Richard Aumerle Maher

“ I loved Rafe Gadbeau. As long as I shall live I shall love him. For his good name I would die. But I cannot see the suffering of that girl, Ruth. Mon Pere, it is too much! I cannot stand it. Yet I cannot go there before men and call my love a murderer. Consider, Mon Pere. There is another way. I, too, am guilty. I wished for the death of that man. I would have killed him myself, for he had made Rafe Gadbeau do many things that he would not have done. He made my love a murderer. I went to keep Rafe Gadbeau from the setting of the fire. ”

“ Augusta and Wardwell, accustomed to seeing Rose Wilding day by day, could not realize the extent of the change that had come over her. To them she was today practically as she had been yesterday. But to a stranger the picture of the large handsome woman, her face blanched now by hidden disease to a transparent pearl white, the skin smooth and unlined as a growing baby's, her pallor doubled by the white of the bed and the enamel that covered every object in the room, was in all a sight to arouse a nameless, creeping dread of something present but unseen. ”

“ Only an impenetrable ring of fire, no earth, no sky. Only these few bare rocks and this inverted bowl of lurid, hot, cinder-laden air out of which she must get the breath of life.
Into this ring of fire a hunted man had burst, just as she had seen a rabbit and a belated woodchuck bursting. And that man had lain himself down to die. And here, of all places, he had found the hand of the mighty, the omnipresent Catholic Church reached out ready to him!
She was only a young girl. But since that night when the Bishop had come to her as she held her father dying in her arms she had thought much. ”

“ But Augusta knew that it was not the restlessness of Spring that threatened her. And she knew that not even the sullen restiveness of a call of blood could hurt in the way that she was going to be hurt.
She was a woman. And she knew that only through a woman could she be wounded to her heart's depth. That strange prescience, that border land insight which had come to her in other times, and had sometimes been kind to her and sometimes cruel, had lately been turning up pictures to her mind. ”

“ Revenge.”
“What business is it of yours?” came an angry voice out of the crowd.
“It is not my business,” said the Bishop solemnly. “It is the business of God. Of your God. Of my God. Am I a meddling priest? Have I no right to speak God’s name to you, because we do not believe all the same things? My business is with the souls of men––of all men. And never in my life have I so attended to my own business as I am doing this minute, when I say to you in the name of God, of the God of my fathers and your fathers, do not put this sin of murder upon your souls this night. Have you wives? ”

“ McQuade had given her a helping of wax so big that she had not believed that she could eat a quarter of it. And, without thinking or stopping, she had eaten up every bit of it. And she was hungry for more.
She looked up in horror, and exclaimed confusedly:
"I beg everybody's pardon. I never piggied anything up so in my life!"
"Don't apologize, dear," said Fan McQuade, smiling down into Augusta's burning face. "We'd've been disappointed if you hadn't done just as you did. I always distrust people who don't forget themselves when they first eat sugar wax. ”

“ All the day long men toiled with heart and will, dragging logs and driftwood from the lake and cutting, splitting, shaping planks and joists for a shanty, while the women picked burnt nails and spikes from the ruins of what had been their homes. So that when night came down over the hills there was an actual shelter over the heads of women and children. And the light spirited, sanguine people raised cheer after cheer as their imagination leaped ahead to the new French Village that would rise glorious out of the ashes of the old. ”

“ She was so like a tired little girl that as his glance momentarily followed the stream of the light into the mother's room and fell upon the little cot drawn up and ready at the side of the mother's bed, Wardwell for an instant lost his grip on reality. The fiction at which Rose Wilding's poor wandering mind had grasped seemed to be actually the truth. And Wardwell found that he had to struggle with himself before he could remember that Augusta was truly his wife and that she and he had an existence for each other which did not depend on that fiction. ”

“ The Judge polled the jury, glaring fiercely at each man as his name was called, but one after another the men arose and answered gruffly for acquittal. The hill people rushed from the courthouse, running for their horses and shouting the verdict as they ran. Then sleepy little Danton awoke from its September drowse and was aware that something real had happened. The elaborate machinery of prosecution, the whole political power of the county, the mighty grip and pressure of the railroad power had all been set at nothing by the tragic little love story of an ignorant French girl from the hills. ”

“ McQuade's three sons and two hired men had been in the camp ten days now, breaking roads through the settling snow, scalding out sap buckets and boiling pans, and tapping trees. Jimmie and Augusta, in wonder and ignorance, had watched the men going from tree to tree with augers, boring out a hole in each, into which they drove the wooden spout, and hung the tin bucket beneath. They stood among the bare trees on a southerly slope of the hills where the late March sun of a lovely morning beat warm and strong, and they saw a miracle. ”

“ But a drifting storm had followed him down from Little Tupper, covering the road that he had made and leaving no trace of the way. He had stopped driving and held only a steady, even rein to keep his ponies from stumbling, while he let the tough, willing little Canadian blacks pick their own road.
Twice in the last hour the Bishop and Arsene had been tossed off the single bobsled out into the drifts. It was back-breaking work, sitting all day long on the swaying bumper, with no back rest, feet braced stiffly against the draw bar in front to keep the dizzy balance. ”

