the icy shadow of the Dome he dismounted at a little log-cabin in the scrub and went in. Strips of the newspapers of '99 still hung on the rough walls, and on the slab page 191table under the glass-bottle window squirrels had fed since Dick the Duke lived here. Dick the Duke had had bright hair and a strange soft English voice and a way of being good to children, and here he had destroyed himself because of some bold-eyed girl … or because of something else. Kirk the man, standing where Kirk the boy had played, guessed now that it had really been because of something else. Something that the soft-voiced English boy had lost and knew that he would not get back any more. What have you lost? I have lost my name….

The whisper came to him out of the frozen stars, the icy night. He dragged on down to the steaming Livery that smelt of hay cut perhaps on the Kanana this summer and of a bran mash Jenkins was making for a coughing horse. The travelling vet., who had come down on the last stage from Whitehorse, was in the yard, saying to Dupree, the boss:

"That Jenkins is an awful shine as a stableman. I guess I'll have to report him. Seemed generally half-kippered, isn't he?" "Well, they're none too easy to get, and so I tell you," said Dupree, crossly. "Oh, here, you, Regard. Dierdre Cass brought in her horse just now all of a lather. Next time you take her riding you be on hand to rub him down. See? Get busy on him right away."

Sullenly Kirk rubbed down the steaming bay and fed the horses, working with mind and fingers equally numb. The Whitehorse stage had left that morning, but there was always work at the stables: always sick horses to be doctored and exercised, harness to be mended and things got in readiness for the incoming stage. For now the Yukon River was frozen tight as a drum, the last steamer was snug on the Whitehorse slips until next June, and the tentative pony-stage of the light snow had given place to the regular winter stage with its six-horse team and its possible eighteen passengers and 7,500 pounds of goods and mail to be run on schedule, no matter what the weather. It was as dark now as it would be page 192with the glair-ice and the Glories lighting the pale world, and Kirk was just realizing that he needed food when Dupree came into the stable.

"A hurry-call for you from the Barracks, Regard. I guess you can go."

"Damn them! I'm going to eat first," thought Kirk. But he went. Now that the Patrol was so near he was practically under Police orders that he might get fully into training. The lives of about ten men were probably going to depend on that before long, and between them Sergeants Plume and Orange had fined him down to springy bone and muscle that nothing could tire. But he felt tired now as he walked down to the red-brick building and saw Orange moving in the yard about a couple of sleds.

"Good egg!" cried Orange cheerfully. "Jump into your furs, man, and come along. An Indian says old Muggy's dying up at the Gentle Annie, and I guess we've got to go and bring him in."

"Send a sky-dog, can't you?" snarled Kirk. "It's his job."

"Why, we'll surely turn him on to Muggy once he's in hospital. No time for prayers now. This is going to be just what our teams want, Kirk. They haven't had enough night-work yet. Get your furs."

"Like hell I won't till I've had some grub."

"Well, don't go getting all pink inside." Orange was still good-natured. "Go rustle something out of the kitchen."

Kirk went in, slamming the door. He gulped coffee, ate a slab of bannock, lit a pipe, and came out surly as he went. He had planned to hunt up old Ennett and get drunk to-night, and long clean quiet hours under the endless eyes of the sky were terrifying to think of. He got his dogs from the corral, harnessed them, rolled into his furs on the sled. Orange was already starting, and cried:

"Here! Give me room, can't you! Remember they're young dogs."

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"You can go to hell!" shouted Kirk.

He swung into the lead, the steel runners screaming and jarring over the frozen snow of the yard, and headed up towards the Klondyke River and the Old Inn. Orange was young, with a good opinion of himself and his position. He was to be in charge of the Patrol and did not mean to have any insubordination among its members, and he muttered vengeance on Kirk as he followed. "If I don't take it out of your hide yet, my friend!" he thought.

All up the river Kirk kept ahead, guiding the half-tried team with his voice. Orange, struggling with his own, heard him at it, sternly, monotonously: "Gee, Buck. Haw, Buck. Haw, you devil … Haw. Mush along…."

Even in the regulation fur coat, cap and gloves, with several pair of wool stockings under his moccasins, Orange found it cold. He was not looking forward to the Winter Patrol with any pleasure. Twenty-four days going and about eighteen back, with a fortnight's spell at Macpherson, was the usual thing, and it remained to see how much would be saved by the new trail. Orange, who was sociable and sybarite, hated the long silent treks in the bitter cold, the discomfort and lack of cleanliness.

