Katrine had a long and heavy round of visits to make that day, and for two long hours she sat motionless by a dying woman's bedside, fearing to withdraw her hand, to which the poor terrified enterer into the Valley of the Shadow was clinging. In her arms, and with her tired head on Katrine's young bosom, the woman drew her last breath; and Katrine, feeling her own soul wrenched asunder and her body aching with strain and shock, came round in the afternoon to Annie. She would not say a word to her of the death-bed from which she had come. With an effort she talked of cheerful things, of the spring-time that was on its way to them, of the pleasure of seeing Will again, and so on, till her head ached. She did a few domestic offices for the girl, and then feeling she must break down herself if she stayed longer, she said she needed sleep, and if Annie could take care of herself for a time she would go and lie down. Annie noticed how heavy the lids were over her eyes and begged her to go at once, though a strange fear, like a child's of the dark, came over her.

"Will will be soon with you now--the best company," Katrine said, with a tired smile; "and if you want me, a knock on the wall here will bring me to you," and Annie was left alone.

As the afternoon closed in her cough seemed to grow more and more troublesome; the pain in her chest, too, had never been so bad; she had to keep her hand there all the time as she laboured round the room putting everything to rights, making sure that the cabin was neat and tidy against Will's return. At last she sat down in the circle of hot light round the fire, and little Tim crawled into her lap. She put her arms round him and held him absently. She was thinking over Katrine's words. The Spring! were they really near it? "so near," she had said, "it was almost here." Her eyes looking upwards to the darkening windows caught the old and smoke-hued almanac pinned up to the wall beside it.

She set the child down, and getting up walked slowly over to it and ran one trembling finger down the dates. Each one from December, when they had first hung it up, had a heavy black line against it, where she had scratched it out with eager fingers; only the last days had no mark against them. She had been too weary, too heart sick, to note them any longer. What did it matter to her when the Spring came? the almanac for her would have come to an end before that. But now a fresh gleam of hope seemed to have entered her heart, and with a feverish movement she drew the old stump of pencil from her pocket and scratched off the unmarked days, and then stood gazing at the date of that day; they were still far, far from the Spring--too far. Oh, to go back in the Spring, to escape from this prison of darkness, this country of horror and starvation and misery, to be back once more in her home in the Spring!

Her mind fled away from the dreary interior of the darkening cabin. She stood once more in the rich gra.s.sy meadow with the golden sunlight of an evening summer sky warm around her, the song of the birds in her ears, the hot scent of the meadow-sweet in her nostrils, before her the little narrow path leading to the cottage that seemed to bask sleepily in the yellow glow. She made a step forward with dilated eyes, then the cough seized her, the vision dissolved and fled. Again the cabin with its blackened rafters enclosed her. She turned from the calendar. What was the Spring's coming? It might come, but they would not go back. What right had she to think of it? They had made no strike, and had not Will sworn he would never go back without the gold? This accursed gold! If they could but have found it as others had! She put her hands to her head to drive away the thoughts, they were familiar and so useless. She had thought them over and over again so often. As she went back to the fire she noticed one of Will's woollen shirts lying on a chair. Why, that was the one she had meant to wash that morning! How could she have forgotten it? And now perhaps she would not get it done before he returned. Her heart began to beat, her limbs trembled. How weak and queer she felt this afternoon! Still, she would do it somehow. There was hot water on the fire that Katrine had put there. She lifted with an effort the great iron kettle from the fire, and with that in one hand and the shirt in the other she went into the adjoining sloping roofed compartment that served as scullery, wood-shed, pantry, and wash-house.