“ And he, with this full knowledge of her fiercely proud little heart, had brought another woman in to despoil the sacred shrine of Augusta's love. He knew that she had thanked him for getting her pet back for her as the dearest thing he had ever done for her. And now when she should come to know the truth—as she would—it would embitter her to know that she owed it to another woman.
As the letters continued to come and the worry and humiliation of keeping up what seemed like an intrigue grew upon him he moodily wished that Augusta might learn the truth. ”

“ In a little room, as simple and unadorned as the quiet grace of his own bearing, the Parish Priest of New York received them and began to question Augusta.
Wardwell, listening, found himself forgetting somewhat of the business in hand and absorbed suddenly in his own particular business. He was a born writer and novelist, in spite of his own jibes. And, just as the true artist finds himself forever reaching for a brush, he could never be in the presence of character without trying to grasp at the one vital element which was the spring of it. ”

“ At the head of the couch knelt a young girl, her arm supporting the man’s head and shoulder, her wildly tossed hair falling down across his chest.
She was speaking to the man in a voice low and even, but so tense that her whole slim body seemed to vibrate with every word. It was as though her very soul came to the portals of her lips and shouted its message to the man. The power of her voice, the breathless, compelling strength 10 of her soul need seemed to hold everything between heaven and earth, as she pleaded to the man. ”

“ Even now, as he watched the German gun being poked into its place above the line of the dirt on the far hillside, he shuddered at the humiliation and the ignominy of that winter. Augusta had known that there was something wrong. She had, of course, seen it in his eyes and sensed it in the air about him, from the very beginning. But he had never been able to tell her. He knew Augusta's peculiar jealousy. It was not the usual property-holding interest by which the average woman clings to her rights in a man, because she is afraid of the consequences of letting him slip away from her. ”

“ Ruth Lansing reined Brom Bones in under a scarred pine on the French Village road and sat looking soberly at the slopes that stretched up away from the road on either side. Every child of the hills knew the menace that a hot dry summer brought to us in those days. The first, ruthless cutting of the timber had followed the water courses. Men had cut and slashed their way up through the hills without thought of what they were leaving behind. ”

“ Men would pass him from one hard hand to another, and he would be beaten for the sin of being old. Meanwhile, she would save lumps of sugar and quarts of oats. And Jimmie did not care.
The glow of her sacrifice was cold and dead and the ashes of it were in her hair.
In the morning Jimmie awakened to the fact that he was alone in the room. He had not heard Augusta go out. Or was it that she had just this instant gone and that her going had stirred him out of deep sleep. He dressed hastily, wondering at his excitement. She had run out to see Donahue. ”

“ They must die. And they must die now. They were in the hands of men whose homes they had burned, whose dear ones they had menaced with the most terrible of deaths; men who for thirty-six hours now had been thirsting to kill them. The hour had come.
“Take them down to the gully. Build a fire and dig their graves.” Old Erskine Beasley spoke the sentence.
A short, sharp cry of satisfaction was the answer. A cry that suggested the snapping of jaws let loose upon the prey.
Then Joseph Winthrop stood in the very midst of the crowd, laying hands upon the two cowering men, and spoke. ”

“ He found Donahue browsing contentedly among the trees much as he had left him, and a world mockingly unchanged.
Of course, he could not stay there. The haunting, whispering sweetness of Augusta's presence was there at every turn of his eyes, in the breath of every breeze that brushed his cheek, in the song of every bird that piped. There memories choked him, of the nights when she had fought the fever with him, of days when their hearts had danced together in the joy of work. There he had learned why the human race continues to wish [227] to live—he had learned to know a sweet woman's heart. ”

“ Why work? Why fight? Why dream? Why anything? when at the end and the beginning of all things there stood that wall with the word written across it. Guilty––guilty as Rafe Gadbeau. And Ruth Lansing––!
A flash of sudden insight caught him and held him in its glaring light. He had been doing all this work. He had built this home. He had fought the roughest timber-jacks and the high hills and the raging winter for money. He had dreamt and laboured on his dreams and built them higher. Why? For Ruth Lansing. ”

“ Augusta sat back, saying nothing. She was sorry that she had spoken now, and about this. Jimmie, she felt, had told the literal truth. And the incident seemed to make it more difficult to lead up to the things which she must say today.
They rode to the door in silence, both subdued by the nearness of a crisis which each foresaw in a different way. As the lugubrious coach drove away they stood on the sidewalk looking after it, both half conscious that it was the last vestige of an existence with which they were now finished. ”

“ On the draught the lingering flames went dancing swiftly through the brush of the ravine and spread out around the southern side of the hill. Before the men could turn, the thing was done. The hill made itself into a chimney and the flames went roaring to the top of it.
The men fled over the ridge of the hill and down to the south, to get themselves out of that encircling death.
When they were beyond the circle of fire on that side, they saw the full extent of what had befallen them in what had been their moment of victory. ”