"But I'm eternally damned if I'm going to have insolence, too," he thought, as they climbed out of the river to the plateau.

For a while they ran along the Whitehorse trail, where the dogs went eagerly over the beaten snow. But when they turned into the woods Kirk had to get out and break trail. This is exhausting work at best, but to-night Orange had no mercy. "I'll learn him to swear at me," he thought, sitting tight. A weak point of light showed through the spruces at last, touching their red frosty cones to a twinkle. Orange anchored his sled by turning it on its side, opened the door, and went into the shack. Then, with sudden reverence, he pulled off his cap, but Kirk, following, perversely refused to do the same.

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Even the crudest elements take on a certain majesty when they are sufficiently simple, and although death is always more simple than life, death in Muggy's shack owed nothing to anything but its own tremendous power, and did not need to. A lantern stood on a shelf among cobwebs and rubbish that had blown in through the window stuffed with old rags. On more rags and trash an old dead man lay peacefully with the weak yellow flicker on his face, and an old live man stooped over him with trembling hands on his trembling knees. The live man, shrivelled and bleached like a leaf a long time in water, was One-Thumb Smith, who rocked on the bars up at Bounding Creek. Muggy, who had been in the North long before Kate Carmacks found the Klondyke gold, wore still that placidity of expression which marks all wood-dwellers on his gaunt strong face.

Smith raised himself with an effort; looked with doubtful wistful eyes.

"Well, I guess it was his time to go," he said, forlornly. "Rip didn't have nothin' on him. Too bad I couldn't get him a sky-dog, but I said a prayer over him on the chanst."

"We'll have a sky-dog plant him all right. Smith," promised Orange.

"He ain't to be planted in Dawson. Muggy he always figured that he wanted to lie in Whitehorse cem'try," said Smith. He tottered to a stool and sat down. "Before he went jest now he said: 'Git me out to Whitehorse, mate.' An' I will. I figured ter take him acrost the hill an' catch the stage at Homer's Roadhouse. I got a pack-pony, an' I guess I kin do it, too…. only I oughter be startin' right away."

He looked round feebly. His lips were blue. Like Muggy, he was an old man.

"Aw!" said Kirk, violently. "What's all this? Stick him in a hole some place, can't you? The man's dead."

"He's goin' ter be buried in desecrated ground," said Smith, page 195with a sudden flash. "In desecrated ground in Whitehorse cem'try. I promised."

"Desecrated! That's good!" Kirk laughed, and Orange looked at him sharply. His laugh was wild, and he looked wild enough. Probably he'd had a shot or two of that bootpolish and eau de quinine ram old Ennett made, and that was at the bottom of his tantrums. Old Smith rocked his wizened body until his shadow did a pale stealthy dance on the log wall.

"I want he shall be buried in Whitehorse. I'm goin' to catch that stage. He was my mate…."

"Aw! Can that snivellin'!" shouted Kirk.

Orange said, sharply: "Don't be such a brute, Regard. Naturally he wants to do what's best for his friend."

"What's best. Oh, sure.' We all want to do what's best, don't we?"

He bent over the dead man, and Orange thought he had never seen Regard look so blazingly full of life and splendid manhood. He had a sudden idea, and was pleased at its maliciousness.

"Well, I reckon there's no reason why you can't take him over the hill to catch the stage. Shorter than bringing him in to Dawson, and you can make Homer's before the stage leaves in the morning."

"What in hell are you horning into this for, Orange? Muggy's not my friend. Smith can take him if he goes, I guess."

"Guess again," said Orange, blandly.

He had no particular reason for this except to annoy Kirk, and by the dark look on the other's face he saw that he had done it. For the moment Kirk had it in mind to refuse, for although the Police have power to annex a man for especial help, Orange was exceeding his powers here. Then he remembered that, with the Patrol before him, he would do well not to antagonize Orange, and this stung him deeper than any-page 196thing else. Never before had he had to truckle to any man, but now …

"Well," he said, violently, to Smith, "where's that pack-pony? Don't imagine I'm toting him on my back, do you? Where's that pony?"

During the loading-up of Muggy for his last journey it was on Smith that Kirk continued to pour his invectives. He would not speak to Orange.

"Aw!_ What you twitterin' about that way? Muggy won't be worryin' over his body any. Glad to be quit of it, I guess. He never was a charmer…. You an' your civilization! What did it do for Muggy while he lived? Didn't even teach him to kip his body clean, and it don't ever teach folks to kip their minds clean…. Git out of my way there, or I'll step on you, likely…."

