Katharine Newlin Burt

“ Thank God! It was morning. The household was awake. The sound was all I needed to fire my courage. I flung myself bodily upon the candle, rolled away, scrambled to my feet, and fled along the passageway with the speed of my despair. She was after me like a flash, but I had an instant's start.
Down the inclined plane I slid. I leapt along the steps, and there at the foot she fell upon me, and we lay panting within a stone's throw of the closet wall. And I realized that our flight had been no more noisy than the scuttling of rats. I gave myself up to death. ”

“ She left him and Yarnall that afternoon and went away to her cabin in the trees and lay face down on the bare boards of the floor and was young again. Waves of longing for love and beauty and adventure flooded her. For a while she had been very beautiful and had been very passionately loved; for a while she had been surrounded by beauty and taught its meanings. She had fled from it all. She hated it, yes, but she longed for it with every fiber of her being. The last two years were scalded away. She was Joan, who had loved Pierre; Joan, whom Prosper Gael had loved. ”

“ Cold struck up through the shining, clammy surface underfoot so that while Sheila's face burned from the heat of the stove her feet were icy. The back door was warped and let in a current of frosty air over its sill, a draught that circled her ankles like cold metal. On the table in the middle of the room, "Momma" had placed an enormous tin dish-pan piled high with dirty dishes, over which she was pouring the contents of the kettle. Steam rose in clouds, half-veiling her big, fierce face which, seen through holes in the vapor, was like that of a handsome, vulgar witch. ”

“ Between the woman, who went on with her work as though no one had come into the room, and the silent smiling youth, Hugh Garth prowled the floor like a shadow thrown by a moving light.
He was a man of forty-five, gray-haired, misshapen, heavy above the waist and light to meanness below; a man lame in one leg and with an ill-proportioned face, malicious, lined, lead-colored; a man who limped and leaped about the room with a fierce energy, the while his tongue, gifted with a rich and resonant voice, poured vitriol upon the silence. ”

“ Paul Dabney had seen a child turn pale and stiff with fear at the mere sight of me, and I could not forget the grim, stern look with which he followed Robbie's little pitiful, pointing finger. And I had fancied that this man was falling in love with me!
Truly my nerves should have been in no condition to face the dreadful ordeal of the time that was to come, but, truly, too, and very mercifully, those nerves are made of steel. They bend often, and with agonizing pain, but they do not break. I know now that they never will. ”

“ The whiteness of a full moon, the whiteness of a dawn seemed to fall over Sheila.
"He—he can give you everything—" Dickie said shakily.
"I've been waiting"—she said—"I didn't know it until lately. But I've been waiting, so long now, for—for—" She closed her eyes and lifted her soft sad mouth. It was no longer patient.
That night Dickie and Berg lay together on the hide before the fire, wrapped in a blanket. Dickie did not sleep. He looked through the uncurtained, horizontal window, at the stars.
"You've got everything else, Hilliard," he muttered. "You've got the whole world to play with. ”

“ Coyotes mourned their loneliness and hunger near and far, and once, in the broken woods above him, a mountain lion gave its blood-curdling scream. Prosper hated the night and its beautiful desolation, he hated the God that had made this land. He cursed the dawn when it came delicately, spreading a green arc of radiance across the east. And then, as he arose stiffly, stamped out his fire, and started slowly on his way back, he was conscious of a passionate homesickness, not for the old life he had lost, but for his cabin, his bright hearth, his shut-in solitude, his Joan. ”

“ Pete’s eyes dropped, then lifted as though under a great weight.
“And you say you’re not a liar!”
“I am a liar, though not in the way you mean. We are all liars. We have caught that little blind girl in a trap. We have lied to her, all three of us—Bella and I, and you, Hugh—you have lied most of all.”
“She loves me,” Hugh panted. “She knows me. She understands me.”
“Yes,” Pete answered, trembling. “I’ve seen that. I’ve kept quiet. Bella and I have given you your happiness. Now you thank me by striking me and calling me a liar and a cheat!” ”

