Isobel (10 page)

"My Jeanne has blue eyes—"

"And have they little brown dots in them like a wood violet?"

"No-o-o—"

"They're blue, just blue, ain't they?"

"Yes."

"And I suppose most all blue eyes are just blue, without the little
brown spots. Wouldn't you think so?"

"What in Heaven's name are you driving at?" demanded Pelliter.

"I just wanted you to notice that her eyes have little brown spots in
them," replied Billy. "I've only seen one other pair of eyes— just
like hers." He turned toward the door. "I'm going out to care for the
dogs and dig up Blake," he added. "I can't rest until I've seen him."

Pelliter placed Little Mystery on her feet.

"I'll see to the dogs," he said. "But I don't want to look at Blake
again."

The two men went out, and while Pelliter led the dogs to a lean-to
behind the cabin Billy began to work with an ax and spade at the spot
his comrade had pointed out to him. Ten minutes later he came to
Blake. An excitement which he had tried to hide from Pelliter overcame
his sense of horror as he dragged out the stiff and frozen corpse of
the man. It was a terrible picture that the dead man made, with his
coarse bearded face turned up to the sky and his teeth still snarling
as they had snarled on the day he died. Billy knew most men who had
come into the north above Churchill, but he had never looked upon
Blake before. It was probable that the dead man had told a part of the
truth, and that he was a sailor left on the upper coast by some
whaler. He shivered as he began going through his pockets. Each moment
added to his disappointment. He found a few things— a knife, two
keys, several coins, a fire-flint, and other articles— but there was
no letter or writing of any kind, and that was what he had hoped to
find. There was nothing that might solve the mystery of the miracle
that had descended upon them. He rolled the dead man into the grave,
covered him over, and went into the cabin.

Pelliter was in his usual place— on his hands and knees, with Little
Mystery astride his back. He paused in a mad race across the cabin
floor and looked up with inquiring eyes. The little girl held up her
arms, and MacVeigh tossed her half-way to the ceiling and then hugged
her golden head close up to his chilled face. Pelliter jumped to his
feet; his face grew serious as Billy looked at him over the child's
tousled curls.

"I found nothing— absolutely nothing of any account," he said.

He placed Little Mystery on one of the bunks and faced the other with
a puzzled loko in his eyes.

"I wish you hadn't been in a fever on that day of the fight, Pelly,"
he said. "He must have said something— something that would give us a
clue."

"Mebbe he did, Billy," replied Pelliter, looking with a shiver at the
few things MacVeigh had placed on the cabin table. "But there's no use
worrying any more about it. It ain't in reason that she's got any
people up here, six hundred miles from the shack of a white man that
'd own a little beauty like her. She's mine. I found her. She's mine
to keep."

He sat down at the table, and MacVeigh sat down opposite him, smiling
sympathetically into Pelliter's eyes.

"I know you want her— want her bad, Pelly," he said. "And I know the
girl would love her. But she's got people— somewhere, and it's our
duty to find 'em. She didn't drop out of a balloon, Pelly. Do you
suppose— the dead man— might be her father?"

It was the first time he had asked this question, and he noted the
other's sudden shudder of revulsion.

"I've thought of that. But it can't be. He was a beast, and she—
she's a little angel. Billy, her mother must have been beautiful. had
that's what made me guess— fear—"

Pelliter wiped his face uneasily, and the two young men stared into
each other's eyes. MacVeigh leaned forward, waiting.

"I figured it all out last night, lying awake there in my bunk,"
continued Pelliter, "and as the second best friend I have on earth I
want to ask you not to go any farther, Billy. She's mine. My Jeanne,
down there, will love her like a real mother, and we'll bring her up
right. But if you go on, Billy, you'll find something unpleasant— I—
I— swear you will!"

"You know—"

"I've guessed," interrupted the other. "Billy, sometimes a beast— a
man beast— holds an attraction for a woman, and Blake was that sort
of a beast. You remember— two years ago— a sailor ran away with the
wife of a whaler's captain away up at Narwhale Inlet. Well—"

Again the two men stared silently at each other. MacVeigh turned
slowly toward the child. She had fallen asleep, and he could see the
dull shimmer of her golden curls as they lay scattered over Pelliter's
pillow.