"I want he shall be buried proper. You'd like a proper grave yourself."

"Me!" The deadliness of Kirk's invective directed against Smith would have amused Orange if he had not felt that he was some way in a private dissecting-room with this wild-eyed nervous man as the subject. Regard, he saw, was het up good and thoroughly, and he would have taken his decision back but that he feared to rouse Kirk further. "Me?" said Kirk. "A kyote's belly can be my grave for all me!" He drew the straps tight over the still figure that lay along the packsaddle. "What do we pretend to respect in folks, anyway? Gen'ly something they haven't got. Quit tugging that pony's head, will you!" He stood up from buckling the strap, his dark wind-swept face clear in the lantern light, and Orange's unimaginative soul had a moment's uneasiness, as though something tremendous was at stake in this man, although he had not the least clue to it. "Aw!" said Kirk. "When Life takes the trouble to grow us up, it had ought to look after us better. Giddap!"

He struck the pony smartly on the flank, and it bounded page 197away into the scrub with Kirk running lightly at its side. Smith said, weakly:

"That's no funeral pace. He ain't acting right by Muggy. He ain't acting right."

Orange put Smith into Kirk's sled and set off for Dawson, leading the way.

"Your team'll follow home if you don't go talking to 'em," he said, and he did not speak again, for he was still furiously uneasy. He had no fear that Kirk, now climbing the torn white face of the opposite hill like some wild huntsman of legand bearing his awful trophy home, might lose his way. All trails seemed instinctively plain to Kirk, who could go to his destination straight as any migratory bird. Then why had he been lost on the Patrol Trail? Orange's rather lazy mind had fingered that puzzle before and dropped it. He considered it for a few minutes now, then yawned, then smiled. His own young-man arrogance and sense of the fitness of things was pleased at the way he had overridden the youngman arrogance of Kirk Regard. Dawson might be less pleased, because Kirk would have to be paid for his trip. Orange considered that also; also dropped it. He could—and would— blame Smith for that.

Kirk kept the pony going through the dark woods, along the hilltop. Above him stared those mindless, endless eyes of the sky, all concentrating on him until his keyed-up soul and body almost felt them prickle. Trees groaned in the grip of the frost. For hundreds of miles there seemed no sound but the puny sounds made by himself and the pony. The dead man on the pack-saddle now seemed to be Olafssen, now himself.

"Where am I goin'? What am I doin'?" he thought.

Tamsin said that only in the North has one a chance to discover one's real self. Who but some fool incapable of the act would ever want to do that? "Not me," thought Kirk, and felt the implacable North discovering him at every step.

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Again and again he tried to defy it; whistled, sang mockingly at Muggy:

"Peter Coffin's dead an' cold.
The gray sand's a-pilin'.
He lies no deeper than the mould.
The gray sand's a-pilin' high…."

But his voice died away in the long silence, and the North brought up its memories again. Long blades of crimson twilight piercing dark forest where he had walked with his arm round a woman's waist. Implacable stars in an inky sky where the coloured Lights danced wantonly; and himself, reduced to insect value and size, staggered over vast empty wildernesses of snow, following the trail of Ooket's little feet. A wide river yellow with dawn, the peace of it broken suddenly by the crazy cry and crazy flight of a loon like some damned and blackened soul hurrying into the void … and himself that damned soul. Little inch-deep trails of the lesser creatures winding through the frail fragrance of flowers across a sunny slope, and Tamsin, her hands full of the flowers, kneeling there, smiling up at him. Belling on hot evenings of moose mating, and Dierdre slipping along beside him, her thin hand in his. "God!" he cried, passionately. "I don't want her. 1 want Tamsin." But God never answered. He had been invented, apparently, just for men to blaspheme by and dotards like old Mat to puzzle over. Old Mat, who had spoiled the two most perfect desires of Kirk's whole life.

Going down to Homer's Roadhouse in the dark hour before the late dawn, wind caught him on the bare hills in icy gusts out of the south, and he stopped to breathe the pony at an old Indian burying-ground where a small spruce bluff gave shelter. Time and prowling animals had destroyed the peaked wooden covers of the graves and the broken pots and pans once under them were now scattered about. Kirk looked at the rubbish bitterly, "That's all their religion amounts to now," he thought. "Give their dead the refuse they'd other-page 199wise throw on the dump, instead of their very best and most cherished things." Well, that was all that most folk gave their gods anymore—all except Tamsin. He felt wildly that if he could only get to Tamsin and lay his head on her warm soft breast and feel her kind hands in his hair, he would be glad to die. But Dierdre as well as Olafssen was between them, and whatever the dead Olafssen might have in store for them, Dierdre would not let him be. This, he knew instinctively, was different from any of his other affairs. Dierdre was too clever to allow herself to be talked about for nothing.

