"And I have loved you--always!"

CHAPTER XVI

CONFESSIONS

Brent returned to the cabin with his brain in a whirl. "I'll make a strike before spring! I've got to! Then we'll hit for Dawson, and we'll stop at Fort Norman and be married. No--we'll go on through and be married at the Reeves'! Married! A Brent married to an Indian!" He halted in the trail and cursed himself for the thought.

"She's a d.a.m.n sight too good for you! You're a h.e.l.l of a Brent--nothing left but the name! Gambler--notorious gambler, Reeves said--and a barkeep in Malone's dive. You're a hooch hound, and you've got to keep away from hooch to stay sober! You don't dare go back to Dawson--nor anywhere else where there's a saloon! You're broke, and worse than broke. You're right now living on Reeves' money--and you think of marrying _her_!"

Furiously, next morning, he attacked the gravel at the bottom of the shaft. When the loose muck was thrown out he swore at the slow progress, and futilely attacked the floor of the shaft with his pick as though to win down to bed-rock through the iron-hard frost. Then he climbed out and, scooping up a pan from the dump, retired to the cabin, and washed it out.

"Same thing," he muttered disgustedly, as he stared at the yellow grains, "Just wages. I've got to make a strike! There's Reeves to pay--and Camillo Bill--and I've got to have dust--and plenty of it--for _her_. d.a.m.n this hole! I'm going to hit for the lower river. We'll cover this shaft to keep the snow out and hit north. Hearne, and Franklin, and Richardson all report native copper on the lower river--amygdaloid beds that crop out in sheer cliffs. Gold isn't the only metal--there's millions in copper! And, the river winding in and out among the trap and basalt d.y.k.es, there's bound to be gold, too." He collected the few grains of gold, threw out the gravel and water, and picking up his rifle, stepped out the door. At the shaft he paused and called to Joe Pete that he was going hunting and as the big Indian watched him disappear up the river, his lips stretched in a slow grin, and he tossed wood into the shaft.

A mile from the cabin Brent rounded a sharp bend and came face to face with Snowdrift. There was an awkward silence during which both strove to appear unconcerned. The girl was the first to speak, and Brent noticed that she was blushing furiously: "I--I am hunting," she announced, swinging her rifle prominently into view.

Brent laughed: "So am I hunting--for you."

"But really, I am hunting caribou. There are lots of mouths to feed, and the men are not much good. They will spend hours slipping up onto a caribou and then miss him."

"Come on, then, let's go," answered the man gaily. "Which way shall it be?"

"I saw lots of tracks the other day on a lake to the eastward. It is six or seven miles. I think we will find caribou there." Brent tried to take her hand, but she eluded him with a laugh, and struck out through the scraggling timber at a pace that he soon found hard to follow.

"Slow down! I'll be good!" he called, when they had covered a quarter of a mile, and Snowdrift laughingly slackened her pace.

"You're a wonder!" he panted, as he closed up the distance that separated them, "Don't you ever get tired?"

"Oh, yes, very often. But, not so early in the day. See, three caribou pa.s.sed this way only a few hours ago--a bull and two cows." They struck into the trail, and two hours later Snowdrift succeeded in bring down one of the cows with a long shot as the three animals trotted across a frozen muskeg.

"And now we must kill one for you," announced the girl as Brent finished drawing the animal.

"We needn't be in any hurry about it," he grinned. "We still have most of the one we got the other day."

"Then, why are you hunting?"

"I told you. I found what I was hunting--back there on the river. How about lunch? I'm hungry as a wolf."

The girl pointed to a sheltered spot in the lee of a spruce thicket, and while Brent sc.r.a.ped back the snow, she produced food from her pack.

"You must have figured on getting pretty hungry," teased Brent, eying the generous luncheon to which he had added his own.

Snowdrift blushed: "You brought more than I did!" she smiled, "See--there is much more."

"Oh, I'll come right out with it--I put that up for two!"

"And mine is for two," she admitted, "But you are mean for making me say it."

During the meal the girl was unusually silent and several times Brent surprised a look of pain in the dark eyes, and then the look would fade and the eyes would gaze pensively into the distance. Once he was sure that her lip quivered.

"What's the matter, Snowdrift," he asked abruptly, "What is troubling you? Tell me all about it. You might as well begin now, you know--because----"

She hastened to interrupt him: "Nothing is the matter!" she cried, with an obviously forced gaiety. "But, tell me, where did you come from--before you came to the Yukon? All my life I have wanted to know more of the land that lies to the southward--the land of the white man.

Father Ambrose and Sister Mercedes told me much--but it was mostly of the church. And Henri of the White Water told me of the great stores in Edmonton where one may buy fine clothes, of other stores where one may sell hooch without fear of the police, and also where one may win money with cards. But, surely, there are other things. The white men, and the women, they do not always go to church and buy clothes, and drink hooch, and gamble with cards. And are all the women beautiful like the pictures in the books, and in the magazines?"

