Gilbert Parker

“ It would have appealed to more eyes than a woman's.
"To-morrow!" She nodded at it again and turned again to the bright world outside. With arms raised and hands resting against the timbers of the doorway, she stood dreaming. A flock of pigeons passed with a whir not far away, and skirted the woods making down the valley. She watched their flight abstractedly, yet with a subconscious sense of pleasure. Life—they were Life, eager, buoyant, belonging to this wild region, where still the heart could feel so much at home, where the great world was missed so little. ”

“ To Jim the world became a sea of maddening forces which buffeted him; a whirlpool of fire in which his brain was tortured, his mind was shrivelled up; a vast army rending itself, each man against the other. It was a purgatory of music, broken by discords; and then at last—how sweet it all was, after the eternity of misery—"Church bells and voices low," and Sally singing to him, Nancy's voice calling! Then, nothing but sleep—sleep, a sinking down millions of miles in an ether of drowsiness which thrilled him ”

“ There were times when Jim's nerves were shaken in his struggle against the unseen foe, and he had spoken to her querulously, almost sharply. Yet in her tears there was no reproach for him, rather for herself—the fear that she might lose her influence over him, that she could not keep him close to her heart, that he might drift away from her in the commonplaces and monotony of work and domestic life. Everything so depended on her being to him not only the one woman for whom he cared, but the woman without whom he could care for nothing else. ”

“ Suddenly there appeared at the bedside Arrowhead, gaunt and weak, his face swollen, the skin of it broken by the whips of storm.
"He is my brother," he said, and, stooping, laid both hands, which he had held before the fire for a long time, on Jim's heart. "Take his feet, his hands, his, legs, and his head in your hands," he said to them all. "Life is in us; we will give him life." ”

“ You have the perfect gift in private life, and you have a public gift. You have a genius for ruling. Say, my dear, don't wreck it all. I know you are not for me, but there are better men in the country than I am. Hartzman will be a great man one day—he wants you. Young Tilden wants you; he has millions, and he will never disgrace them or you, the power which they can command, and the power which you have. And there are others. Your people have told you they will turn you off; the world will say things— will rend you. There is nothing so popular for the moment as the fall of a favourite. ”

“ From Browning she had written down in her long sliding handwriting, and hung up beneath Jim's looking- glass, the heartening and inspiring words:
"One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake."
They had lived above the sordid, and there was something in the nature of Jim's life to help them to it. ”

“ While he lived she could affirm the rights of a white man's daughter, the rights of the daughter of a pioneer who had helped to make the West; and her pride in him had given a glow to her cheek and a spring to her step which drew every eye. In the chief street of Portage la Drome men would stop their trafficking and women nudge each other when she passed, and wherever she went she stirred interest, excited admiration, or aroused prejudice—but the prejudice did not matter so long as her father, Joel Renton, lived. ”

“ Like a pocket of deerskin is every house, warm and small and full of good things. Hai-yai, what is this life to that! There you will be head and chief of all, for there is money enough for a thousand horses; and your father was a white man, and these are the days when the white man rules. Like clouds before the sun are the races of men, and one race rises and another falls. ”

“ III It was as the Man from Clancey's had said, no one had ever gone down Dog Nose Rapids in the nighttime, and probably no one but Jenny Long would have ventured it. Dingley had had no idea what a perilous task had been set his rescuer. It was only when the angry roar of the great rapids floated up-stream to them, increasing in volume till they could see the terror of tumbling waters just below, and the canoe shot forward like a snake through the swift, smooth current which would sweep them into the vast caldron, that he realised the terrible hazard of the enterprise. ”

“ There is no blood in all the West like yours. My heart was heavy, and dark thoughts came to me, because my man is gone, and the life is not my life, and I am only an Indian woman from the Warais, and my heart goes out there always now. But some great Medicine has been poured into my heart. As I stood at the door and saw you lying there, I called to the Sun. 'O great Spirit,' I said, 'help me to understand; for this girl is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, and Evil has come between us!' And the Sun Spirit poured the Medicine into my spirit, and there is no cloud between us now. ”

“ Jim agreed, as they drew farther and farther away from Washington and the past, and nearer and nearer to the Far North and their future. Never did two more honest souls put their hands in each other's, and set forth upon the thorniest path to a goal which was their hearts' desire. Since they had become one, there had come into Sally's face that illumination which belongs only to souls possessed of an idea greater than themselves, outside themselves—saints, patriots; faces which have been washed in the salt tears dropped for others' sorrows, and lighted by the fire of self-sacrifice. ”

“ I want to see the white men's cities grow, and the armies coming over the hill with the ploughs and the reapers and the mowers, and the wheels and the belts and engines of the great factories, and the white woman's life spreading everywhere; for I am a white man's daughter. I can't be both Indian and white. I will not be like the sun when the shadow cuts across it and the land grows dark. I will not be half-breed. I will be white or I will be Indian ”

“ The crime of Arrowhead, the gallows waiting for him, seemed very far away. They were only two silent travellers, sharing the same hardship, helping to give material comfort to each other—in the inevitable democracy of those far places, where small things are not great nor great things small; where into men's hearts comes the knowledge of the things that matter; where, from the wide, starry sky, from the august loneliness, and the soul of the life which has brooded there for untold generations, God teaches the values of this world and the next. ”

“ Was there not Piegan and Blackfoot blood in the girl's veins? Must only the white man's blood be reckoned when they made up their daily account and balanced the books of their lives, credit and debtor,—misunderstanding and kind act, neglect and tenderness, reproof and praise, gentleness and impulse, anger and caress,—to be set down in the everlasting record? Why must the Indian always give way—Indian habits, Indian desires, the Indian way of doing things, the Indian point of view, Indian food, Indian medicine? Was it all bad, and only that which belonged to white life good? ”