"My God! How I hate her!" he thought, helplessly. "Layin' a trap for me, that's what she was … and I've fell in."

The pony tossed its head with a jingle of steel, whinnied on a shrill high note; and suddenly a superstitious fear of this place chilled Kirk and made the hair wet on his forehead. Faint lights seemed to move over the broken crockery, the bits of iron, and the shadows were a den of wild things stepping softly about as Dierdre stepped, glancing with her sly mysterious eyes. Kirk struck the pony sharply and went pelting down the stony hill, fancying that he heard soft laughter behind.

The gaunt two-story frame-house was all lit up as he came to it. About the stables waggled lanterns, as the men fed and harnessed the horses. Kirk sought out Chesterfield, who kept the Roadhouse and had been an English officer in the war, and explained Muggy. Chesterfield called the driver, who decided that if they could "get him boxed in time I reckon I can take him. Only six passengers where there's room for eighteen." He stood chewing his plug while Kirk and Chesterfield worked on the lengths of raw pine in an outhouse and gave it as his opinion that the W. P. & Y. was in a tight corner.

"They'll be economizin' more yet, now that tourists are headin' for Honoluler and sech-like instead of the Midnight Sun. You better take up goat-breedin', you two. Millionaires page 200ain't that keen on Big Game any more. A poor lot of heads came out this year, I'm told."

"Goats stink," said Kirk, ripping the saw through sappy wood.

"So do men, you better believe. Well, I'm thinking of agriculture for mine. There never was any place in the world where you could grow such cereals."

"I haven't heard they've invented a mountain-plough yet. Where'd you get your flat country?"

"You can get anything if you look for't," contended the driver, chewing. "Say … brought that corpse down through the woods to-night, did you? I thought all the fellers who'd gone to the war had lost their nerve. Saw things up there, didn't you? I do myself, sometimes."

"There's been a lot of trash talked about men never bein' the same after the war. I guess most of him's the same already," said Kirk. "Got them nails handy, Mr. Chesterfield?"

Chesterfield had seen a shadow pass over the young man's face and guessed that for him at least all was not the same. He said:

"No animal forgets quicker than man … or makes the same mistakes more often."

"Other animals don't gen'ly live to make mistakes more'n twice," said Kirk. "Maybe better if we was the same," he added under his breath.

Chesterfield looked at him with interest. There was a kind of marsh-light brilliancy about Regard which would—and, he had heard, did—appeal to most people. He wondered what he had seen and thought up there in the woods alone with the dead man. Well, many an ass has entered Jerusalem, but it is not recorded that even one of them reverenced the Burden he bore.

Kirk went back to Dawson by the incoming stage, leaving the pony for any to collect who cared. "Not my business," he page 201told Chesterfield curtly; and Chesterfield saw him go, wondering if this young man had not in some way made a grand slam of his commitments and now come to the consequences. Like everyone else, he had heard about Regard and MacDonald's Tamsin, and thought it a queer thing … and queerer yet that he should now be hanging around a recently-married woman. Yet he was sorry for Regard, so evidently violently at issues with his world and as certain to be smacked by the undiscriminating hand of Time into the same dead level of acceptance as himself had been—as every man and woman who passes maturity almost certainly has been.

At the Stables a grinning boy greeted Kirk with: "Say, Wagner is looking for you with a gun. You better watch out."

"You better attend to your own business," answered Kirk, but he felt his spirits rise. Any definite action would be a relief after the miseries of these last months which had drifted him so crazily on to the rocks. "To fight over a woman I hate as I do her—gosh! what a joke!" he thought, going gloomily about the work of rubbing down and feeding horses, putting away harness, forking hay for bedding. He wondered what it was in man that made him so continually do and say what he had no wish to. Himself had not meant to lie about Olafssen, and yet he had done it. He had not meant to go so far with Dierdre, and yet he had done it. He did not love any woman but Tamsin, yet all his words and actions were putting her farther from him.

"A curse on me. That's what it is," he thought, taking the lantern at last to cross the dark yard. Coming from the dim warmth, he could not see the yard clearly, but someone moved there. Someone said in Wagner's slow thick voice: "Take that, you——!" and hit him a blow under the ear that sent him sprawling in the snow and muck.