Brent laughed: "No, all the women are not beautiful. It is only once in a great while that one sees a really beautiful woman, and you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen----"

"But I am not beautiful!" cried the girl, "Not like the pictures."

"The pictures are not pictures of real women, they are creations of an artist's brain. The pictures are the artist's conception of what the real women should be."

Snowdrift regarded him with a puzzled frown: "Is it all make-believe, in the land of the white man? The books--the novels that tell of knights in armor, and of the beautiful ladies with their clothes, and their rings of the diamonds that sparkle like ice--and other novels that tell of suffering, and of the plotting of men and women who are very bad--and of the doings of men and women who are good--Sister Mercedes said they are all lies--that they are the work of the brain of the man who wrote it down. Is it all lies and make-believe? Do the white men use their brains only to tell of the doings of people who have never lived, and to make pictures of people and things that never were? Do you, too, live in the make-believe? You have told me you love me. And just now you told me that I was the most beautiful woman you have seen. Those are the words of the books--of the novels. Always the man must tell the woman she is the most beautiful woman in the world. And it is all make-believe, and in the words is no truth!"

"No, no, dear! You do not understand. I don't know whether I can explain it, but it is not all make-believe--by a long shot! Life down there is as real as it is here. There are millions of people there and for them all life is a struggle. Millions live in great cities, and other millions live in the country and raise grain with which to feed themselves, and the millions who live in the cities. And the people in the cities work in great factories, and make the clothing, and the tools, and guns, and everything that is used by themselves and by the people who live outside the cities, and they build the ships and the railroads which carry these goods to all parts of the world. But you have read of all that in the books--and the books are not all lies and make-believe, for they tell of life as it is--not as any one or a dozen characters live it--but as thousands and millions live it. The comings and goings of the characters are the composite comings and goings of a thousand or a million living breathing people. And because each person is too busy--too much occupied with his own particular life, he does not know of the lives of the other millions. But he wants to know--so he reads the books and the magazines, and the newspapers." The girl hung absorbed upon his words, and for an hour Brent talked, describing, explaining, detailing the little things and the great things, the common-places, and the wonders of the far-off land to the southward. But of all the things he described, the girl was most interested in the libraries with their thousands and thousands of books that one might read for the asking--the libraries, and the clothing of the women.

"All my life," she concluded, "I have wanted to go to the land of the white man, and see these things myself. But, I never shall see them, and I am glad you have told me more."

Brent laughed, happily, and before she could elude him his arms were about her and he had drawn her close. "Indeed you shall see them!" he cried. "You and I shall see them together. We'll be married at Dawson, and we'll make a strike----"

With a low cry the girl freed herself from his arms, and drew away to the other side of the fire: "No, no, no!" she cried, with a catch in her voice, "I can never marry you! Oh, why must we love! Why must we suffer, when the fault is not ours? They would hate me, and despise me, and point at me with the finger of scorn!"

Brent laughed: "Hold on girl!" he cried, "Some of the best families in the world have Indian blood in their veins--and they're proud of it! I know 'em! They'll come a long way from hating you. Why, they'll pile all over themselves to meet you--and a hundred years from now our great-grand-children will be bragging about you!" Suddenly, he grew serious, "But maybe you won't marry me, after all--when you've heard what I've got to say. Maybe you'll despise me--and it'll be all right if you do. It will be what I have earned. It isn't a pretty story, and it's going to hurt to tell it--to you. But, you've got to know--so here goes.

"In the first place, you think I'm good. But, I'm not good--by most of the ten commandments, and a lot of by-laws. I'm not going to do any white-washing--I'm going to begin at the beginning and tell you the truth, so you can see how far I've dropped. In the first place my family tree is decorated with presidents, and senators, and congress-men, and generals, and diplomats, and its branches are so crowded with colonels, and majors and captains and judges, and doctors, that they have to prop them up to keep them from breaking. Some were rich, but honest; and some were poor, but not so honest, and a lot of them were half way between in both wealth and honesty. But, anyway, you can't turn twenty pages of United States history without running onto the trail of at least one man that I can claim kin to. As for myself, I'm a college man, and a mining engineer--that means I was fitted by family and education to be a big man, and maybe get a chance to slip into history myself--I've made some, over on the Yukon, but--it ain't fit to print.

"Hooch was at the bottom of the whole business. I couldn't handle hooch like some men can. One drink always called for another, and two drinks called for a dozen. I liked to get drunk, and I did get drunk, every chance I got--and that was right often. I lost job after job because I wouldn't stay sober--and later some others because I couldn't stay sober. I heard of the gold on the Yukon and I went there, and I found gold--lots of it. I was counted one of the richest men in the country.

