I felt myself going and just did get hear. You get supplies horses at Snowy Gulch go up Poor Man Creek through Spruce Pa.s.s over to Yuga River. Go down Yuga River past first rapids along still place to first creek you'll know it cause there's an old cabin just below and my canoe landing. Half mile up, in creek bed, is the pocket and new cabin. And don't tell no one in Snowy Gulch who you are and where you going. Go quick brother Ez and put up a stone for me at Snowy Gulch.

Your brother

HIRAM MELVILLE.

There was a long pause after Ezram's voice had died away. Ben's eyes glowed in the moonlight.

"And you haven't heard--whether your brother is still alive?"

"I got a wire the hotel man sent me. It reached me weeks before the letter came, and I guess he must have died soon after he wrote it. I suppose you see what he means when he says to carry a copy of this letter, instead of the original."

"Of course--because it const.i.tutes his will, your legal claim. Just the fact that you are his brother would be claim enough, I should think, but since the claim isn't recorded, this simplifies matters for you. You'd better make a copy of it and you can leave it in some safe place. And of course this claim is what you offered to let me in on."

"That's it. Not much, but all what I got. What I want to know is--if it's a go."

"Wait just a minute. You've asked me to go in with you on a scheme that looks like a clear quarter of a million, even though I can't give anything except my time and my work. You found me in a penitentiary, busted and all in--a thief and a gangster. Before we go any further, tell me what service I've done you, what obligation you're under to me, that gives me a right to accept so much from you?"

It might have been in the moonlight that Ezram's eyes glittered perceptibly. "You're in my charge," he grinned. "I guess you ain't got any say comin'."

"Wait--wait." Ben sprang to his feet, and caught by his earnestness, Ezram got up too. "I sure--I sure appreciate the trust you put in me,"

Ben went on slowly. "For my own part I'd give everything I've got and all I'd hope to ever get to go with you. It's a chance such as I never dared believe would come to me again--a chance for big success--a chance to go away and get a new start in a country where I feel, instinctively, that I'd make good. But that's only the beginning of it."

The dark vivid eyes seemed to glow in the soft light. "Forgive me if I talk frank; and if it sounds silly I can't help it," Ben continued.

"You've never been in prison--with a five-year sentence hanging over you--and n.o.body giving a d.a.m.n. For some reason I can't guess you've already done more for me than I can ever hope to repay. You got me out of prison, you wakened hope and self-respect in me when I thought they were dead, and you've proved a friend when I'd given up any thought of ever knowing human friendship again. I was down and out, Ezram. Anything you want me to do I'll do to the last ditch. You know I can fight--you know how a man can fight if it's his last chance. I've got some bonus money coming to me from the Canadian Government--and I'll put that in too, because we'll be needing horses and supplies and things that cost money. But I can't take all that from a stranger. You must know how it is. A man can't, while he's young and strong, accept charity--"

"Good Lord, it ain't charity!" the old man shouted, drowning him out.

"I'm gettin' as much pleasure out of it as you." His voice sank again; and there was no line of mirth in his face.

"It was long ago, in Montreal," Ezram went on, after a pause. "I knew your mother, as a girl. She married a better man, but I told her that every wish of hers was law to me. You're her son."

IV

Night is always a time of mystery in Snowy Gulch--that little cl.u.s.ter of frame shacks lost and far in the northern reaches of the Caribou Range.

Shadows lie deep, pale lights spring up here and there in windows, with gaping, cavernous darkness between; a wet mist is clammy on the face. At such times one forgets that here is a town, an enduring outpost of civilization, and can remember only the forests that stretch so heavy and dark on every side. Indeed the town seems simply swallowed up in these forests, immersed in their silence, overspread by their gloom, and the red G.o.ds themselves walk like sentries in the main street.

The breath that is so fragrant and strange between the fronting rows of shacks is simply that of the forest: inept the woodsman who would not recognize it at once. The silence is a forest silence, and if the air is tense and electric, it is because certain wilderness forces that no white man can name but which surely dwell in the darker thickets have risen and are in possession.