It was many degrees colder here, and the long iron nails that kept the boards together overhead had sparkling icicles on them that glittered as the firelight from the inner room touched them, and she could hardly draw her breath. Nevertheless she walked over to the wash-tub and poured in the water, and set to work with shaking hands. "Had ever shirt seemed so large?" she wondered vaguely, and her thin arms moved slowly, lifting it up and down with difficulty. It seemed getting so dark, too. She should have lighted the candles, it wouldn't look so cheery for Will if he came back to find the cabin dark. But was this only the twilight falling? No, it was in her eyes. She leaned heavily on the edge of the wooden tub, trembling, the floor unsteady beneath her, a strangling suffocation in her throat, a swimming darkness before her eyes. A sense of terrible loneliness pressed in upon her, and then suddenly she knew that in the chill of that dark twilight she was alone with Death. He had come for her at last.

Oh, to have had Will's strong arms round her, a human breast to lay her head down upon, and so die! A nameless terror possessed her, overwhelmed her; she started from the wash trestle. There was a sudden cry, "Will!

Will!" and she fell forward on the damp flooring, a little eager scarlet stream of blood pouring out from the nerveless lips to stain the soap-suds under the trestle.

The child sitting playing in the ring of warm firelight in the adjoining room heard that last cry, and startled, dropped his toys, looking with round eyes to the blackness beyond the open door. He listened with one tiny finger in his mouth for many minutes, but no further sound came to disturb him from the wash-house, and he went on playing.

An hour pa.s.sed perhaps before Will set foot in Good Luck Row, and he tramped up it with a sounding pace. There was fire in his eyes, the blood ran hard in all his veins, his rubber boots had elastic springs in their soles. Yet he carried an extra weight with him. There was something in his pocket in a buckskin bag that burned his hand as if it had been red-hot iron when he touched it. As he came to No. 14 and saw the windows dark he merely hurried his pace, and hardly stayed to lift the door latch, but just burst through the half-opened door and brought his huge burly frame over the threshold.

"Well, Annie, my girl, we've struck it at last," he shouted at the top of his voice, "and you shall come home right away. Where are you, Annie?

Didn't I say wait a bit for me?"

He had entered by the wash-house, but the darkness was thick, almost palpable, before his face and revealed nothing. He went forward to the open door, beyond which the burned-down fire gave only a faint red light, and his foot kicked something heavy on the floor. With a curious feeling gripping his heart, he stopped dead short where he stood and fumbled for a match. Then he struck it, and in its sickly glare looked down. "Annie, my dear!" he called in a shaking voice, and bent down holding the match close to the upturned face. The light played for an instant upon it and went out. "Annie!" he called again, and the word broke in his throat.

A thin wail went up from little Tim in the dusk of the inner room. Where the man stood was silence and darkness. His strike had come too late.

His wife was dead.

Half-an-hour later a man burst into the "Pistol Shot." It was between hours, and the bar-tender was just going round lighting the lamps; the place was nearly empty, only a few miners were standing at the end of the counter, talking together. The new customer staggered across the floor as if already under the influence of drink, kicking up the fresh sawdust on the ground; then he reached the counter and demanded drink after drink. He tossed the whiskies handed to him down his throat, and then retreated to a bench that stood against the wall and sat down staring stupidly in front of him. The little group of men looked at him once or twice curiously, and then one said--

"Why, it's Bill Johnson, who's just made a strike. Come up, boys, let's congratulate him."

The men moved up to the motionless, staring figure, and one of them slapped him on the shoulder.

"Say, Bill, old man, you're in luck, and we'll all drink your health.

Got any gold to show us?"

The sitting figure seemed galvanised suddenly out of its stupor. Will raised his head with a jerk, and the men involuntarily drew back from the glare of his bloodshot eyes. He put his hand to his pocket and drew out a small dirty buckskin bag. He dashed it suddenly on the ground with all his force, so that the sawdust flew up in a little cloud.

"Curse the gold!" he said, and got up and tramped heavily out of the saloon.

CHAPTER IV

G.o.d'S GIFT

They buried Mrs. Johnson very soon. As one of the neighbours sensibly, if rather crudely, remarked, "Their cabins were too small for them to keep corpses knocking around in them." And so the second day after her death, in a flood of thin, sweet sunshine, they buried her who had so loved the light and the sun, and had longed so wearily for them through so many days.