“ It is in the tale of our people. One tribe ruled, and the others were their slaves. If it is written on the leaves of the Tree of Life that the white man rule us for ever, then it shall be so. I have spoken. Now, behold I go."
Jim had conquered, and together they sped away with the dogs through the sweet-smelling spruce woods where every branch carried a cloth of white, and the only sound heard was the swish of a blanket of snow as it fell to the ground from the wide webs of green, or a twig snapped under the load it bore. ”

“ On either side only the shadowed shore, forsaken by the races which had hunted and roamed and ravaged here—not a light, nor any sign of life, or the friendliness of human presence to make their isolation less complete, their danger, as it were, shared by fellow-mortals. Bright as the moon was, it was not bright enough for perfect pilotage. Never in the history of white men had these rapids been ridden at nighttime. ”

“ Must the world stand still because a handful of Crees need a hunting-ground? Must the makers of cities and the wonders of the earth, who fill the land with plenty—must they stand far off, because the Crees and their chief would wander over millions of acres, for each man a million, when by a hundred, ay, by ten, each white man would live in plenty, and make the land rejoice. ”

“ It was Sewell's hand which first felt Jim's heart and pulse, and found that there was still life left, even before it could be done by the doctor from headquarters, who had come to visit a sick man at the post.
For hours they worked with snow upon the frozen limbs to bring back life and consciousness. Consciousness came at last with half delirium, half understanding; as emerging from the passing sleep of anaesthetics, the eye sees things and dimly registers them, before the brain has set them in any relation to life or comprehension. ”

“ All was silent and cruelly cold. Nothing but the wide plain of snow and the steely air. But as she stood intently listening, the red glow from the fire behind her, again came the cry—"Pauline!" not far away. Her heart beat hard, and she raised her head and called—why was it she should call out in a language not her own? "Qu'appelle? Qu'appelle?"
And once again on the still night air came the trembling appeal—
"Pauline!"
"Qu'appelle? Qu'appelle?" she cried, then, with a gasping murmur of understanding and recognition she ran forwards in the frozen night towards the sound of the voice. ”

“ The snow-tipped mountains far above and away, the fir- covered, cedar-ranged foothills, and, lower down, the wonderful maple and ash woods, with their hundred autumn tints, all merging to one soft, red tone, the roar of the stream tumbling down the ravine from the heights, the air that braced the nerves—it all seemed to be part of her, the passion of life corresponding to the passion of living in her. ”

“ Suddenly her anger flared out, low and vivid and fierce, but her words were slow and measured. "There is no reason why I should marry you—not one. You offer me marriage as a prince might give a penny to a beggar. If my mother were not an Indian woman, you would not have taken it all as a matter of course. But my father was a white man, and I am a white man's daughter, and I would rather marry an Indian, who would think me the best thing there was in the light of the sun, than marry you. ”

“ Little white one, the white life is the only life, and I will live it with you till a white man comes and gives you a white man's home. But not John Alloway—shall the crow nest with the oriole?"
As the woman spoke with slow, measured voice, full of the cadences of a heart revealing itself, the girl's breath at first seemed to stop, so still she lay; then, as the true understanding of the words came to her, she panted with excitement, her breast heaved, and the blood flushed her face. ”

“ In the awful struggle between man and nature that followed, the captive became the leader. The craft of the plains, the inherent instinct, the feeling which was more than eyesight became the only hope. One whole day to cover ten miles—an endless path of agony, in which Jim went down again and again, but came up blinded by snow and drift, and cut as with lashes by the angry wind. At the end of the ten miles was a Hudson's Bay Company's post and safety ”

“ With five hundred men ready to turn him loose in the plains without dogs or food, he carried himself with a watchful coolness and complacent determination which got home to their minds with great force.
For hours the struggle for the murderer went on, a struggle of mind over inferior mind and matter. Arrowhead was a chief whose will had never been crossed by his own people, and to master that will by a superior will, to hold back the destructive force which, to the ignorant minds of the braves, was only a natural force of defence, meant a task needing more than authority behind it. ”

“ He was having his last fight. They watched him with an aching anxiety, and there was anger in the doctor's face. He had no patience with these forces arrayed against him.
At last the doctor whispered to Sewell: "It's no use; he must have the brandy, or he can't live an hour."
Sewell weakened; the tears fell down his rough, hard cheeks. "It'll ruin him-it's ruin or death."
"Trust a little more in God, and in the man's strength. Let us give him the chance. Force it down his throat—he's not responsible," said the physician, to whom saving life was more than all else. ”

“ In the greater, deeper experience of their lives, the more material side of existence had grown less and less to them. Their home was a model of simple comfort and some luxury, though Jim had insisted that Sally's income should not be spent, except upon the child, and should be saved for the child, their home being kept on his pay and on the tiny income left by his mother. With the help of an Indian girl, and a half-breed for outdoor work and fires and gardening, Sally had cared for the house herself. ”

“ As the light came in at the windows, Sewell touched him on the shoulder, and said: "He is sleeping now."
"I hear my brother breathe," answered Arrowhead. "He will live."
All night he had listened, and had heard Jim's breath as only a man who has lived in waste places can hear. "He will live. What I take with one hand I give with the other."
He had taken the life of the factor; he had given Jim his life. And when he was tried three months later for murder, some one else said this for him, and the hearts of all, judge and jury, were so moved they knew not what to do. ”