He was up again instantly and rushing at the other man, and then a shout brought the stablemen running to form a ring and set up lanterns on the gate-posts. The mill they were page 202waiting for had begun, and they did not mean to miss it. For several days betting had occupied their lazy hours, and more were in favour of Wagner, that slow stolid ox of a man. Also, he undoubtedly had right on his side—they were still sufficiently primitive up here to believe that this counted.

Kirk was hardly conscious of the eager faces, dim in the flickering light. He was finding for the first time some easement of the wretchedness and remorse and despair which had been crazing him, and he took and received the rattling blows with bitter intentness. When he could see anything for the blood which soon began to run into his eyes from a cut on the forehead, he saw Wagner's broad fair stupid face with the round ox-eyes and the cut and swelling lips, and drove at them again and again with all his strength. But Wagner had thews like an ox and the slow battering-ram temperament, and the younger and more emotional man steadily realized that he was spending himself against them with very little result.

"There's a curse on me," he thought, knowing that the thought weakened him and yet unable to throw it off. The men yelled at him:

"Hit him, Kirk! Go for'm! We're backin' you!" while others shouted: "Wagner! Wagner! You've got him beat, Charlie! Keep at him!"

Kirk felt dimly that the whole thing was indecent, altogether wrong. He slipped in the greasy muck, fell, and rose again, feeling the foulness of the mud as part of the general uncleanness of his own body and soul. He began to hit wildly, and then again he was down and could not get up, although Wagner kicked him with his heavy boot before going away sobbing. Kirk heard that strange thick toneless sobbing somewhere off in the dark, and thought it was himself, until men dragged him up and into the stable, where they rubbed him down with wisps of hay and gave him brandy. They were pitying him, damning him with faint praise: "You sure did page 203your best, old chap. Charlie don't know when he's beat, an' that's a fact…."

He shook them off. "You leave me be. I'm all right. I've got to go down to the Barracks an' report."

He heard their protesting cries: "For the Lord's sake! You can't go like that, man. You're all beaten up."

"I'm goin'," he said, and went staggering off over the frozen board-walk towards the bright light shining from those solid brick walls. He felt a perverse pleasure in advertising his shame; hoped that the Sergeant would upbraid him, give him a chance to be insolent. He wondered if he was going to finish the night in cells, and rather looked for it.

But Sergeant Plume had handled men for a good many years. He received Kirk's report urbanely, although Kirk's swelling eyes could hardly see him standing in his red jacket before the blazing fire. He had known that this was waiting for Regard, and was not sorry that the young fool had got it so severely. Justice must be upheld, thought Sergeant Plume, although he privately believed that Dierdre was chiefly to blame. "These women!" he thought, half wonderingly, and wished he knew just what had happened between Regard and MacDonald's daughter on the Kanana.

Kirk slept little that night, and he could not dismiss Tamsin from his mind at all. When she heard the whole of this, as she certainly would do, what would she think of him then? And what had she been thinking of him ever since he left her? "Aw, women," he told himself defiantly. "I guess you can buy 'em enywheres by the bunch. Look at Ooket. Look at Dierdre. How'm I to know she's a mite better? Taken up with Stewart or someone by now, prob'ly."

Through the three days which elapsed before they took the trail he sullenly doctored his hurts and fell into an unnatural state of forced heroics. Fate, he felt, was against him. Very well, then, he would defy Fate. He would arrange for the Patrol to camp in that spruce bluff, and if they found what page 204was left of Olafssen he would confess the affair and be damned to them. "Then we'll see what's going to happen," he thought, and felt nervously through the long days of marching that he could hardly wait for it to happen. He was still stiff, but he forced himself to break trail for more hours at a time than any of the others, feeling that only in some such way could he get back his much-needed self-respect. Orange, who had been so directed by Plume, let him go much his own way.

"The road to Endor is the oldest road," said the Sergeant, "and I guess that young spark just hadn't enough to keep him busy. Let him tire himself good and plenty, and he'll be all right."