Katrine and Talbot stood side by side at the open grave. He had been in the town that day and met Katrine on the street, learned from her where she was going, and accompanied her. He knew something of all she had done for the dead woman, and he watched her now with interest and surprise at her composure. Katrine's face was unmoved, and her eyes were dry through it all.

"Another that gold has killed," she said to him as they turned away, and her face looked grave and grey in the flood of the cold sunlight.

Will was not present. He was down at the "Pistol Shot." He had been on a big drunk for the past two days, not even returning to his cabin at night, and the body of his wife would have lain unguarded had not Katrine brought her fur bag and slept beside it each night on the deserted hearth. Little Tim had been taken in by a neighbour, all the mothers round seeming anxious for the honour after it was known that Will had "made his strike."

They walked in absolute silence for some time up the incline. Talbot was going back to the west gulch, and Katrine said she would walk a little of the way in that direction too. The afternoon was bright and clear, and the air singularly still, so still that the intense cold was hardly realised. The rays of sunshine struck warmly across the snow banks piled on each side of the narrow path they were treading. The sky was pale blue, and the points of the straight larches on the summit of the ridges cut darkly into it like the points of lances. There was something in the atmosphere that recalled a day in late autumn in England. They were nearing the top of the ridge, and both had their gaze bent on the narrow ascending path before them, when suddenly a tiny object darted into the middle of it and ran up the opposite bank. On the instant Katrine drew one of the pistols from her belt and fired. The little dark form rolled down the bank, dropped back into their path, and lay there motionless.

It was a fine shot, for the tiny moving thing was fully thirty yards from them and looked hardly the size of a dollar. Talbot glanced at her with startled admiration. He himself never shot except for food or other necessity, and wanton killing rather annoyed him than otherwise, but here the skill and the correctness of wrist and eye were so obvious that they compelled him to an involuntary admiration.

"You are a good shot!" he exclaimed, looking at the bright, clear-cut face beside him, warmed into its warmest tints by the keen air and the continuous mounting of their steps.

"But not a good woman," she answered shortly, quickly reading the thoughts that accompanied his words. She did not look at him, but straight ahead.

"You might be both," he said, with a sudden impulse of interest and regret.

Katrine laughed.

"I don't know," she said lightly. "Good women are not usually good shots. You don't generally find them combined. But any way, what have I to do with goodness? I don't need it in my business."

He did not answer, and they walked on in silence till they came up to the little dark lump in the road. It was a small marmot. Katrine glanced at it and pa.s.sed on. Talbot stooped and picked up the sc.r.a.p of blood-stained fur.

"What did you do it for?" he asked curiously.

"Practice, that's all," she answered.

"Don't you feel sorry to kill merely for the sake of practice?"

"No. I should have been sorry if I had wounded it; but it's a good thing to be dead, I think. I wouldn't have shot unless I had been almost entirely sure I should kill it."

There was another silence, and then she said suddenly, "One must keep up one's practice here, going about as I do in all sorts of places and making my living as I do. These," and she tapped her pistols, "are my great protection. Only last night a great brute leaned over me and wanted to kiss me--would have done, only he saw I should shoot him if he did."

"Would you shoot a man for kissing you?" replied Talbot in an astonished tone, elevating his eyebrows.

"Yes. Why, I'd rather be shot than kissed!" exclaimed the girl fiercely, with an angry flush on her smooth cheek.

Talbot looked at the contemptuous, curling lips, at the whole beautiful hard face beside him, and walked on in silence, wondering. Her momentary anger was gone directly, and they were good comrades all the rest of the way.

At the point where she stopped to say good-bye to him, she held out her hand: "Thank you for coming to the burial with me, it was good of you,"

and she pressed his hand with a grateful smile.