“ I did n't really mean to kill Robbie. But I did mean to get him out of that room, alive or dead. He killed himself, which saved me the trouble. I don't like killing children—it's quite untrue what they say of me in that respect—though I've been driven to it once or twice. It's being too squeamish about babies' lives that's put an end to most careers of burglary. That's the God's truth, Janice. You're shaking, are n't you? How queer it must be to have nerves like that—young, innocent, ignorant nerves! Poor Janice! ”

“ There was that look of a broken flower, that look of lovely death, that stops the heart of a mother sometimes when she bends over a crib and sees damp curls in a halo about a strange, familiar face.
Thatcher, looking at Sheila, had some of these thoughts. A teamster is either philosopher or clown. One cannot move, day after day, all day for a thousand days, under a changeless, changeful sky, inch by inch, across the surface of a changeless, changeful earth and not come very near to some of the locked doors of the temple where clowns sleep and wise men meditate. ”

“ A log fell forward and Joan lifted her head. She had not come to an end of Isabella’s tragedy nor of her own memories, but something other than the falling log had startled her; a light, crunching step upon the snow.
She looked toward the window. For an instant the room was almost dark and the white night peered in at her, its gigantic snow-peaks pressing against the long, horizontal window panes, and in that instant she saw a face. The fire started up again, the white night dropped away, the face shone close a moment longer, then it too disappeared. ”

“ He flung himself down in Hugh’s chair and rested his head in his hands.
Bella bent over him. “Poor Pete! It’s cruel for you—and,” she added softly, uncertainly, “and for me.”
“For you too, Bella?” He looked up at her through tears.
She nodded her head, and her face worked. “Perhaps you could take her back to her friends, Pete?”
“And leave Hugh? Didn’t you hear what he said, Bella? Life and death! It would kill him if she should go away with me. Or—he’d follow and kill me.”
“Yes,” Bella assented somberly; “yes, he’d kill you. The devil is still living in his heart.” ”

“ Sheila's delicate, crystalline beauty pierced her senses like the frosty beauty of a winter star: her dress of white mist, her slender young arms, her long, slim, romantic throat, the finish and polish of her, every detail done lovingly as if by a master's silver-pointed pencil, her hair so artlessly simple and shining, smooth and rippled under the lights, the strangeness of her face! Girlie told herself again that it was an irregular face, that the chin was not right, that the eyes were not well-opened and lacked color, that the nose was odd, defying classification ”

“ He put his chin on his fist and stared over her head into the fire. She felt the slackening of his embrace and searched his arms with questioning fingers. “Why are you cross, Hugh? Did I say anything to hurt you? Let’s forget Ham Rutherford. I wonder where he is, poor, horrible wretch!”
“Dead—dead—dead,” Hugh muttered. “Dead and buried—or he ought to be. O God!” he groaned, and crushed her close against him; “I can’t ask you to love me, Sylvie—to marry me. Now you know what it is like to love a man who must be afraid of other men. What right have I to ask any woman to share my life?” ”

“ Two years before her breakdown, Jasper had been terribly hurt in an automobile accident, and Betty had come to him at the hospital, had waited, as white as a snow-image, for the result of the examination. They had told her emphatically that there was no hope. Jasper Morena could not live for more than a few days. She must not allow herself to hope. He might or might not regain consciousness. If he did, it would be for a few minutes before the end. Betty had listened with her white, rigid, child face, had thanked them, had gone home. ”

“ Sheila, looking out at the wide Nebraskan prairies that slipped endlessly past her window hour by hour that day, felt that she would not make a hit at Millings. She was afraid of Millings. Her terror of Babe and Girlie was profound. She had lived and grown up, as it were, under her father's elbow. Her adoration of him had stood between her and experience. She knew nothing of humanity except Marcus Arundel. And he was hardly typical—a shy, proud, head-in-the-air sort of man, who would have been greatly loved if he had not shrunk morbidly from human contacts. ”