It is not a time when human beings are at their best and strongest.

There is an instinctive, haunting feeling which, though not fear, wakens a feeling of inadequacy and meekness. Only a few--those who have given their love and their lives to the wild places--have any idea of sympathetic understanding with it. Among these was Beatrice Neilson, and she herself did not fully understand the dreams and longings that swept her ever at the fall of the mysterious wilderness night.

The forest had never grown old to her. Its mystery was undying. Born in its shadow, her love had gone out to it in her earliest years, and it held her just as fast to-day. All her dreams--the natural longings of an imaginative girl born to live in an uninhabited portion of the earth--were inextricably bound up in it; whatever plans she had for the future always included it. Not that she was blind to its more terrible qualities: its might and its utter remorselessness that all foresters, sooner or later, come to recognize. Her thews were strong, and she loved it all the more for the tests that it put to its children.

She was a daughter of the forests, and its mark was on her. To-night the same moon that, a thousand miles to the south, was lighting the way for Ben and Ezram on their northern journey, shone on her as she hastened down the long, shadowed street toward her father's shack, revealing her forest parentage for all to see. The quality could be discerned in her very carriage--swift and graceful and silent--vaguely suggesting that of the wild creatures themselves. But there was no coa.r.s.eness or ruggedness about her face and form such as superficial observation might have expected. Physically she was like a deer, strong, straight-limbed, graceful, slender rather than buxom, dainty of hands and feet. A perfect const.i.tution and healthful surroundings had done all this. And good fairies had worked further magic: as she pa.s.sed beneath the light at the door of the rude hotel there was revealed an unquestioned and rather startling facial beauty.

It seemed hardly fitting in this stern, rough land--the soft contour and delicacy of the girl's features. It had come straight from her mother, a woman who, in gold-rush days, had been the acknowledged beauty of the province. Nor was it merely the attractive, animal beauty that is so often seen in healthy, rural girls. Rather its loveliness was of a mysterious, haunting kind that one a.s.sociates with old legends and far distant lands.

Perhaps its particular appeal lay in her eyes. They seemed to be quite marvelously deep and clear, so darkly gray that they looked black in certain lights, and they were so shadowed and pensive that sometimes they gave the image of actual sadness. For all the isolation of her home she was no stranger to romance; but the romance that was to be seen, like a gentleness, in her face was that of the great, shadowed forest in which she dwelt.

Pensive, wistful, enthralled in a dreamy sadness,--what could be nearer the tone and pitch of the northern forest itself? There might have been also depths of latent pa.s.sion such as is known to all who live the full, strong life of the woods. The lines were soft about her lips and eyes, indicating a marked sweetness and tenderness of nature; but these traits did not in the least deny her parentage. No one but the woodsman knows how gentle, how hospitably tender, the forest may be at times.

She had fine, dark straight brows that served to darken her eyes, dark brown hair waving enough to soften every line of her face, a girlish throat and a red mouth surprisingly tender and childish. As might have been expected her garb was neither rich nor smart, but it was pretty and well made and evidently fitted for her life: a loose "middy," blue skirt, woolen stockings and rather solid little boots.

As she pa.s.sed the door of the hotel one of the younger men who had been lounging about the stove strode out and accosted her. She half-turned, recognized his face in the lamplight, and frankly recoiled.

She had been lost in dreams before, vaguely pensive, for Beatrice had been watching the darkness overspread and encompa.s.s the dark fringe of the spruce forest that enclosed the town. Now, because she recognized the man and knew his type--born of the wild places even as herself, but a b.a.s.t.a.r.d breed--the tender, wistful half-smile sped from her childish mouth and her eyes grew alert and widened as if with actual fear. She halted, evidently in doubt as to her course.

"Going home?" the man asked. "I'm going up to see your pop, and I'll see you there, if you don't mind."