It was about a fortnight later on, one of those dreary grey afternoons of late winter, nearly dark already, though still early by the clock, and the mercury in the thermometers had gone out of sight and stayed there. Katrine came tripping along a side street on her way back to the row, warm in her skin coat, and her face all aglow and abloom under her fur cap. She had turned into the "Swan and Goose" saloon on her way up, had put in half-an-hour over a game, and won a fat little canvas bag stuffed with gold dust; had thinned it out somewhat in hot drinks across the bar, and now, warmed through with rum, and light-hearted, she was returning with the bag still well lined in her waist-belt.

She had recovered from the great shock of Annie's death. Her nature, though essentially kind, was not of that soft, tender stamp that receives deep and painful impressions from other's sufferings. She would exert herself strenuously for another, as she had done for Annie, but it was not in her nature to sorrow long or deeply for the irrevocable.

There was a certain hardness and philosophy in her temperament that her life and surroundings and all her experience had tended to develop. And in Annie's death there was nothing striking or unusually sad in this corner of the world, so crowded with scenes of suffering, so filled with pathos of every form. There were women hoping and waiting, and longing and starving, in every street of the town, she knew; sickness and sorrow and death looked her in the eyes from some poor face at every corner.

Annie had been but one poor little unit in the crowd of sufferers, but one example of the misery of the town, the plague-stricken town, the town stricken with a curse--the curse of the greed of gold.

Matters had brightened very much in Dawson lately, a new feeling of hope and fresh life had gone through the town. The weather was less severe, the days were lengthening, the skies were brighter, the sickness had died out, and people went about their work looking cheerful again; and Katrine, freed from her anxieties and nursing, felt her elastic spirits bound upwards in response to the general brightness of the camp.

She came along humming behind her closed lips, and then suddenly turning a corner, stopped dead short with a horrified stare in her eyes. She had come round by one of the lowest dens in the city. Katrine knew it both inside and out, for there was no place from hut to hut in Dawson that she was afraid to enter. The door was standing open. It opened inwards, and there was a group of men, some inside and some outside, and amongst them they were forcing into the street a drunken woman. The entry to the place was beneath the level of the ground, and reached by a few uneven, miry steps, and up these the unfortunate was blindly stumbling under a rain of blows, pushes, and curses. She was old, and her hair streamed in ragged streaks across her bloodshot eyes, her tawdry skirt was long, and got under her unsteady feet. Just as she had managed to totter to the topmost step, a young man in the group behind her struck her a heavy blow between the shoulders. She tripped in the long skirt and trod on it, tearing it with a ripping sound from the waist, and fell forward, striking her face on the uneven frozen ground. Katrine sprang forward, but before she could reach her the woman had staggered to her feet and turned to face her tormentors, the blood streaming now from her cut lips, her trembling hands vaguely grasping at her torn skirt and trying to keep it to her waist. A roar of laughter burst from the men at the pitiful sight, and then died suddenly as they recognised Katrine. She stepped in front of the old woman, and faced them with a scorn in her eyes beyond all words. Then she turned in silence, put her arm round the helpless creature's waist, and supported her frail, tottering steps over the slippery, uneven ground. For an instant the men stood abashed and ashamed, then when the spell of those great fearless, scornful eyes was removed, their natures rea.s.serted themselves, and a general laugh went round.

"Birds of a feather!" shouted one, mockingly, as the two retreating figures disappeared in the gathering darkness. Katrine heard it, and winced; but she did not relax the hold of her supporting arm, and by gentle and repeated questioning managed to elicit from the helpless old being where she lived. Katrine turned her steps in the given direction, and drawing out her handkerchief wiped the blood from the old woman's face, and smoothed her straggling grey hair back behind her ears. When they reached her cabin at last, Katrine saw that the stove was black and empty. There was no light of any sort in the place, and the freezing darkness of the interior chilled her through. She would not leave the old woman until she had lighted a fire and candle for her and got her to bed; then, without waiting to listen to the mumbled and incoherent thanks showered upon her, she went out gently and on to her own place.