So daily Kirk broke trail ahead of the long teams, while icy skies stood above with a moon shining like a silver coin among the restless silver prickles of the stars, and the Northern Lights blew up in great white billows to the zenith and there caught colour and twitched their silken skirts and danced like ladies at a ball. Sometimes there were blizzards; and, struggling against the cutting sleet with head down, Orange wondered what would be the end if this moody difficult man in charge mistook the new trail and led them into some deep blind alley as that other Patrol had been led. But Kirk made no mistakes. He took them off at the fork as though it had been paved with asphalt, and brought them up and over the mountains and down the frozen stream without a falter. And then Orange, who had never been very severely tried himself, wondered how it was that a man who was such a superb dogmusher and pathfinder could have so little control over his own passions.

Gradually these great dumb formless masses of mountains asserted their power over Kirk again. The never-changing whiteness was in some way more terrifying than ever before, and through it the Patrol seemed to go as a tiny futile line of insects hauling chips of wood, and guided by things in short fur coats and long black wool stockings, who looked page 205more like women's cotton-spools on two pins than anything else. It seemed impossible that it could matter what happened to them … or to him. The Yukon didn't care. God didn't care. Tamsin wouldn't care. When, very tired at night, he sometimes imagined himself leading the Patrol astray on purpose, so that they should go on lifting one foot after the other and flirting the snow from the snowshoe heel until food was done and the dogs died and each man lay where he fell. He wondered if Orange would shoot him when he discovered they were lost. But each morning he rose with the others, and helped to beat the frozen tents into folds and lay them on the sleds and lace them with the stiffened thongs, and each day he led them down the trail to the spruce bluff.

Tramping silently one behind the other through this dead world, a man had to think his own thoughts and bear them as best he might. Constable Smith, they all believed, slept as he walked. Orange was awed by the stern never-ending heights, and sometimes spoke in whispers, glancing round as though fearing to shake down on them this heavy weight of silence. Sometimes they all whistled and sang catches; but more often as they wound deeper into this immense silence they walked as silently. Here and there the trails of snowshoe rabbits, mink and marten criss-crossed the white, and by setting traps at night or an occasional shot they got fresh meat now and again. Because in this eternal shadowless white, projections gave no warning, they often stumbled, and a bruise in this cold was a painful thing; and Kirk's forehead was still swollen and sore by the cuts from Wagner's knuckles. But towards the tenth evening he led them down the fan-shaped valley to the spruce bluff and told Orange they must camp there.

It gave him a strange sense of peace to see the tents go up in the spruce bluff, the big fires blaze and the sticks of whitefish set to thaw for the dogs stepping about hungry with greenish eyes. He sat, contented at last, hearing all the jovial page 206sounds of men who are at home anywhere and afraid nowhere, and knew that he, too, was no longer afraid. Now he had flung down the glove to the Yukon, and whether she would ignore it was not in his choice any more. In some way the knowledge gave him a sense of release that he had not felt since he shot Olafssen.

In the red light Orange was doctoring his feet. Behind him the stiff little spruces stood like the prim maiden aunts Tamsin had called them. Kirk thought of Tamsin with a curious calm. He felt nearer to her now that he was no longer running away from his fate. After the foot ritual, which Orange never allowed any man to neglect, they fed, and then, with the icy night close about them, crowded round the fires to smoke and talk, letting the dogs prowl where they chose. Wolfish of breed although they were, they would not forsake page 207the fires which made scarlet beds in the frosty snow and sometimes shot up long flames to sparkle red in icicles far up in the spruces.

The last days had been hard going, with thaws which meant a hold-up every time, and forced marches when frost hardened the surface again. But Orange was well satisfied. They were already three days ahead of schedule, and the grades had been no worse than on the ordinary route. And neither he nor anyone else knew that by next year there would no longer be need of the Mackenzie-Dawson Patrol. Wireless would have sent it, like any other epics of the past, into oblivion.

Backed up to a tree, Orange took down notes painstakingly Kirk felt that Orange was geared never to trip a notch in the wheel of his daily round, and in spite of his clumsy furs he still looked neat and brisk. They had an amazing knack of keeping clean and neat and competent, these Mounties, and they talked easily of many things. Poker and dogs and trails, Outside and women, the dog-mushing contest up at Nome, rifles, gravels, diseases and religions. Orange told of a log raft laced with willows on which he and Smith had once tried to cross a side-stream, but the thing battered to pieces in the rapids and nearly drowned them. Kirk had a joke about a hatter he had found drifting out on the Kluane when he was guiding there a year ago.