“ Sylvie will marry him. Hugh gets his will.” Pete shook his head. “Wait a few days—you’ll see. She’s fighting against him now; I don’t know why—some instinct. But though he tells her so many lies, he doesn’t lie about one thing. He loves her. He does love her.”
“No! No!” Bella’s passion, tearing its way through her long habit of repression, was almost terrifying. “He loves the image she has of him. If he knew that she could see him as I do, his love would shrivel up like a flower in a drought. Hugh can’t love the truth. He can’t love anything but his delusions. Pete, tell her the truth. ”

“ The real heat of the house, and it was almost unbearably hot, came from the stoves in kitchen and bedrooms, but this fire gave its quota of warmth and more than its quota of that beauty so necessary to Prosper Gael.
Wen Ho put his head from one side to the other and stopped rubbing his hands. He had heard the packing of snow under webs and runners. After listening a moment, he nodded to himself, like a figure in a pantomime, ran into the kitchen, did something to the stove, then lighted a lantern and pattered out along the tunnel dodging the icicle stalactites. ”

“ Sheila sat wrapped in furs in front of the broad figure of her companion, who stood at the back of the sledge, used a long whip, and shouted to the dogs by name in her great musical voice of which the mountain echo made fine use. They sped close to the frozen whiteness of the world, streaked down the slopes, and were drawn soundlessly through the columned vistas of the woods. Here, there, and everywhere were tracks, of coyotes, fox, rabbit, martin, and the little pointed patteran of winter birds, yet they saw nothing living. "What's got the elk and moose this season?" muttered Miss Blake. ”

“ Hugh!”
The man was staring straight ahead of him, and now he drew his hand across his eyes, the fingers crooked as though they tore a veil.
“Now,” he said, “I do see myself just as I am. Yes, I did shoot at you. Yes, I think I meant to kill you. I must have meant to kill you. That’s the truth. For the second time I’m a murderer. Yet now, as God lives, even if I am down in the dust, I’ll lay hold of my stars. I’m going to walk out of your lives so that they can shape themselves to their own good ends. Sylvie can shape yours with you, Pete.” ”

“ He was like a man who, having denied the existence of Apollyon, has come upon him face to face and has been burnt by his breath. Such a man is inevitably moral. All this long, intricate intrigue with the wife of a man who called him friend, seemed to him horribly unworthy. If Betty had been a great lover, if she had not lost courage at the eleventh hour and left him to face that terrible winter in Wyoming, then their passion might have justified itself: but now there was a staleness in their relationship. ”

“ It could hardly be called morning—a heavy, flying darkness of drift, a wind filled with icy edges that stung the face and cut the eyes, a wind with the voice of a driven saw. The little cabin was caught in the whirling heart of a snow spout twenty feet high. The firs bent and groaned. There is a storm-fear, one of the inherited instinctive fears. Sheila's little face looked out of the whipped windows with a pinched and shrinking stare. She went from window to hearth, looking and listening, all day. A drift was blown in under the door and hardly melted for all the blazing fire. ”

“ Joan knew that it was a man’s right to kill his woman for “dealin’s with another man.” This law was human; it evidently did not hold good with animals. There was no bitterness, though some ferocity, in the traffic of their loves.
While she pondered through the first sleepless nights in this strange shelter of hers, and while the blizzard Prosper had counted on drove bayoneted 89 battalions of snow across the plains and forced them, screaming like madmen, along the narrow cañon, Joan came slowly and fully to a realization of the motive of Pierre’s deed. ”

“ This was one of Hugh’s madnesses; he would take Sylvie up a mountain and show her his kingdom, show her himself as lord of the wilderness. He had been there before many times, to the top of their one mountain, always under protest from Bella and Pete. It was a bare rock exposed to half the world and all the eyes of Heaven; and for a man in hiding, a man who lived, yet whose name was carved above a grave, it was a very target for untoward accident. Some trader or trapper down in the forest might look up and behold the misshapen figure black and bold, against the sky. ”

