Arthur Stringer

“ If there was a sting of cynicism in the interjection, the younger man made no outward effort to ward it off. Crowley saw, when it was too late, that the others childheartedness was impervious to enmity, that he was angelically innocent of the very armor which, for so long had galled and burdened down his own tainted shoulders.
But still the young acolyte of the rapt eyes contemplated the glowing hearth in satisfied silence. Crowley lighted his cigar, and still waited. He even lighted a match, and held it for the other man, significantly. ”

“ As Allin turned to cut and fling half a dozen fresh slices of bacon into his sizzling frying-pan, the older man had a still better chance to study his anomalous new companion. His deliberate eye took note of the young teacher's square, compact head, of the short, crisply curling black hair that covered it, of the well-blocked-out jaw, the stalwart width of the shoulder that made the thick-set figure seem almost short, the blanched ruddiness of the face, with its alert. ”

“ Crowley's mind flashed back over the three intervening years, those idly withering, denuding implacably alienating years when life and all it held seemed to have fallen into a sour stagnation, from which even she herself had emerged so insufficient, so flaccid, so bitterly unsatisfying. ”

“ Yes, he said quietly, with an unconscious deepening of the voice, “there was one person I met there who was more than friend to me, a woman—an angel, I often think she must be!—who came into my life that troubled year, like a star out of the darkness. ”

“ He was glad to escape from the gathering night, a minute later, into the thick, tobacco-laden, companionable warmth of Elk Crossing's one and only hotel. Here, however, not even a cot could be secured for the night. The alerter day-coach passengers had already poured into the little wooden road-house and Crowley had to face the disheartening novelty of patroling the village in quest of a bed. The school-teacher, he was told, often took in decent folk, at a pinch. ”

“ His twofold feeling of repugnance, first for the very face itself, and second for the reiterated theatricality of the whole miserable affair, seemed to shift and merge into one of pity for the man before him. Yet a moment later he heard his own lips saying involuntarily: “She is very beautiful!” Then he choked back the little shuddering gasp that seemed from his throat escaping with the sudden cry: “But what do you know of women? What do you know of her, of what she is, of what she has been or might be?”
Allin shook his head from side to side, unmoved. ”

“ The two men seated themselves.
“You are the teacher here in the village, I believe?” began Crowley, uncomfortably hot at the feeling that he was jockeying for his position.
“Yes, my second winter at the Crossing.” A generous forkful of potatoes and bacon punctuated his sentence. “I'm trying to pound the rudiments into thirty young pagans out here and read political economy at the same time.”
“You say out here—then the North-West isn't your home:
“It always has been. I teach here in the winter and get four hundred and the shack for it. ”

“ By this time Crowley's eyes had grown accustomed to the light, and he looked at the other man with a natural curiosity which deepened, as he gazed, to a discreet studiousness.
“Oh, pshaw! I'm glad enough to have you! I 'bach' it here alone, through the winter. My name's Allin—John Allin.”
When Crowley, holding aloof from giving his name, explained that his home was in New York, Allin paused in the act of helping him off with his fur lined overcoat, and looked at him enviously, an even keener interest in his quick eyes. ”

“ She came to Banff, ill, I think, when I was an under-guide at the hotel, Once each day I had to take her up the mountains up the Corkscrew, to Tunnel Mountain, to the Cave and Basin, to Devil's Gap, to Mount Rundle, the Sun Dance Canyon. She was as far away from home and as lonely as I was. I guess she pitied me. But that was all I asked. In a life like that, shut in with snow and mountains and solitude, you can say and learn a great many things. ”

“ He paused, musingly, unashamed of his boyish eloquence, glowing with an ardor that filled Crowley with an ominous and fretful uneasiness. Every tendency of the older man's life had been toward reticence ”

“ That's how we got these prairie lilies. She slipped down the side of the track and picked them for me.”
The younger man took up the picture from the table and replaced it on his shelf, between Progress and Poverty and his dog-eared Keats, carefully drawing the faded calico curtain.
Crowley, at the movement, felt as though some sterner hand had suddenly excluded him from a sanctuary. A flame of mad, unreasoning jealousy of the man who had crushed even this fool's-gold from the sullen quartz that had always defied his own efforts swept fiercely through him. ”

“ Allin had already turned in his chair, and on the stove-hearth was knocking the ashes from a dark-stained corncob pipe
“Won't you try this, to-night?” said Crowley, with forced friendliness of tone, handing him one of his Havanas. Allin slipped the cigar from its tube, smelt it with boyish delight, looked at it again, and elatedly explained that it was not often he got hold of a cigar in Elk Crossing, even a bad one. ”

“ Why, that's what makes life worth living!" cried the school-teacher, feeling, as the other had felt before him, the wordless shock of that strangely diverse which accident had projected upon his own. Crowley allowed himself to wonder if, after all, wealth did not bring with it its inalienable drawbacks ”