"Poor little devil!" he exclaimed, softly.

"I believe that woman was Little Mystery's mother," Pelliter went on.
"She couldn't bear to leave the little kid when she went with Blake,
so she took her along. Some women do that. And after a time she died.
Then Blake took up with an Eskimo woman. You know what happened after
that. We don't want Little Mystery to know all this when she grows up.
It's better not. She's too little to remember, ain't she? She won't
ever know."

"I remember the ship," said Billy, not taking his eyes off Little
Mystery. "She was the Silver Seal. Her captain's name was Thompson."

He did not look at Pelliter, but he could feel the quick, tense
stiffening of the other's body. There was a moment's silence. Then
Pelliter spoke in a low, unnatural voice.

"Billy, you ain't going to hunt him up, are you? That wouldn't be fair
to me or to the kid. My Jeanne 'll love her, an' mebbe— mebbe some
day your kid 'll come along an' marry her—"

MacVeigh rose to his feet. Pelliter did not see the sudden look of
grief that shot into his face.

"What do you say, Billy?"

"Think it over, Pelly," came back Billy's voice, huskily. "Think it
over. I don't want to hurt you, and I know you think a lot of her,
but— think it over. You wouldn't rob her father, would you? An' she's
all he's got left of the woman. Think it over, Pelly, good 'n' hard.
I'm going to bed an' sleep a week!"

Billy slept all that day and the night that followed, and Pelliter did
not awaken him. He aroused himself from his long sleep of exhaustion
an hour or two before dawn of the following morning, and for the first
time he had the opportunity of going over with himself all the things
that had happened since his return to Fullerton Point. His first
thought was Pelliter and Little Mystery. He could hear his comrade's
deep breathing in the bunk opposite him, and again he wondered if
Pelliter had told him everything. Was it possible that Blake had said
nothing to reveal Little Mystery's identity, and that the igloo and
the dead Eskimo woman had not given up the secret? It seemed
inconceivable that there would not be something in the igloo that
would help to clear up the mystery. And yet, after all, he had faith
in Pelliter. He knew that he would keep nothing from him even though
it meant possession of the child. And then his mind leaped to Isobel
Deane. Her eyes were blue, and they had in them those same little
spots of brown he had found in Little Mystery's. They were unusual
eyes, and he had noticed the brown in them because it had added to
their loveliness and had made him think of the violets he had told
Pelliter about. Was it possible, he asked himself, that there could be
some association between Isobel and Little Mystery? He confessed that
it was scarcely conceivable, and yet it was impossible for him to get
the thought out of his mind.

Before Pelliter awoke he had determined upon his own course of action.
He would say nothing of what had happened to himself on the Barren, at
least not for a time. He would not tell of his meeting with Isobel and
her husband or of what had followed. Until he was absolutely certain
that Pelliter was keeping nothing from him he would not confide the
secret of his own treachery to him. For he had been a traitor— to the
Law. He realized that. He could tell the story, with its fictitious
ending, before they set out for Churchill, where he would give
evidence against Bucky Smith. Meanwhile he would watch Pelliter, and
wait for him to reveal whatever he might have hidden from him. He knew
that if Pelliter was concealing something he was inspired by his
almost insane worship of the little girl he had found who had saved
him from madness and death. He smiled in the darkness as he thought
that if Pelliter were working to achieve his own end— possession of
Little Mystery— he was inspired by emotions no more selfish than his
own in giving back life to Isobel Deane and her husband. On that score
they were even.

He was up and had breakfast started before Pelliter awoke. Little
Mystery was still sleeping, and the two men moved about softly in
their moccasined feet. On this morning the sun shone brilliantly over
the southern ice-fields, and Pelliter aroused Little Mystery so that
she might see it before it disappeared. But to-day it did not drop
below the gray murkiness of the snow-horizon for nearly an hour. After
breakfast Pelliter read his letters again, and then Billy read them.
In one of the letters the girl had put a tress of sunny hair, and
Pelliter kissed it shamelessly before his comrade.