Ray Brent's voice had an undeniable ring of power. It was deeply ba.s.s, evidently the voice of a pa.s.sionate, reckless, brutal man. The covetous caress of his thick hand upon her arm indicated that he was wholly sure of himself in regard to her.

She stared with growing apprehension into his even-featured, not unhandsome face. Evidently she found it hard to meet his eyes,--eyes wholly lacking in humor and kindliness, but unquestionably vivid and compelling under his heavy, dark brows. "I'm going home," she told him at last. "I guess, if you're going up to see Pop, you can walk along too."

The man fell in beside her, his powerful frame overshadowing hers. It was plain at once that the manner of her consent did not in the least disturb him. "You're just letting me because I'm going up there anyway, eh?" he asked. "I'll walk along further than that with you before I'm done."

The girl paused, as if in appeal. "Ray, we've thrashed that out long ago," she responded. "I wish you wouldn't keep talking about it. If you want to walk with me--"

"All right, but you'll be changing your mind one of these days." Ray's voice rang in the silence, indicating utter indifference to the fact that many of the loungers on the street were listening to the little scene. "I've never seen anything I wanted yet that I didn't get--and I want you. Why don't you believe what your pop says about me? He thinks Ray Brent is the goods."

"I'm not going to talk about it any more. I've already given you my answer--twenty times."

The man talked on, but the girl walked with lifted chin, apparently not hearing. They followed the board sidewalk into the shadows, finally turning in at a ramshackle, three-room house that was perched on the hillside almost at the end of the street at the outer limits of the village.

The girl turned to go in, but the man held fast to her arm. "Wait just a minute, Bee," he urged. "I've got one thing more to say to you."

The girl looked into his face, now faintly illumined by the full moon that was rising, incredibly large and white, above the dark line of the spruce tops. For all the regularity of his rather handsome features, his was never an attractive face to her, even in first, susceptible girlhood; and in the moonlight it suddenly filled her with dread. Ray Brent was a dangerous type: imperious willed, slave to his most degenerate instincts, reckless, as free from moral restraint as the most savage creatures that roamed his native wilds. Now his facial lines appeared noticeably deep, dark like scars, and curious little flakes of iniquitous fire danced in his sunken eyes.

"Just one minute, Bee," he went on, wholly rapt in his own, devouring desires. The dark pa.s.sions of the man, always just under the skin, seemed to be getting out of bounds. "When I want something, I don't know how to quit till I get it. It's part of my nature. Your pop knows that--and that's why he's made me his pardner in a big deal."

"If my father wants men like you--for his pardners, I can't speak for his judgment."

"Wait just a minute. He's told me--and I know he's told you too--that I'd suit him all right for a son-in-law. He and I agree on that. And this country ain't like the places you read about in your story books--it's a man's country. Oh, I know you well enough. It's time you got down to bra.s.s tacks. If you're going to be a northern woman, you've got to be content with the kind of men that grow up here. Up here, the best man wins, the hardest, strongest man. That's why I'm going to win you."

Because he was secretly attacking her dreams, the dearest part of her being, she felt the first surge of rising anger.

"You're not the best man here," she told him, straightening. "If you were, I'd move out. You may be the strongest in your body, and certainly the hardest, going further to get your own way--but a real man would break you in two in a minute. Some one more than a brute to beat horses to death and jump claims. I'm going in now. Please take away your hand."

"One thing more. This is the North. We do things in a man's way up here--not a story-book way. The strong man gets what he wants--and I want you. And I'll get you, too--just like I get this kiss."

He suddenly s.n.a.t.c.hed her toward him. A powerful man; she was wholly helpless in his grasp. His arms went about her and he pressed his lips to hers--three times. Then he released her, his eyes glowing like red coals.

But she was a northern girl, trained to self-defense. As he freed her, her strong, slender arm swung out and up--with really startling force.

Her half-closed hand struck with a sharp, drawing motion across his lips, a blow that extinguished his laughter as the wind extinguishes a match-blaze.

"You little--devil!"