For some seconds thereafter his partners could make no intelligent response. This bitter blow had been antic.i.p.ated by neither. But Ray was a strong man, and his self-control quickly returned to him.

"You see what that means, don't you?" he asked Neilson.

"It means we've lost!"

The eyes before him narrowed and gleamed. "So that's what it means to you! Well, I don't look at it just that way. It means to me that we've got to take these supplies and these pack horses and start out and find Ben Darby--and never stop hunting till we've found him."

"Of course we've got to rescue Beatrice--"

"Rescuing Beatrice isn't all of it now, by a long shot. For the Lord's sake, Neilson--use your head a minute. Didn't old Hiram leave a will, giving this claim to his brother Ezra? If the claim wasn't recorded that will wouldn't mean much--but it is. And hasn't this Ben got a letter from Ezra leaving the claim to him? Now do you want to know who owns that claim? Ben Darby owns it, and as long as he can kick, that quarter of a million in gold can never be ours."

"You mean we've got to find him--and destroy that letter--"

"We've got to; that's all. He wrote us he had it, just to taunt us, and we've got to burn that up whether we find the girl or not. But that ain't all we've got to destroy--that piece of paper. You see that, don't you?"

Neilson breathed heavily. "It's all plain enough."

"I want it to be plain, so next time I want to let daylight through a man you won't stand in the way. It ain't just enough to burn up that letter. We've got to get the man who owns it, too. If we don't he'd still have a good enough case against us--with a good lawyer. Likely enough lots of people knew of their partnership, maybe have seen the letter--and they'd all be good witnesses in a suit. Our reputation ain't so good, after that Jenkins deal, that we'd shine very bright in a suit.

Even if he couldn't prove his own claim, he could lug out the will old Hiram left--he alone knows where it's hid--and then his next nearest relatives would come in and get the claim. On the other hand, if we smash him, the thing will all quiet down; there'll be no claimants to work the mine; and after a few months we can step in and put up our own notices. But we've got to do that first--smash him wide-open as soon as we can catch up with him. He'll be way out in Back There, and no man would ever know what became of him, and there'd be n.o.body left to oppose us any more. But we can't be safe any other way."

Neilson nodded slowly. His subordinate had put the matter clearly; and there was truth in his words. In Ben's murder alone lay their safety.

He had always been adverse to bloodshed; but further reluctance meant ruin. Ben was one whom he could strike down without mercy or regret. And the blow would not be for expediency alone. There would be a personal debt to pay after the long months of searching. He could not forget that Beatrice was helpless in his hands.

"The thing to do is to turn back with Chan, at once," he said.

"Of course," Ray agreed. "That plan of yours to get help in chasing 'em down don't go any more. We don't want any spectators for what's ahead of us. Here's grub and horses a-plenty, and we needn't lose any time."

So they turned back toward the Yuga, on their quest of hate.

XXII

Beatrice Neilson was a mountain girl, with the strong thews of Jael, yet she hid her face as the canoe shot into the crest of the rapids. It seemed incredible to her that the light craft should buffet that wild cataract and yet live. She was young and she loved life; and death seemed very near.

The scene that her eyes beheld in that last little instant in which the boat seemed to hang, shuddering, at the crest of the descent was branded indelibly on her memory. She saw Ben's face, set like iron, the muscles bunching beneath his flannel sleeves as he set his paddle. He was leaning forward, aware of nothing in the world but the forthcoming crisis. And in that swift flash of vision she saw not only the steel determination and the brutal savagery of the avenger. A little glimpse of the truth went home to her, and she beheld something of the misdirected idealism of the man, the intensity and steadfastness that were the dominant traits of his nature. She could not doubt his belief in the reality of his cause. Whether fancied or real the injury, deep wells of emotion in his heart had broken their seals and flowed forth.

The wolf crouched on the heap of supplies, fearful to the depths of his wild heart of this mighty stream, yet still putting his faith in his master in the stern. Beatrice saw his wild, frightened eyes as he gazed down into the frightful whirlpools. The banks seemed to whip past.

Then the rushing waters caught the craft and seemed to fling it into the air. There was the swift sense of lightning and incredible movement, of such incalculable speed as that with which a meteor blazes through the sky, and then a mighty surging, struggle; an interminable instant of ineffable and stupendous conflict. The bow dipped, split the foam; then the raging waters seized the craft again, and with one great impulse hurled it through the clouds of spray, down between the narrow portals of rocks.

Beatrice came to herself with the realization that she had uttered a shrill cry. Part of the impulse behind it was simply terror; but it was also the expression of an intensity of sensation never before experienced. She could have understood, now, the lure of the rapids to experienced canoeists. She forced herself to look into the wild cataract.

The boat sped at an unbelievable pace. Ben held his paddle like iron, yet with a touch as delicate as that of a great musician upon piano keys, and he steered his craft to the last inch. His face was still like metal, but the eyes, steely, vivid, and magnetic, had a look of triumph.

The first of the great tests had been pa.s.sed.

Sudden confidence in Ben's ability to guide her through to safety began to warm the girl's frozen heart. There were no places more dangerous than that just past; and he had handled his craft like a master. He was a voyageur: as long as his iron control was sustained, as long as his nerve was strong and his eye true she had every chance of coming out alive. But they had irremediably cast their fortunes upon the river, now. They could not turn back. She was in his whole charge, an agent of vengeance against her own father and his confederates.

Hot, blinding tears suddenly filled her eyes. Her frantic fear of the river had held them back for a time; but they flowed freely enough now the first crisis was past. In utter misery and despair her head bowed in her hands; and her brown hair, disheveled, dropped down.

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."