"Wild-lookin' chap sittin' an' suckin' his hairy cheeks an' staring at my party. At last he said: 'Fellow come by about two year ago an' told me thar was a war on. Is that a fact?' I had a dude from Chicago that trip an' he thought he'd git a rise. 'Why,' he said, 'he must a-been thinkin' of the Boer War, but I guess that's been over quite a time. Must a-been a queer sort o' chap who'd take the trouble to mention that war,' he said. 'Wai,' said the hatter, chewin' a piece, 'I guess every man's queer if it comes to that. I guess the impressions his finger-prints make ain't no more varied than the impressions he makes on other men,' 'Aw. Really?' says the dude. page 208'And what kind of impression do I make on you?' 'Wai,' says the hatter, 'since yer wanter know, I git the impression that you're a damned liar. I served with the Amurricans of the Foreign Legion right along through the Great War.' My! I was pleased to see that dude take a fall. He surely had sickened me some."

"I know his sort," said Smith. "They swell around in Injun chaps and a whole storeful of ironmongery, while your real old sourdough don't generally carry nothing more dangerous than a toothpick. Olafssen was another of that kidney. You cert'nly could hear him clank when he walked."

It was natural that there should have been much talk of Olafssen in the Patrol, and Kirk had trained himself not to wince at the name. Orange was watching, for he could not lose the suspicion that Regard knew more than he chose to tell. Yet he was sitting there easily in the firelight, his strong hands linked under his knees, smoking, talking, chaffing and seemingly more at peace than he had been since they left. "Getting the poison of that woman out of his blood, I suppose," thought Orange. "Pity such a fine chap should choose to mess himself up so." And then someone said:

"You mark my words, we've not heard the last of Olafssen yet. I bet you. A fatalist, that's what he was; and if he aimed to git some place he surely got there. Yes, sir. If he's livin' he'll turn up yet, an' if he ain't his h'ant will. Ah, a mighty determined cuss Olafssen was. Yes, sir."

"Well, this is a good place for haunts if he came this trail," said young Weatherby, yawning. "And that reminds me …"

One story followed another until they went to cutting spruce-boughs for bedding, and laid the thawed robes atop, and made the fires up and called in the dogs. Weatherby and Macky went after the dogs; found them scratching and snuffling at a hole among the tree-roots with something scattered around them that sent Weatherby back to Orange at a run. His light eyes were frightened, and it did not need page 209his words to tell Kirk that the Yukon had betrayed him again.

"Will you come, sir? A … a skeleton, I think," stammered young Weatherby. Kirk went with them among the swinging lanterns. It was safer to give no cause for suspicion to these cheerful comradely men who would change so sternly and so rapidly if once they knew the truth. Orange especially would give him no more quarter than one of these wolf-eyed huskies would give a weak member of their tribe who had displeased them. It would, Kirk remembered, probably mean promotion for Orange before all was done.

"Carefully now," Orange was saying anxiously. "Don't touch anything till I examine … curse these dogs, they've scattered the bones all over the shop. Yes … it's human remains right enough…."

With faces ghostly in the lantern-light the men stood about the stony heap where Orange knelt. But presently he rose.

"Get the dogs tied up, men, and we'll investigate this in the morning," he said. "Nothing to be done now."

Young Weatherby giggled nervously as they went back to the fires.

"We've got our haunt all right," he said. Orange said nothing, and the men were unusually boisterous as they turned in. But Kirk, lying between Weatherby and Orange, with the acrid odour of the spruce rising through the robes as the heat of their bodies increased, found himself calm and ready for sleep. This did not surprise him. It had never been danger at short range which frightened him, and danger was near now. Or was it? He began to suspect that this was probably the best thing which could have happened. Orange, always full of deductions and cut-and-dried opinions, would feel certain that Kirk would not have chosen this camp if he had known. Also—and he really thought of this for the first time—would there be anything to identify Olafssen? Ooket had had his ear-rings, which were now at the bottom of the Kanana, and Orange would look for them. Wolves had page 210probably been at work before the dogs. Thinking it over Kirk dropped off to sleep.

The cold crept nearer. Out of the black skies star-points stared down on the vast solitudes where little animals followed the trails of wandering Indians and white men for pitiful scraps of food. The dogs barked once or twice, hearing rustling in the scrub, and lifting their sharp noses from the shelter of bushy tails to sniff. But the men slept on. Black shadows brimmed the deep draws. Below the gripping ice thin streams of creeks and rivers felt their blind way, and on the hillside the branches of a jack-pine splintered and fell with the frost. The sound thundered into Kirk's dreams and turned to Judgment Day with Tamsin sitting up beside God. But when he reached his hands to her he knew that she was the Yukon itself, very white and cold and strong, and not to be turned from her purpose by any pleading. Yet her tears fell on him like ice, her kisses froze his mouth; and when he woke he found that in truth his lips were frozen by his breath.

