They had not gone a dozen miles when a shouting horseman rode furiously on them from behind. They turned with carbines c.o.c.ked, but it was Abe Hawley who cursed them, flung his fingers in their faces, and rode on harder and harder. Abe had got the news from one of Nancy's half-breeds, and, with the devil raging in his heart, had entered on the chase. His spirit was up against them all: against the Law represented by the troopers camped at Fort Stay-Awhile, against the troopers and their captain speeding after Nancy Mach.e.l.l--his Nance, who was risking her life and freedom for the hated, pale-faced smuggler riding between the troopers; and his spirit was up against Nance herself.

Nance had said to him, "Come back in an hour," and he had come back to find her gone. She had broken her word. She had deceived him. She had thrown the four years of his waiting to the winds, and a savage l.u.s.t was in his heart, which would not be appeased till he had done some evil thing to some one.

The girl and the Indian lad were pounding through the night with ears strained to listen for hoof-beats coming after, with eyes searching forward into the trail for swollen creeks and direful obstructions.

Through Barfleur Coulee it was a terrible march, for there was no road, and again and again they were nearly overturned, while wolves hovered in their path, ready to reap a midnight harvest. But once in the open again, with the full moonlight on their trail, the girl's spirits rose. If she could do this thing for the man who had looked into her eyes as no one had ever done, what a finish to her days in the West! For they were finished, finished forever, and she was going--she was going East; not West with Bantry, nor South with Nick Pringle, nor North with Abe Hawley--ah, Abe Hawley! He had been a good friend, he had a great heart, he was the best man of all the Western men she had known; but another man had come from the East, a man who had roused something in her never felt before, a man who had said she was wonderful; and he needed some one to take good care of him, to make him love life again. Abe would have been all right if Lambton had never come, and she had meant to marry Abe in the end; but it was different now, and Abe must get over it. Yet she had told Abe to come back in an hour. He was sure to do it; and, when he had done it, and found her gone on this errand, what would he do? She knew what he would do. He would hurt someone. He would follow, too. But at Dingan's Drive, if she reached it before the troopers and before Abe, and did the thing she had set out to do; and because no whiskey could be found, Lambton must go free; and they all stood there together, what would be the end? Abe would be terrible; but she was going East, not North, and, when the time came she would face it and put things right somehow.

The night seemed endless to her fixed and anxious eyes and mind, yet dawn came, and there had fallen no sound of hoof-beats on her ear. The ridge above Dingan's Drive was reached and covered, but yet there was no sign of her pursuers. At Red Man's River she delivered her load of contraband to the traders waiting for it, and saw it loaded into the boats and disappear beyond the wooded bend above Dingan's.

Then she collapsed into the arms of her brother Bantry, and was carried, fainting, into Dingan's Lodge.

A half-hour later MacFee and his troopers and Lambton came. MacFee grimly searched the post and the sh.o.r.e, but he saw by the looks of all that he had been foiled. He had no proof of anything, and Lambton must go free.

"You've fooled us," he said to Nance, sourly, yet with a kind of admiration, too. "Through you, they got away with it. But I wouldn't try it again, if I were you."

"Once is enough," answered the girl, laconically, as Lambton, set free, caught both her hands in his and whispered in her ear.

MacFee turned to the others. "You'd better drop this kind of thing," he said. "I mean business." They saw the troopers by the horses, and nodded.

"Well, we was about quit of it anyhow," said Bantry. "We've had all we want out here."

A loud laugh went up, and it was still ringing when there burst into the group, out of the trail, Abe Hawley, on foot.

He looked round the group savagely till his eyes rested on Nance and Lambton. "I'm last in," he said, in a hoa.r.s.e voice. "My horse broke its leg cutting across to get here before her--" He waved a hand toward Nance.

"It's best stickin' to old trails, not tryin' new ones." His eyes were full of hate as he looked at Lambton. "I'm keeping to old trails. I'm for goin' North, far up, where these two-dollar-a-day and hash-and-clothes people ain't come yet." He made a contemptuous gesture toward MacFee and his troopers. "I'm goin' North--" He took a step forward and fixed his bloodshot eyes on Nance. "I say I'm goin' North. You comin' with me, Nance?" He took off his cap to her.

He was haggard, his buckskins were torn, his hair was dishevelled, and he limped a little; but he was a ma.s.sive and striking figure, and MacFee watched him closely, for there was that in his eyes which meant trouble.

"You said, 'Come back in an hour,' Nance, and I come back, as I said I would," he went on. "You didn't stand to your word. I've come to git it.

I'm goin' North, Nance, and I bin waitin' for four years for you to go with me. Are you comin'?"

His voice was quiet, but it had a choking kind of sound, and it struck strangely in the ears of all. MacFee came nearer.

"Are you comin' with me, Nance, dear?"

She reached a hand toward Lambton, and he took it, but she did not speak.

Something in Abe's eyes overwhelmed her--something she had never seen before, and it seemed to stifle speech in her. Lambton spoke instead.

"She's going East with me," he said. "That's settled."

MacFee started. Then he caught Abe's arm. "Wait!" he said, peremptorily.

"Wait one minute."

There was something in his voice which held Abe back for the instant.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE START ON THE NORTH TRAIL]

"You say she is going East with you," MacFee said sharply to Lambton.

