James Oliver Curwood

“ He had seen Jeanne in another man's arms; he had read the confirmation of his fears in Pierre's grief-distorted face, in the strange tremble of his voice, in the words that he had spoken. He was sorry for Pierre. He would have been glad if that other man had been the lovable half-breed; if Jeanne, in the poetry of life and love, had given herself to the one who had saved the spark of life in her chilled little body years and years ago. And yet in his own grief he unconsciously rejoiced that it was a man like Pierre who suffered with him. ”

“ For an instant Jeanne's white, terrified face met his own. And then, without a word to him, she fled swiftly down the trail.
Philip made no effort to follow. For two or three minutes he stood like a man turned suddenly into hewn rock, staring with unseeing eyes into the gloom where Jeanne had disappeared. Then he walked back to the edge of the spruce. There he drew his revolver, and cocked it. The starlight revealed a madness in his face as he approached Thorpe's cabin. He was smiling, but it was such a smile as presages death; a smile as implacable as fate itself. ”

“ If a bomb had burst under his feet he could not have been more amazed than at this information, given to him in Jeanne's quiet voice. Fort o' God—within thirty miles of the scene where very soon he was to fight the great battle of his life! He dug his paddle into the water and sent the canoe hissing up the river. His blood pounded like that of a racehorse on the home-stretch. Of all the things that had happened, of all he had learned, this was the most significant. Every thought ran like a separate powder-flash to a single idea, to one great, overpowering question. ”

“ Philip motioned to MacDougall, who went into the little office room.
"I will die," whispered Pierre, softly, as though he were achieving a triumph. "And everything would die with me, M'sieur, if I did not know that you love Jeanne, and that you will care for her when I am gone. M'sieur, I have told you that I love her. I have worshiped her, next to my God. I die happy, knowing that I am dying for her. If I had lived I would have suffered, for I love alone. She does not dream that my love is different from hers, for I have never told her. ”

“ An hour before he had stood with bared head over the ancient dead at Churchill, and now, on the rock, he had seen the resurrection of what he had dreamed those dead to be in life. He had never seen people like Pierre and Jeanne. Their strange dress, the rapier at Pierre's side, his courtly bow, the low, graceful courtesy that the girl had made him, all carried him back to the days of the old pictures that hung in the factor's room at Churchill, when high-blooded gallants came into the wilderness with their swords at their sides, wearing the favors of court ladies next their hearts. ”

“ You can hear the wash of the Bay down there, and if you're keen you can catch the smell of icebergs. There's Fort Churchill—a rifle-shot beyond the ridge, asleep. There's nothing but Hudson's Bay Company's posts, Indian camps, and trappers between here and civilization, which is four hundred miles down there. Seems like a quiet and peaceful country, doesn't it? There's something about it that makes you thrill and wonder if this isn't the biggest part of the universe after all. Listen! Hear the Indian dogs wailing down at Churchill! That's the primal voice in this world, the voice of the wild. ”

“ He could hear the gale whistling over the top of the great rock, and moaning in the spruce and cedar forest, and he closed the door after him, and buried himself in the darkness and wind. He bowed his head to the stinging snow, which came like blasts of steeled shot, and hurried into the shelter of the Sun Rock, and stood there after that listening to the wildness of the storm and the strange whistling of the wind cutting itself to pieces far over his head. Since man had first beheld that rock such storms as this had come and gone for countless generations. ”

“ In the flashing play of the fire her exquisite arms and shoulders shone with dazzling beauty; her eyes laughed at him; her hair rippled in a golden flood. Faintly there came to him, filling the room slowly, tingling his nerves, the sweet scent of heliotrope—the perfume that had filled his nostrils on that other night, a long time ago, the sweet scent that had come to him in the handkerchief dropped on the rock, the breath of the bit of lace that had bound Jeanne's hair!
Eileen moved toward him. "Philip," she said, "now are you glad to see me?" ”

“ And such men! Men who had lived and died when the world was unborn in a half of its knowledge and science, when red blood was the great capital, strong hearts the winners of life. And there were women, too, women who had come with these men, and died with them, in the opening-up of a new world. It was such men as these, and such women as these, that Philip loved, and he walked with bared head and swiftly beating heart over the unmarked jungle of the dead.
And then he came to other things, the first low log buildings of Churchill, to the silence of sleeping life. ”

“ The canoe began moving slowly onward, and Jeanne turned so that her eyes searched the stream ahead. A thick wall of stunted forest shut out the barren from their view; the stream grew narrower, and on the opposite side a barren ridge, threatening them with torn and upheaved masses of rock, flung the heavy shadows of evening down upon them. No one spoke. Philip could hear Pierre breathing behind him: something in the intense quiet—in the awesome effect which their approach to Fort o' God had upon these two—sent strange little thrills shooting through his body. ”

“ He repeated Pierre's instructions to him, described his terrible fear for her, and in it all withheld but one thing—the name of Lord Fitzhugh Lee. Jeanne listened to him without a word. She sat as erect as one of the slender reeds among which the canoe was hidden. Her dark eyes never left his face. They seemed to have grown darker when he finished.
"May the great God reward you for what you have done," she said, in a low voice, quivering with a suppressed passion. "You are brave, M'sieur Philip—as brave as I have dreamed of men being." ”

“ He was as tall as Philip; his shoulders were broader; his chest massive; and as he stood under the light of one of the hanging lamps, his face shining with a pale glow, one hand upon his breast, the other extended, it seemed to Philip that all of the greatness and past glory of Fort o' God, whatever they may have been, were personified in the man he beheld. He was dressed in soft buckskin, like Pierre. His hair and beard grew in wild disorder, and from under shaggy eyebrows there burned a pair of deep-set eyes of the color of blue steel. He was a man to inspire awe; old, and yet young ”