The camp was nervously at work early. There was a general air of crisp busyness under the good smell of frying meat and boiling coffee and resinous burning wood. Then with spades and a blanket they all went back among the stiff little trees. But little could be learned from what animals and weather had left of Olafssen. The whitened bones had been gnawed over by hungry wolves, the frost had made them rotten, the scraps of clothing were bleached and withered into wisps. There was a hole in the skull which might have been made by a bullet; yet even that was uncertain; and although Orange searched a good two hours for the ear-rings he had to give it up at last. They wrapt all that had been Olafssen decently in a bear-robe and put it on a sled; and while they sat over their midday meal and wondered whether or not it was Olafssen and what he had been murdered with, Kirk wondered in how far he was suspected, and was not surprised a little later to hear Smith say:

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"Wonder how much Regard knows about this. Orange looks like he's got somethin' up his sleeve."

"Try again, sonny," said Fieldlake, patiently working the frost out of the dog-harness. "Orange's always acting like he's got something up his sleeve. It keeps him interested, I guess. But you may bet your bottom dollar Regard wouldn't have made the camp here if he'd anything to hide. That feller wasn't born yesterday."

And this, Kirk realized now, would be his trump card.

They met blizzards now: Chinook winds that brought down avalanches of soft snow and made going almost impossible, and again frosts that hardened the surface only sufficiently to cut the dog's feet when they sank through. Day by day they wound like a trail of ants along the bottom of the vast slopes, and made their tiny camps in some frozen willow-thicket threaded with rabbit-spore and wantoned over all night long by the dancing Glories, or headed uphill where timber was thicker and a larger fire could better keep off the wolf-pack which had followed them all the day. On the lower Peel they saw and shot a caribou; and that night the Patrol marched into Barracks, all dogs and men in good order, as later reported in the Police Blue Books, having been led over a new trail by Kirk Regard at a gain of seven days and augmented their number by the bones of "some man unknown."

For days the Patrol and the Fort Detachment surmised and talked, while "the man unknown," on a couple of boards in an outhouse, was painstakingly put together again by the Corporal-in-Charge and Smith, who confessed to some knowledge of anatomy. Photographs were taken, and all the pitiful scraps of evidence, including three bullets, ticketed and filed. But without the ear-rings there was no overwhelming proof. The Yukon, it seemed, had no mind to give up another of many dark secrets that it held.

The long days with that grim burden on the sled had shaken Kirk more than he expected. He did not understand page 212why the fear of detection was now less than the fear that he never would be detected and would have to carry this shadow with him all his life long. Tamsin had exorcised it, and probably could again; but between her was Dierdre and the Thing on the sled and old Mat and the whole Yukon—the Yukon that stared at him by day and listened to him by night and would never let him go. He did not know if any suspected him, but he was asked no questions in addition to those questions and answers already on the Dawson books, and it was only Orange who seemed to watch him with especial interest.

One day he sat on his bunk with the kit he had been sorting all about him and stared through the window at the white way he had come. The hills looked ancient and ghostly monsters squatting about the Fort like watchers at a ring-side. Dogs prowled over the snow. Through the faint windy light they seemed to blow back and forth, silently as smoke. Shadows of the wild, they foreshadowed that greater wild which is the undiscovered country of the heart. Kirk felt his own heart suddenly as a blank and desolate wilderness. All that was weak and young in him—and in most humans a certain residue of these qualities persists until the last—urged him to throw in his hand and be done with it: to get even with himself again, once and for ever. He stood up slowly, as though drawn by that desire to his feet; turned towards the door. Then in the passage he heard young Weatherby singing, and the song was one he had often sung with Tamsin.

"With a pal like you, so good and true, I'd like to leave it all behind, and go and find A sweet little nest somewhere in the West, And let the rest of the world go by."

Kirk sat down again. If he only could! And perhaps he could. Hot life stirred in him again. Why hadn't he taken Tamsin in spite of Mat Colom? Why didn't he go back and try to take her now? It seemed incredible now that he had page 213run as he had and not faced it out to old Mat. It seemed incredible that he should be planning now to knuckle under in this way.

From the kitchen came the smell of cooking and a shout of laughter. Kirk squared his shoulders and went out whistling. He felt himself suddenly more of a grown man than he had felt in his life before. In the summer he would go back and take Tamsin.