Then I started out to get rid of the gold. I couldn't spend it all so I gambled it away. Almost from the time I made my strike I never drew a sober breath, until I'd shoved my last marker across the table. Then I dealt faro--turned professional gambler for wages in the best place in Dawson, but the hooch had got me and I lost out. I got another job in a saloon that wasn't so good, but it was the same story, and in a little while I was tending bar--selling hooch--in the lowest dive in town--and that means the lowest one in the world, I reckon. That last place, The Klondike Palace; with its painted women, who sell themselves nightly to men, with the sc.u.m of the earth carousing in its dance-hall, and playing at its tables, was the h.e.l.l-hole of the Yukon. And I was part of it. I stood behind its bar and sold hooch--I was the devil that kept the h.e.l.l-fires stoked and roaring. And I kept full of hooch myself, or I couldn't have stood it. Then I lost out even there, on--what you might call a technicality--and after that I was just a plain b.u.m. Everybody despised me--worst of all, I despised myself. I did odd jobs to get money to buy hooch, and when I had bought it I crawled into my shack and stayed there till it was gone. I was weak and flabby, and dirty. My hands shook so I couldn't raise a gla.s.s of hooch to my lips, until I'd had a stiff shot. I used to lap the first drink out of a saucer like a dog. I dodged the men who had once been my friends. Only Joe Pete, who had helped me over the Chilkoot, and who remembered that I was a good man on the trail, and a girl named Kitty, would even turn their heads to glance at the miserable drunkard that slunk along the street with his bottle concealed in his ragged pocket.

"There is one more I thought was my friend. His name is Camillo Bill, and he is square as a die, and he did me a good turn when he cleaned me out, by holding my claims for only what he had coming when he could have taken them all. But he came to see me one day toward the last. He came to tell me that the claims had petered out. I wanted him to grub-stake me, for a prospecting trip and he refused. That hurt me worse than all the rest--for I thought he was my friend. He cursed me, and refused to grub-stake me. Then I met a real friend--one I had never seen before, and he furnished the gold for my trip to the Coppermine, and--here I am."

Snowdrift had listened with breathless attention and when Brent concluded she was silent for a long time. "This girl named Kitty?" she asked at length, "Who is she, and why was she your friend? Did you love this woman? Is she beautiful?"

"No," answered Brent, gravely, "I did not love her. She was not the kind of a woman a man would love. She was beautiful after a fashion. She might have been very beautiful had her life fallen in a different groove. She was an adventuress, big hearted, keen of brain--but an adventuress. Hers was a life distorted and twisted far from its original intent. For it was plain to all that she had been cast in a finer mould, and even the roughest and most brutal of the men treated her with a certain respect that was not accorded to the others. She never spoke of her past. She accepted the present philosophically, never by word or look admitting that she had chosen the wrong road. Her ethics were the ethics of the muck and ruck of the women of the dance halls. She differed only in that she had imagination--and a certain pride that prevented her from holding herself cheaply. Where others were careless and slovenly, she was well groomed. And while they caroused and shamelessly debauched themselves, she held aloof from the rabble.

"You asked why she was my friend. I suppose it was because she was quick to see that I too, was different from the riff-raff of the dives. Not that I was one whit better than they--for I was not. It was no credit to me that I was inherently different. It was, I reckon, a certain innate pride that kept me out of the filth of the mire, as it kept her out. To me the painted slovens were physically loathsome, so I shunned them. She was keener of brain than I--or maybe it was because she had a perspective. But while I was still at the height of my success with the claims and with the cards, she foresaw the end, and she warned me. But, I disregarded the warning, and later, when I was rushing straight to the final crash, she warned me again and again, and she despised me for the fool I was.

"When, at the very bottom, I was taken suddenly sick, it was Kitty who nursed me through. And then, when I was on my feet again she left me to myself. I have not seen her since."

"And, if you make a strike again," asked the girl in a low voice, "Will you go back to Dawson--to the cards and the hooch?"

"I will go back to Dawson," he answered, "And pay my debts. I will not go back to the cards. I am through with gambling for good and all, for I have promised. And when a Brent gives his word, he would die rather than break it."

"But the hooch?" persisted Snowdrift. "Are you done with the hooch too?"

Brent was conscious that the eyes of the girl were fixed upon his in a gaze of curious intentness, as though their deliberate calm suppressed some mighty emotion. He groped for words: "I don't--that is, how can I tell? I drink no hooch now--but there is none to drink. I hate it for I know that what it did to me once it will do to me again. I hate it--and I love it!" exclaimed the man. "Tell me, is hate stronger than love?"