The Triumph of John Kars Part 9

She withdrew her gaze from the glacial field beyond the river, and looked into the man's smiling eyes, as he greeted her.

"There's just about two things liable to hold a young girl sitting around on the bank of the Snake River, with a spring breeze coming down off the glacier. One of them's dreams, the sort of romance that don't belong to these lat.i.tudes."

"And the other?"

"Mostly foolishness."

There was no offence in the man's manner. Jessie was forced to smile.

His words were so characteristic.

"Then I guess it's foolishness with me," she said.

"That's how I figgered when I saw you making this way, just as I was leaving the store. Say, that coat's mighty thin. Where's your fur--if you have to sit around here?"

Murray's eyes surveyed the long cloth coat doubtfully.

The girl shook her head.

"I'm not cold."

A sharp, splitting crack, followed by a dull, echoing boom drew the eyes of both towards the precipitous bank across the river. The great glacial field had already awakened from its long winter sleep. Once more it was the living giant of countless ages stirring and heaving imperceptibly but irresistibly.

The sound died out and the evening peace settled once more upon the world. In the years of their life upon this river these people had witnessed thousands, ay, perhaps millions of tons of the discolored ice of the glacier hurled into the summer melting pot. The tremendous voice of the glacial world was powerless to disturb them.

Murray gave a short laugh.

"Guess romance has no sort of place in these regions," he said, his thoughts evidently claimed by the voice they had both just listened to.

Jessie looked round.

"Romance doesn't belong to regions," she said. "Only to the human heart."

Murray nodded.

"That's so--too." His amiable smile beamed into the girl's serious eyes. "Those pore darn fools that don't know better than to hunt fish through holes in the polar ice are just as chock full of romance as any school miss. Sure. If it depended on conditions I guess we'd need to go hungry for it. Facts, and desperate hard facts at that, go to make up life north of 'sixty,' and any one guessing different is li'ble to find all the trouble Providence is so generous handing out hereabouts."

"I think that way, too--now. I didn't always."

The girl sighed.

"No."

The man seemed to have nothing further to add, and his smile died out.

Jessie was once more reflectively contemplating the ma.s.ses of overhanging ice on the opposite bank. The thoughts of both had drifted back over a s.p.a.ce of seven months.

It was the man who finally broke the spell which seemed to have fallen.

He broke it with a movement of impatience.

"What's the use?" he said at last.

"No--there's no use. Nothing can ever bring him back to us." The girl suddenly flung out her hands in a gesture of helpless earnestness and longing. "Oh, if he might have been spared to me. My daddy, my brave, brave daddy."

Again a silence fell between them, and again it was the man who finally broke it. This time there was no impatience. His strange eyes were serious; they were as deeply earnest as the girl's. But the light in them suggested a stirring of deep emotion which had nothing of regret in it.

"His day had to come," he said reflectively. "A man can live and prosper on the northern trail, I guess, if he's built right. He can beat it right out, maybe for years. But it's there all the time waiting--waiting. And it's going to get us all--in the end. That is if we don't quit before its jaws close on our heels. He was a big man.

He was a strong man. I mean big and strong in spirit. You've lost a great father, and I a--partner. It's seven months and more since--since that time." His voice had dropped to a gentle, persuasive note, his dark eyes gazing urgently at the girl's averted face. "Is it good to sit around here in the chill evening dreaming, and thinking, and tearing open afresh a wound time and youths ready to heal up good?

Say, I don't just know how to hand these things right. I don't even know if they are right. But it kind of seems to me we folk have all got our work to do in a country that don't stand for even natural regrets. It seems to me we all got to shut our teeth and get right on, or we'll pay the penalty this country is only too ready to claim.

Guess we need all the force in us to make good the life north of 'sixty.' Sitting around thinking back's just going to weaken us so we'll need to hand over the first time our bluff is called."

Jessie's sad eyes came back to his as he finished speaking. She nodded.

