Part 18 (2/2)

Ben gazed at her with a curious mingling of emotions. It had not been part of his plan to bring sorrow to this girl. After all, she was not in the least responsible for her father's crimes. He had sworn to have no regrets, no matter what innocent flesh was despoiled in order that he might strike the guilty; yet the sight of that bowed, lovely head went home to him very deeply indeed. She was the instrument of his vengeance, necessary to his cause, but there was nothing to be gained by afflicting her needlessly. At least, he could give her his pity. It would not weaken him, dampen his fiery resolution, to give her that.

As he guided his craft he felt growing compa.s.sion for her; yet it was a personal pity only and brought no regrets that he had acted as he did.

”I wish you wouldn't cry,” he said, rather quietly.

Amazed beyond expression at the words, Beatrice looked up. For the instant her woe was forgotten in the astounding fact that she had won compa.s.sion from this cast-iron man in the stern.

”I'll try not to,” she told him, her dark eyes ineffably beautiful with their l.u.s.ter of tears. ”I don't see why I should try--why I should try to do anything you ask me to--but yet I will--”

Further words came to him, and he could not restrain them. ”You're sort of--the goat, Beatrice,” he told her soberly. ”It was said, long ago, that the sins of the father must be visited upon the children; and maybe that's the way it is with you. I can't help but feel sorry--that you had to undergo this--so that I could reach your father and his men. If you had seen old Ezram lying there--the life gone from, his kind, gray old face--the man who brought me home and gave me my one chance--maybe you'd understand.”

They were speechless a long time, Beatrice watching the swift leap of the sh.o.r.e line, Ben guiding, with steady hand, the canoe. Neither of them could guess at what speed they traveled this first wild half-hour; but he knew that the long miles--so heart-breaking with their ridges and brush thickets to men and horses--were whipping past them each in a few, little breaths. Ever they plunged deeper into the secret, hushed heart of the wild--a land unknown to the tread of white men, a region so still and changeless that it seemed excluded from the reign and law of, time.

The spruce grew here, straight and dark and tall, a stalwart army whose measureless march no human eyes beheld. Already they had come farther than a pack train could travel, through the same region, in weary days.

Already they were at the border of Back There. They had cut the last ties with the world of men. There were no trails here, leading slowly but immutably to the busy centers of civilization; not a blaze on a tree for the eyes of a woodsman riding on some forest venture, not the ashes of a dead camp fire or a charred cooking rack, where an Indian had broiled his caribou flesh. Except by the slow process of exploration with pack horses, traveling a few miles each day, fording unknown rivers and encircling impa.s.sable ranges, or by waiting patiently until the fall rains swelled the river, they might never leave this land they had so boldly entered. They could not go out the way they had come--over those seething waters--and the river, falling swiftly, would soon be too low to permit them to push down to its lower waters where they might find Indian encampments.

Nothing was left but the wilderness, ancient and unchanged. The spruce forest had a depth and a darkness that even Ben had never seen; the wild creatures that they sometimes glimpsed on the bank stared at them wholly without knowledge as to what they were, and likely amazed at the strength whereby they had braved this seething torrent that swept through their sylvan home. Here was a land where the grizzly had not yet learned of a might greater than his, where he had not yet surrendered his sovereignty to man. Here the moose--mightiest of the antlered herd--reached full maturity and old age without ever mistaking the call of a birch-bark horn for that of his rutting cow. Young bulls with only a fifty-inch spread of horns and ten points on each did not lead the herds, as in the more accessible provinces of the North. All things were in their proper balance, since the forest had gone unchanged for time immemorial; and as the head-hunters had not yet come the bull moose did not rank as a full-grown warrior until he wore thirty points and had five feet of spread, and he wasn't a patriarch until he could no longer walk free between two tree trunks seventy inches apart. Certain of the lesser forest people were not in unwonted numbers because that fierce little hunter, the marten, had been exterminated by trappers; the otter, yet to know the feel of cold iron, fished to his heart's content in rivers where an artificial fly had never fallen and the trout swarmed in uncounted numbers in the pools.

Darting down the rapids Ben felt the beginnings of an exquisite exhilaration. Part of it arose from the very thrill and excitement of their headlong pace; but partly it had a deeper, more portentous origin.

Here was his own country--this Back There. While all the spruce forest in which he had lived had been his natural range and district--his own kind of land with which he felt close and intimate relations--this was even more his home than his own birthplace. By light of a secret quality, hard to recognize, he was of it, and it was of him. He felt the joy of one who sees the gleam of his own hearth through a distant window.

He _knew_ this land; it was as if he had simply been away, through the centuries, and had come home. The shadows and the stillness had the exact depth and tone that was true and right; the forest fragance was undefiled; the dark sky line was like something he had dreamed come true. He felt a strange and growing excitement, as if magnificent adventure were opening out before him. His gaze fell, with a queer sense of understanding, to Fenris.

The wolf had recovered from his fear of the river, by now, and he was crouched, alert and still, in his place. His gaze was fast upon the sh.o.r.e line; and the green and yellow fires that mark the beast were ablaze again in his eyes. Fenris too made instinctive response to those breathless forests; and Ben knew that the bond between them was never so close as now.

Fenris also knew that here was his own realm, the land in which the great Fear had not yet laid its curse. The forest still thronged with game, the wood trails would be his own. Here was the motherland, not only to him but to his master, too. They were its fierce children: one by breed, the other because he answered, to the full, the call of the wild from which no man is wholly immune.

Ben could have understood the wolf's growing exultation. The war he was about to wage with Neilson. would be on his own ground, in a land that enhanced and developed his innate, natural powers, and where he had every advantage. The wolf does not run into the heart of busy cities in pursuit of his prey. He tries to decoy it into his own fastnesses.

A sudden movement on the part of Beatrice, in the bow of the canoe, caught his eye. She had leaned forward and was reaching among the supplies. His mind at once leaped to the box of sh.e.l.ls for her pistol that he had thrown among the duffle, but evidently this was not the object of her search. She lifted into her hands a paper parcel, the same she had brought from her cabin early that morning.

He tried to a.n.a.lyze the curious mingling of emotions in her face. It was neither white with disdain nor dark with wrath; and the tears were gone from her eyes. Rather her expression was speculative, pensive. Presently her eyes met his.

His heart leaped; why he did not know. ”What is, it?” he asked.

”Ben--I called you that yesterday and there's no use going back to last names now--I've made an important decision.”

”I hope it's a happy one,” he ventured.

”It's as happy as it can be, under the circ.u.mstances. Ben, I came of a line of frontiersmen--the forest people--and if the woods teach one thing it is to make the best of any bad situation.”

Ben nodded. For all his long training he had not entirely mastered this lesson himself, but he knew she spoke true.

”We've found out how hard Fate can hit--if I can make it plain,” she went on. ”We've found out there are certain powers--or devils--or something else, and what I don't know--that are always lying in wait for people, ready to strike them down. Maybe you would call it Destiny. But the Destiny city men know isn't the Destiny we know out here--I don't have to tell you that. We see Nature just as she is, without any gay clothes, and we know the cruelty behind her smile, and the evil plans behind her gentle words.”

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