Scarlett of the Mounted Part 10

"Considering the conditions of camp life, my dear, it might be wise,"

acquiesced the minister, as he shook hands.

"Just for a lark, ye know," murmured Scarlett, pacifically, saluting.

But though her pretty lip trembled, Evelyn held her head high and pa.s.sed him without a sign.

VII

PEACE, PERFECT PEACE

Feeling that on her father's return she could requite the obligation a thousandfold, Evelyn consented to remain with her party as guests of Perdu's Grand Hotel while the shack at Lost Shoe Creek was being made ready for their tenancy.

Perdu, lying on a large lake of the same name, is port of entry, and base of supplies, to the goldfields beyond. Being at that time in the third year of its existence it had a highly developed social and commercial life. For in its initial season a camp is likely to be a bedlam of frenzied maniacs shrieking, Gold, gold, gold! The second season witnesses a slump proportioned to the inflated values of its predecessor. But if it weathers to a third, then some sort of poise is attained, as steady industries develop and existence seeks a normal plane. The fancy-women who flock wherever the nuggets are thickest, now segregate themselves in a secluded quarter of the towns.h.i.+p; married men send for their families, while the unblessed bachelor whistles "The Girl I Left Behind Me," or pays attention to the schoolteacher. On all sides one sees the effort, sometimes pitiful, always human and worthy, from the harsh matrix of the wilderness to wrest a home. And then follow the petty complexities of a miscalled civilization. To Evelyn's surprise, after the first warm tender of hospitality, she encountered the same restricted social conditions in Perdu that obtain in villages on the "outside," as the world beyond the mountains in northern lat.i.tudes is termed. Women left cards on her; heads of rival cliques warned her one against the other; the wife of the princ.i.p.al grocer planned a tea in her honor.

On a brilliant summer morning, without cloud or shadow, mountains and valleys alike lying exposed to a broadside of sun that had been warming to its work since four hours after midnight, Evelyn set out to return the visit of the town surveyor's wife. A short cut through the cl.u.s.tered willow bushes brought her to the back door of their cabin, where she came upon the hostess at her washtubs, while from the doorstep the town surveyor was cleaning his teeth publicly. Wholly unembarra.s.sed, the good people greeted their visitor with cordiality, and conducted her into the living-room, where babies, cot beds and cooking commingled with such observances of decency and taste as a woman of refinement, no matter how overworked, seems somehow generally able to contrive. In point of cultivation, so Evelyn soon discovered, her new acquaintances were fully her equal. Delighted as they professed themselves to be that her stay would be of long duration, yet to the plans she outlined for her projected improvement of the district they showed an almost marked indifference. When she dropped hints about the free library she intended to establish, Mr. Grayson began quite inappositely to brag of having made more money the previous winter by lumbering than in the way of his profession, owing to the fact that "up here, thank G.o.d! no one, man or woman, loses caste by honest labor of any sort." When she alluded to the art furniture she thought of importing for her domicile, Mrs. Grayson cautioned her to be very careful of her lamp chimneys, the commonest kind costing fifty cents at local stores, because, so the storekeepers said, of the exorbitant freight rates that prevailed. Also she advised Evelyn to start right in and do her own was.h.i.+ng, as the local laundries charged something over four dollars for a dozen simple pieces. When Miss Durant mentioned the theatre she was arranging to have built, the opera troupe with which she already was negotiating for a series of performances to beguile the long Klondike winter, the Graysons merely said, almost with sarcasm, "How nice!" adding that the camp contrived to get up some fair entertainments of its own in the hall over the truckman's stable. Coming to the conclusion that they were jealous lest her advent should undermine the social prestige which, so Hastie had informed her, they enjoyed, Evelyn rose to take her leave and, kindly wishful to put them at their ease, admired the babies, the bearskin rugs, the horns of mountain sheep and goat upon the wall, the view, the two geraniums in pots upon the window-sill; accepted an invitation to a wild-strawberry picnic, offered to teach them bridge, and departed in a glow of self-gratulation at her tact in dealing with the envious and small-minded.

On the hotel piazza she found the minister waiting for her, and with him Scarlett. To the latter she had not spoken since the day of their difference, for such she chose to consider it, in regard to Gelly. True, more than once she had caught sight of him galloping down the road or striding by on some official errand, but never had she lifted a finger to delay him, nor he appeared conscious of her presence.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DEPARTED IN A GLOW OF SELF CONGRATULATION AT HER TACT.]

Ignoring his greeting, in high good humor with herself and all the world, Evelyn opened fire. "Mr. Maclane, I wish you would tell that young man he owes me an apology."

Scarlett suppressed a gratified smile. "Mr. Maclane, will ye convey to the speaker that she'll have to prove the debt for me to pay it?"

"Tell him the last time we met he put me in the wrong," said Evelyn, prettily, the glow of her goodness toward the envious Graysons still upon her. "He behaved as though he thought me narrow, contemptible--and the worst is, the shoe pinches, because in a tiny degree I fear it may have been true."

She waited with a charming air of penitence for contradiction, but, to her astonishment, none came.

Instead, "I'm a brute, just," Scarlett remorsefully described himself.

"Who am I to hold ye up the looking-gla.s.s? I'll never be so rude again."

"Oh"--Miss Durant stiffened perceptibly--"I do not usually find the reflection unbearable to contemplate."

"I've lived so long in the open, in primitive conditions," Scarlett, unmindful of her interruption, went on, "I always blurt out whatever pops into my mind. Well, there's precedent. In Eden, Adam must have called a spade a spade."

"Ah, my young friend, but there's no record of his having called Eve a spade," observed Maclane, with a twinkle in his eye.