"Yes. You're surely right. It's no use. It's worse. It's playing the enemy's game. Mother needs my help. Alec. The little kiddies at the Mission. You're right, Murray." Then, in a moment of pa.s.sion her eyes lit and all that was primitive in her flamed up. "Oh, I could curse them, I could crush them in these two hands," she cried, suddenly thrusting out two clenched small fists in impotent threat, "these--these devils who have killed my daddy!"

The man's regard never wavered. The girl's beauty in the pa.s.sion of the moment held him. Never had her desirability appeared greater to him. It was on the tip of his tongue to pour out hot words of love.

To force her, by the very strength of his pa.s.sionate determination, to yield him the place in her heart he most desired. But he refrained.

He remembered in time that such a course must be backed by a physical attraction which he knew he entirely lacked. That lack must be compensated for by an added caution.

He shook his head.

"Don't talk that way," he said gently. "It's all been awful. But it can't be undone now, and---- Say, Jessie, you got your mother, and a brother who needs you. Guess you're more blessed than I am. I haven't a soul in the world. I'm just a bit of flotsam drifting through life, looking for an anchorage, and never finding one. That's how it is I'm right here now. If I'd had folks I don't guess I'd be north of 'sixty'

now. This place is just the nearest thing to an anchorage I've lit on yet, but even so I haven't found a right mooring."

"You've no folks--none at all?"

Jessie's moment of pa.s.sion had pa.s.sed. All her sympathy had been suddenly aroused by the man's effort to help her, and his unusual admission of his own loneliness.

A shadow of the man's usual smile flickered across his features.

"Not a soul," he said. "Not a father, mother, relative or--or wife.

Sounds mean, don't it?" Quite abruptly he laughed outright.

"Oh, I could tell you a dandy story of days and nights of lonesomeness.

I could tell you of a boyhood spent chasing the streets o' nights looking for a sidewalk to crawl under, or a sheltered corner folks wouldn't drive me out of. I could tell you of hungry days without a prospect of better to come, of moments when I guessed the cold waters of Puget Sound looked warmer than the night ahead of me. I could tell you of a mighty battle fought out in silence and despair. Of a resolve to make good by any means open to man. I could tell you of strivings and failures that 'ud come nigh breaking your heart, and a resolve unbreakable not to yield. Gee, I've known it all, all the kicks life can hand a derelict born under an evil influence. Say, I don't even know who my parents were."

"I never thought--I never knew----"

The girl's words were wrung from her by her feelings. In a moment this man had appeared to her in a new light. There was no sign of weakness or self-pity in Murray as he went on. He was smiling as usual, that smile that always contained something of a mocking irony.

"Pshaw! It don't figger anyway--now. Nothing figgers now but the determination never to find such days--and nights again. I said I need to find a real mooring. A mooring such as Allan found when he found your mother. Well, maybe I shall. I'm hoping that way. But even there Nature's done all she knows to hand me a blank. I'd like to say look at me, and see the scurvy trick Nature's handed out my way. But I won't. Gee, no. Still I'll find that mooring if I have to buy it with the dollars I mean to wring out of this devil's own country."

Jessie's feelings had been caught and held through sympathy. Sympathy further urged her. This man had failed to appeal before. A feeling of gentle pity stirred her.

"Don't say that," she cried, all her ideals outraged by the suggestion of purchasing the natural right of every man. "There's a woman's love for every man in the world. That surely is so. Guess it's the good G.o.d's scheme of things. Saint or sinner it doesn't matter a thing.

We're as G.o.d made us. And He's provided for all our needs. Some day you'll wonder what it was ever made you feel this way. Some day," she went on, smiling gently into the round face and the glowing eyes regarding her, "when you're old, and rich, and happy in the bosom of your family, in a swell house, maybe in New York City, you'll likely get wondering how it came you sat right here making fool talk to a girl denying the things Providence had set out for you." Her pretty eyes became grave as she leaned forward earnestly. "Say, I can see it all for you now. The picture's standing right out clear. I can see your wife now----"

The man smiled at her earnestness as she paused.

"Can you?"