"What for?" He fastened Lambton with his eyes, and Lambton quailed. "Have you told her you've got a wife--down East? I've got your history, Lambton.

Have you told her that you've got a wife you married when you were at college--and as good a girl as ever lived?"

It had come with terrible suddenness even to Lambton, and he was too dazed to make any reply. With a cry of shame and anger, Nancy started back.

Growling with rage and hate, Abe Hawley sprang toward Lambton, but the master of the troopers stepped between.

No one could tell who moved first, or who first made the suggestion, for the minds of all were the same, and the general purpose was instantaneous; but in the fraction of a minute Lambton, under menace, was on his hands and knees crawling to the riverside. Watchful, but not interfering, the master of the troopers saw him set adrift in a canoe without a paddle, while he was pelted with mud from the sh.o.r.e.

The next morning at sunrise Abe Hawley and the girl he had waited for so long started on the North trail together, MacFee, master of the troopers and justice of the peace, handing over the marriage lines.

THE STROKE OF THE HOUR

"They won't come to-night--sure."

The girl looked again toward the west, where, here and there, bare poles, or branches of trees, or slips of underbrush, marked a road made across the plains through the snow. The sun was going down golden red, folding up the sky a wide, soft curtain of pink and mauve and deep purple merging into the fathomless blue, where already the stars were beginning to quiver. The house stood on the edge of a little forest, which had boldly a.s.serted itself in the wide flatness. At this point in the west the prairie merged into an undulating territory, where hill and wood rolled away from the banks of the Saskatchewan, making another England in beauty.

The forest was a sort of advance-post of that land of beauty.

Yet there was beauty, too, on this prairie, though there was nothing to the east but snow and the forest so far as eye could see. n.o.bility and peace and power brooded over the white world.

As the girl looked, it seemed as though the bosom of the land rose and fell. She had felt this vibrating life beat beneath the frozen surface.

Now, as she gazed, she smiled sadly to herself, with drooping eyelids looking out from beneath strong brows.

"I know you--I know you," she said, aloud. "You've got to take your toll.

And when you're lying asleep like that, or pretending to, you reach up--and kill. And yet you can be kind--ah, but you can be kind and beautiful! But you must have your toll one way or t'other." She sighed and paused; then, after a moment, looking along the trail--"I don't expect they'll come to-night, and mebbe not to-morrow, if--if they stay for _that_."

Her eyes closed, she shivered a little. Her lips drew tight, and her face seemed suddenly to get thinner. "But dad wouldn't--no, he couldn't, not considerin'--" Again she shut her eyes in pain.

Her face was now turned from the western road by which she had expected her travellers, and toward the east, where already the snow was taking on a faint bluish tint, a reflection of the sky deepening toward night in that half-circle of the horizon. Distant and a little bleak and cheerless the half-circle was looking now.

"No one--not for two weeks," she said, in comment on the eastern trail, which was so little frequented in winter, and this year had been less travelled than ever. "It would be nice to have a neighbor," she added, as she faced the west and the sinking sun again. "I get so lonely--just minutes I get lonely. But it's them minutes that seem to count more than all the rest when they come. I expect that's it--we don't live in months and years, but just in minutes. It doesn't take long for an earthquake to do its work--it's seconds then.... P'r'aps dad won't even come to-morrow,"

she added, as she laid her hand on the latch. "It never seemed so long before, not even when he's been away a week." She laughed bitterly. "Even bad company's better than no company at all. Sure. And Mickey has been here always when dad's been away past times. Mickey was a fool, but he was company; and mebbe he'd have been better company if he'd been more of a scamp and less a fool. I dunno, but I really think he would. Bad company doesn't put you off so."

There was a scratching at the inside of the door. "My, if I didn't forget Shako," she said, "and he dying for a run!"

She opened the door quickly, and out jumped a Russian dog of almost full breed, with big, soft eyes like those of his mistress, and with the air of the north in every motion--like his mistress also.

"Come, Shako, a run--a run!"

An instant after she was flying off on a path toward the woods, her short skirts flying and showing limbs as graceful and shapely as those of any woman of that world of social grace which she had never seen; for she was a prairie girl through and through, born on the plains and fed on its scanty fare--scanty as to variety, at least. Backward and forward they ran, the girl shouting like a child of ten--she was twenty-three--her eyes flashing, her fine white teeth showing, her hands thrown up in sheer excess of animal life, her hair blowing about her face--brown, strong hair, wavy and plentiful.

Fine creature as she was, her finest features were her eyes and her hands.

The eyes might have been found in the most savage places; the hands, however, only could have come through breeding. She had got them honestly; for her mother was descended from an old family of the French province.

That was why she had the name of Loisette--and had a touch of distinction.

It was the strain of the patrician in the full blood of the peasant; but it gave her something which made her what she was--what she had been since a child, noticeable and besought, sometimes beloved. It was too strong a nature to compel love often, but it never failed to compel admiration. Not greatly a creature of words, she had become moody of late; and even now, alive with light and feeling and animal life, she suddenly stopped her romp and run, and called the dog to her.

"Heel, Shako!" she said, and made for the door of the little house, which looked so snug and homelike. She paused before she came to the door, to watch the smoke curling up from the chimney straight as a column, for there was not a breath of air stirring. The sun was almost gone, and the strong bluish light was settling on everything, giving even the green spruce-trees a curious burnished tone.