"Faith, I'll drop the spade, then," laughed the Irishman, "if she'll let me call her Eve!"

"Tell him," laughed Miss Durant, with heightened color, "that he goes too far."

"Tell her I'd go farther--to any lengths, for her, so long as it didn't take me from her side."

"Tell him he's kissed the blarney-stone."

"Tell her I only practiced on it to keep my hand in till she should come."

"How dare you!" cried Evelyn, feeling that she ought to be very angry.

"Come, come, my children, peace," prescribed Maclane. "Miss Durant, I am here as a pet.i.tioner. One of my dear Indians, in fact the sister-in-law of Chilkat Jo, has a baby----"

"Velly damfine Clistian baby!" interpolated the trader, who was sitting on the step near by, whittling out a toy canoe.

"Oh, Joseph!" the minister protested, "when will you learn that a d.a.m.n baby cannot be a Christian baby--nor a Christian baby a d.a.m.n baby. We are to baptize the little one this morning," he told Evelyn. "And I am asked to beg you to stand G.o.dmother."

"For a heathen unregenerate, miss!" Sarah put her head out of the window just behind the group. "Don't you mix yourself up with that truck!"

"I'm a bit of a heathen nowadays myself." Maclane stopped Chilkat Jo's angry outburst. "My dear Indians have converted me."

"I wonder you aren't afraid of being tried for heresy, sir," commented Sarah, "talking that loose way."

"Perhaps I should be," agreed Maclane, "in the cities across yon mountains. But here they hold us in a charmed circle, and who can escape their spell?" He pointed to the lake, brilliantly ablaze, like a vessel holding wondrous depths of color, in which the snow-capped peaks with their V-shaped creva.s.ses lay mirrored like cameos in turquoise relief.

"My Indians--in my civilized days I used to preach h.e.l.l-fire to them, till they scorned me for it, crying, 'Our children when they die become birds of song. Why, then, should we give them to you Christians to be burned?' Then, again, though I knew him to be a saint, dedicated in Christ's name to the service of his fellow-men, I used to avoid my brother, the Catholic priest, because his doctrines on the surface differed from my own! Again, my Indians taught me, scoffing, 'If Christianity makes enemies of her ministers, why, we want none of it.'

Yes, all that I have given the heathen have they requited me a hundredfold, making me a Christian through the Christ I try to show to them!"

"I will do what you ask me only too gladly, Mr. Maclane!" cried Evelyn, understanding that this was the good minister's way of making peace between herself and Chilkat Jo. "I shall be proud of my G.o.dchild; and I promise it the finest cup from Tiffany's----"

"No, no! No presents, please," enjoined Maclane. "Only kindness, neighborliness, and an appreciation of the heathen virtues. The Sergeant here has consented to be G.o.dfather."

"The Sergeant!" involuntarily exclaimed Evelyn.

"Aye! In the short time he has been in charge, he has completely won the hearts of the tribe of Raven and Frog. No baptism complete without him."

"Oh, as a sponsor, I'm painting the town red," admitted the Irishman.

"And the Claim has a regular column of feeble-minded puns upon the epidemic. Well, I only hope the Scarlett creepers won't turn to Scarlett runners, in time of battle."

"I will tell Lallah that you consent. Be ready, both, please, when you hear the chapel bell," directed the minister, going to the mission.

Scarlett lingered, but as Evelyn took no notice of him, "Thankee for the pressing invitation," he remarked, drawing up a chair and seating himself beside her. "And are ye beginning to feel acclimated among us savages?"

"Oh, you are doing your best!" Evelyn a.s.sured him. "Though I must say, even for the wilderness, the ideas of social distinction seem curiously lax. Why, as his head waiter is off on a spree, Mr. Hastie has offered me the place--three hundred dollars a month and tips!"

"Good pay," commented Scarlett. "Why don't ye take it? I'd ask no better for my own sister, if I had one."

Evelyn tossed her head. "To pa.s.s dishes to unwashed barbarians in corduroys who gobble off their knives and drink from their saucers.

Even for your own sister," she could not forbear asking, "wouldn't you consider the situation rather primitive?"

"I should, and that's the situation's saving grace," he promptly replied, "since primitive man is woman's best friend, once she makes him realize she will not let him be her enemy."

Against her will, Evelyn looked at the speaker with reluctant admiration, forced to recognize that however ignorant of cla.s.s distinctions the poor young man might be, his was certainly no ordinary mentality. Accordingly, woman-like, she harked back to personalities, hoping in shallow waters to take him, through his very superiority, at a disadvantage. "Oh, we have nothing to complain of on the score of friendliness," she laughed. "Our matrimonial opportunities seem limited only by the number of single men within proposing radius. No, Sergeant, I am not the belle. That proud position is disputed by Sarah and the plainest orphan, who also is the most muscular, because they frankly tell us, in a land where hired labor is not to be had a man must marry to get some one to cook and wash for him. However, such few score of proposals as have come my way, I honestly can brag, are for myself, since I am not considered a specially useful 'household proposition,'

and oddly enough my great wealth seems not to impress these poverty-stricken millionaires in the least degree."

"Oh, I tell ye, in a mining camp one gets down to first principles, or lack of them," commented the soldier. "It's chaos, till man and woman together evolve a paradise."

Evelyn waited, hoping he also would propose to her in order that she might refuse him, not kindly, with the consideration she had shown the other poor victims who had laid their hearts at her feet, but with scathing denunciation of his insolence. Instead of improving his opportunity, however, the soldier rose. "Ye'll bid me to the wedding, Miss Durant?"