“ One should leave the future humbly on the knees of the gods. That night, when Hilliard was lying wakeful in his berth listening to the click of rails, the old trapper lay under the driving snow. But he was not wakeful. He slept with no visions of gold or love, a frozen and untroubled sleep. He had caught his foot in a trap, and the blizzard had found him there and had taken mercy on his pain. They did not find his body until spring, and then Cosme's letter to Sheila lay wet and withered in his pocket. ”

“ Pete stood staring after her. A new Bella, this, not the cousin, the little cousin from the farm; not the nurse who had saved him from Hugh’s hardness and told him limping fairy tales and doctored his hurts; not the accepted necessity, but a woman—a woman young, yes, young. In the instant when he had glimpsed her face, broken and quivering, the tight lips parted and the hair disarranged about flushed, quivering cheeks, the eyes deep with widened pupils, she had revealed beauty and passion—the two halves of youth. ”

“ She had been sitting in her chair, listless and wan, now staring at the flames, now following Wen Ho’s activities with absent eyes. A storm was swirling outside. Near the window, Prosper, a figure of keen absorption, bent over his writing-table, his long, fine hand driving the pencil across sheet after sheet. He looked like a machine, so regular and rapid was his work. A sudden sense of isolation came upon Joan. What part had she in the life of this companion, this keeper of her own life? She felt a great need of drawing nearer to him, of finding the humanity in him. ”

“ Miss Blake's resonant, deep voice seemed to pounce upon Sheila above the chatter of the stream which, running about three sides of the glade, was now, at the silence of the dogs, incessantly audible.
"Well, if it isn't the little barmaid!" cried Miss Blake, and advanced, wiping her hand on a white apron tied absurdly over the corduroy trousers and cowboy boots. "Well, if you aren't as welcome as the flowers in May! So you thought you'd leave the street-lamps and come take a look at the stars?" ”

“ She wanted, pitifully enough, to mark every difference between this Joan and the Joan whom Prosper had drawn on his sled up the cañon trail. If he expected to force her back into the position of enchanted leopardess, to see her “lie at his feet and eat out of his hand,” as Morena had once described the plight of Zona, he would see at a glance that she was no longer so easily mastered. In fact, sitting there, she looked as proud and perilous as a young Medea, black-haired with long throat and cold, malevolent lips. ”

“ Her lips were tight set; her chin held out with an air of dogged effort which seemed to possess no relation to her mechanical occupation, yet to have a strong habitual relation to her state of mind. She seemed, in fact, under a shell of self-control, to conceal an inner light, like a dimly burning dark-lantern. Her expression was dumb. She moved about like a deaf-mute. Indeed, her stillness and stony self-repression were extraordinary.
A youth rose from a chair near the stove and greeted Hugh as he entered. ”

“ CHAPTER III THE FINEST CITY IN THE WORLD So Sheila Arundel left the garret where the stars pressed close, and went with Sylvester Hudson out into the world. It was, that morning, a world of sawing wind, of flying papers and dust-dervishes, a world, to meet which people bent their shrinking faces and drew their bodies together as against the lashing of a whip. Sheila thought she had never seen New York so drab and soulless; it hurt her to leave it under so desolate an aspect. ”

“ Perhaps, in spite of his gruesome boast as to dead men, it was as much to satisfy his own spirit as to comfort Joan’s that Prosper actually did undertake a journey to the cabin that had belonged to Pierre. It was true that Prosper had never been able to stop thinking, not so much of the tall, slim youth lying so still across the floor, all his beauty and strength turned to an ashen slackness, as of a brown hand that stirred. The motion of those fingers groping for life had continually disturbed him. ”