“ For a brief space Jeanne was silent.
"Yes, always, M'sieur. I am eighteen years old, and this is the first time that I have ever seen what you people call civilization. It is my first visit to Fort Churchill. It is the first time I have ever been away from Fort o' God."
Jeanne's voice was low and subdued. It rang with truth. In it there was something that was almost tragedy. For a breath or two Philip's heart seemed to stop its beating, and he leaned far over, looking straight and questioningly into the beautiful face that met his own. ”

“ Never had he seen such a beautiful face among the forest people. He had dreamed of such faces beside camp-fires, in the deep loneliness of long nights in the forests, when he had awakened to bring before him visions of what Eileen Brokaw might have been to him if he had found her one of these people. He drew himself closer to the rock. The girl turned again to the edge of the cliff, her slender form silhouetted against the starlit sky. ”

“ Philip gripped at his throat to hold back a sob. A terrible stillness came into the room, and he dared not move. It seemed a long time before Jeanne lifted her head, slowly, tenderly, as if fearing to awaken a sleeping child. She turned to him, and he read the truth in her face before she had spoken. Her voice was low and calm, filled with the sweetness and tenderness and strength that come only to a woman in the final moment of a great sorrow.
"Leave us, Philip," she said. "Pierre is dead." ”

“ A dozen feet away, full in the moonlight, three figures sat on the edge of the cliff, as motionless as though hewn out of rock. Instinctively Philip's hand slipped to his revolver holster, but he drew it back when he saw that one of the three figures was that of a woman. Beside her crouched a huge wolf-dog; on the other side of the dog sat a man. The man was resting in the attitude of an Indian, with his elbows on his knees, his chin in the palms of his hands, gazing steadily and silently out over the Bay toward Churchill. ”

“ He turned and ran in the direction which Pierre's assailants had taken, his head lowered, his revolver held in front of him, on a level with his breast. He had not gone a hundred yards when something stopped him. In his path, with its face turned straight up to the moonlit sky, lay the body of a man. For an instant Philip bent over it. The broken blade of Pierre's rapier glistened under the man's throat. One lifeless hand clutched at it, as though in the last moment of life he had tried to draw it forth. The face was distorted, the eyes were still open, the lips parted. ”

“ She had risen to her feet; there had come for an instant a flash like that of fire in her eyes; her voice trembled a little when she spoke. There was resentment in the poise of her white shoulders as Ransom's voice came to them in a loud laugh from behind the palms; her red lips showed disdain and anger. She hated Ransom for breaking in; she despised Philip for allowing the interruption to tear away her triumph. Her own betrayal of herself was like tonic to Philip. ”

“ Philip smiled grimly.
"The man does live, and the combination does exist," he said, slowly. "Greggy, I have known of men, and of combinations who have spent millions, who have sacrificed everything of honor and truth, who have driven thousands of men, women, and children to starvation—and worse—to achieve a victory in high finance. I have known of men and combinations who have broken almost every law of man and God in the fight for money and power. ”

“ What significance was there in this strange combination of circumstances that persisted in drawing Pierre and Jeanne into the plot that threatened himself? Had there been truth, after all, in those last words that he impressed upon the fainting senses of Pierre Couchee's message to Gregson?
He waited to answer none of the questions that leaped through his brain. To-morrow some one would find Pierre, or Pierre would crawl down into Churchill. And then there would be the dead man to account for. He shuddered as he returned his revolver into his holster and braced his limbs. ”

“ Life, smooth, uneventful, develops friendship slowly; an hour of the unusual may lay bare a soul. Philip thought of Eileen Brokaw, whose heart was still a closed mystery to him; who was a stranger, in spite of the years he had known her. In four days he had known Jeanne a lifetime; in those four days Jeanne had learned more of him than Eileen Brokaw could ever know. So he arrived at the resolution which made him, too, look eagerly ahead to the end of the journey. At Fort o' God he would tell Jeanne of his love. ”

“ New buildings loomed up—working quarters of men who were grubbing for dollars, the new wharves, the skeletons of elevators, sullen, windowless warehouses, the office-buildings of men who were already fighting and quarreling and gripping at one another's throats in the struggle for supremacy, for the biggest and ripest plums in this new land of opportunity. The dollar-fight had begun, and the things that already marked its presence loomed monstrous and grotesque to Philip, as if jeering at the forgotten efforts of those whom the sea was washing away. ”

“ I spent a half of the summer at our cottage on the lake."
"But it is not tan," he persisted, thrilled for a moment by the discoveries he was making. "It is the wind; it is the open; it is the smoke of camp-fires; it is the elixir of balsam and cedar and pine. That is what I see in your face—unless it is the fire."
"It is the fire, partly," she said. "And the rest is the wind and the open of the seas we have come across, and the sting of icebergs. Ugh: my face feels like nettles!"
She rubbed her cheeks with her two hands, and then held up one hand to Philip. ”

“ We have taken pleasure in living as we do—in making for ourselves our own little social codes, our childish aristocracy, our make-believe world. It is the spirit of Fort o' God that lives with us, and makes us content; the shadow-faces of men and women who once filled these rooms with life and pleasure, and whose memory seems to have passed into our keeping alone. I know them all; many of their names, all of their faces. I have a daguerreotype of Camille Poitiers, and she must have been very beautiful. ”

“ Philip broke the silence.
"Now—you understand."
"It is impossible!" gasped Gregson. "I cannot believe this! It—it might have happened a thousand—two thousand years ago—but not now. My God, man!" he cried, more excitedly. "You do not mean to tell me that you believe this will be done?"
"Yes," replied Philip.
"It is impossible!" exclaimed Gregson again, crushing the letter in his hand. "A man doesn't live—a combination doesn't exist—that would start such a hell loose as this—in this way!" ”