"She says she's making the dress she's going to wear when we're
married, and that if I don't come home before it's out of style she'll
never marry me at all," he cried, joyously. "Look there, on that page
she's told me all about it. You're— you're goin' to be there, ain't
you, Billy?"

"If I can make it, Pelly."

"If you can make it! I thought you was going out of the Service when I
did."

"I've sort of changed my mind."

"And you're going to stick? "

"Mebbe for another three years."

Life in the cabin was different after this. Pelliter and Little
Mystery were happy, and Billy fought with himself every hour to keep
down his own gloom and despair. The sun helped him. It rose earlier
each day and remained longer in the sky, and soon the warmth of it
began to soften the snow underfoot. The vast fields of ice began to
give evidence of the approach of spring, and the air was more and more
filled with the thunderous echoes of the "break up." Great floes broke
from the shore-runs, and the sea began to open. Down from the north
the powerful arctic currents began to move their grinding, roaring
avalanches. But it was a full month before Billy was sure that
Pelliter was strong enough to begin the long trip south. Even then he
waited for another week.

Late one afternoon he went out alone and stood on the cliff watching
the thunderous movement of arctic ice out in the Roes Welcome.
Standing motionless fifty paces from the little storm-beaten cabin
that represented Law at this loneliest outpost on the American
continent, he looked like a carven thing of dun-gray rock, with a
dun-gray world over his head and on all sides of him, broken only in
its terrific monotony of deathlike sameness by the darker gloom of the
sky and the whiter and ghostlier gloom that hung over the ice-fields.
The wind was still bitter, and his vision was shut in by a near
horizon which Billy had often thought of as the rim of hell. On this
afternoon his heart was as leaden as the day. Under his feet the
frozen earth shivered with the rumbling reverberations of the crashing
and breaking mountains of ice. His ears were filled with a dull and
steady roar, like the echoes of distant thunder, broken now and then—
when an ice-mountain split asunder— with a report like that of a
thirteen-inch gun. There were curious wailings, strange screeching
sounds, and heartbreaking moanings in the air. Two days before
MacVeigh had heard the roar of the ice ten miles inland, where he had
gone for caribou.

But he scarcely heard that roar now. He was looking toward the warring
fields of ice, but he did not see them. It was not the dead gloom and
the gray monotony that weighted his heart, but the sounds that he
heard now and then in the cabin— the laughing of Little Mystery and
of Pelliter. A few days more and he would lose them. And after that
what would be left for him? A cry broke from his lips, and he gripped
his hands in despair. He would be alone. There was no one waiting for
him down in that world to which Pelliter was going, no girl to meet
him, no father, no mother— nothing. He laughed in his pain as he
faced the cold wind from the north. The sting of that wind was like
the mocking ghost of his own past life. For all his life he had known
only the stings of pain and of loneliness. And then, suddenly, there
came Pelliter's words to him again— "Mebbe some day you'll have a
kid." A flood of warmth swept through his veins, and in the moment of
forgetfulness and hope which came with it he turned his eyes into the
south and west and saw the sweet face and upturned lips of Isobel
Deane.

He pulled himself together with a low laugh and faced the breaking
seas of ice and the north. The gloom of night had drawn the horizon
nearer. The rumble and thunder of crumbling floes came from out of a
purple chaos that was growing blue-black in the distance. For several
minutes he stood listening and looking into nothingness. The breaking
of the ice, the moaning discontent in the air, and the growling
monotone of the giant currents had driven other men mad; but they held
a fascination for him. He knew what was happening, and he could almost
measure the strength of the unseen hands of nature. No sound was new
or strange to him. But now, as he stood there, there rose above all
the other tumult a sound that he had not heard before. His body became
suddenly tense and alert as he faced squarely to the north. For a full
minute he listened, and then turned and ran to the cabin.

Pelliter had lighted a lamp, and in its glow Billy's face shone white
with excitement.