“ For some reason Pete was ashamed to meet Bella’s eyes. As usual, they were the audience, those two. They sat, each in a chair, the width of the room apart; below them, his grizzled head and warped face transfigured by its new tenderness, Hugh bent over the child in his arms. Pete held his tumult of curiosity, of interest, in leash. He could hear his heart pounding.
“You’re safe now, and warm,” Hugh was murmuring. “No need to be scared, no need. I’ll take care of you. Go to sleep. I’m strong enough to keep off anything. You’re safe and snug as a little bird in its nest. That’s right. ”

“ The body of the trapper, Hilliard's first messenger, had been found under the melting snow, a few days before, and to the white-faced young stranger was given that stained and withered letter in which Hilliard had excused and explained his desertion.
Nothing, at Rusty, had been heard of Sheila. No one knew even that she had ever left Miss Blake's ranch—the history of such lonely places is a sealed book from snowfall until spring. Their tragedies are as dumb as the tragedies of animal life. No one had ever connected Sheila's name with Hilliard's. ”

“ Holliwell’s God of comfort and forgiveness forsook him. What did he want with a God when that one comrade of his lonely, young, human life was out there lost by his own cruelty! Perhaps she was dead. Perhaps the wound had killed her. For all these years she might have been lying dead somewhere in the snow, under the sky. Sharp periods of pain followed dull periods of stupor. Now it was night again and a recollection of Jasper’s theater ticket had dragged him to a vague purpose. He wanted to see again that woman who had so vivified his memory of Joan. ”

“ Hugh groaned. “Ah, but I do—I do! You must stay with me always. Sylvie, somehow we will be married—you—and I!”
“Now it frightens me,” she whispered, “being blind. It does frighten me now. I want so terribly to see your face, your eyes. Oh, you mustn’t marry a blind girl, a waif. You’ve been so noble, you’ve suffered so terribly. You ought to have some wonderful woman who would understand your greatness, would see all that you are.” ”

“ I want to ask you, Miss Sheila, if you've got red blood in your veins and a love of adventure and a wish to see that real entertaining show we call 'life'—and mighty few females ever get a glimpse of it—and if you've acquired a feeling of gratitude for Pap and if you've got any real religion, or any ambition to play a part, if you're a real woman that wants to be an in-spire-ation to men, well, ma'am, I ask you, could you turn down a chance like that? ”

“ An apartment house was a greater novelty to him even than a theater, but, after a dazed moment of discovering that he did not have to ring or knock, but just push open the great iron-scrolled door and step into the brightly lighted, steam-heated marble hall, he decided that the woman at the desk was a person in authority, and to her he addressed himself, soft hat gripped in his hand, his face set to hide excitement. ”

“ It was a queer game, queer and breathless, played in this narrow space shut in by the white wilderness. And as the slow days went by, the low log house seemed to be filled more and more with smothered and conflicting emotions. A dozen times the whole extravaganza came near collapse; a dozen times Hugh saved it by a word, or Pete and Bella by a silence. Their parts were not easy, and although Pete still smiled, his young clear face grew whiter and more strained. Sylvie treated him always as though he were a child. She would pat his head and rumple his hair if he sat near her ”

“ And this was the first time a woman had stirred that mysterious trouble in his brain.
"It's not like a smile at all," thought Dickie, the dancing crowd invisible to him; "it's like something—it's—what is it? It's as if the wind blew it into her face and blew it out again. It doesn't come from anywhere, it doesn't seem to be going anywhere, at least not anywhere a fellow knows ..." Here he was rudely joggled by a passing elbow and the pain of his ankle brought a sharp "Damn!" out of him. He found a niche to lean in, and he watched Sheila and Jim. ”

“ It was very desolate—the blank surface of the world with its flying scud, the blank yellow-gray sky, the range, all iron and white, the blue-black scars of leafless trees, the green-black etchings of firs. The wind cut across like a scythe, sharp, but making no stir above the drift. It was all dead and dark—an underground world which, Prosper felt, never could have seen the sun, had no memory of sun nor moon nor stars. The roof of Pierre’s cabin made a dark ridge above the snow, veiled in cloudy drift. ”