When one, life ended, goes down into the grave that gra.s.s may grow above him and men walk over his quiet body, are the doors of his h.e.l.l swinging open that he may enter, or are they softly closing behind him?

Are the fires of h.e.l.l venomous tongues that bite deep to punish with their torture when it is too late? or are they flames which cleanse and chasten while there is yet time? Ernestine Dumont, like many another, had lighted the fires with her own hands, seeing and understanding what it was that she did. For close to two years she had walked through the flames of her own kindling. And now, not waiting for the tardy retribution which comes all too late, she was already pa.s.sing through the burning fires; she was closer than she knew to having the iron portals clang behind her, gently and forever. After labour comes rest; after suffering, peace.

Drennen had said, "There is no law here in the North Woods that a man may not push aside." He was thinking of such law as Lieutenant Max represented. Had he looked into his own heart; could he have looked into the hearts of Marshall Sothern, Ernestine Dumont, Kootanie George, even into the heart of Lieutenant Max, he would have known that his seeming truth was an obvious lie. There is another law which reaches even into the lawless North Woods and which says, "Transgress against me and not another but yourself shall shape your punishment." Had he looked into the hearts of Ygerne Bellaire, of Sefton and Lemarc and Garcia, he would have beheld the same truth. He might have looked into the hearts of good men and bad and have found the same truth. For soon or late each man, be he walking as straight in the light as he knows how, be he crouching as low in the shadows as he may, ignites the sulphur and tinder of his own h.e.l.l. The h.e.l.l may be little or it may be a conflagration; it may flicker and die out or it may burn through life and lick luridly at the skies; but a man must light it and walk through it, since he is but man, and that he may be a man.

If Ernestine Dumont's body had appeared to grow wan and slender, her soul, long stifled, had found nourishment and had expanded. Under a sympathy emanating gently from Sothern she grew calm and spoke with him as she had not known she could speak. She was not the woman she had been two years ago, and yet no miracle had been wrought. She had sinned but she had suffered. The suffering had chastened her. A rebellious spirit always, she had become softened with a meekness which was not weakness but the dawning of understanding. She had struggled, she had known fatigue after violence and the G.o.d who had made the Law had ordained that after fatigue should come rest.

There was much she did not say which Sothern, having trod his own burning path, could divine.

She had offered to David Drennen a fierce pa.s.sion which he neither could nor would accept. The hot breath of it had shaken her being, seared through her breast, blinded her eyes. She had flung herself upon Kootanie George, still seeing only Drennen through the blur of her pa.s.sion; she had awakened love in Kootanie George, the strong love of a strong man, and she had not so much as seen it.

She had humiliated the Canadian before men. Had she fired the shot because she loved him he would have been proud instead of ashamed. But he had known that she had fired only because she wanted to hate David Drennen.

Seeing dimly what she had lost only when it was gone from her she had sought to bring it back by throwing herself at another man. Garcia had made light love to her beautifully after the exquisite manner of his kind, and had gone away when Ygerne had gone, with laughter in his gay heart and his song upon his lips for the woman who had taken Drennen's love. George had seen, had understood and his heart had grown still harder.

But now, at last, Ernestine knew to the full what she had been offered and had thrust aside. She had come to see in Kootanie George the qualities of which a woman like her could be proud. She had come to feel a strange sort of awe that George, who was no woman's man but always a man's man, had loved her. And it had been given to her at last to know that her pa.s.sion for David Drennen had been as the pa.s.sion of the moth for the candle. A new love came into her heart, rising to her throat, choking her; a love that was meek and devoted, that was now as much a part of her as were her hands and feet; an emotion that was the most unselfish, the most worthy and womanly she had ever felt. She had followed Kootanie George; she had at last come up with him; and now, George's back to her, she sat at her own little fire.

"Life is hard for us, Miss Dumont." Sothern laid his hand very gently upon her shoulder and smiled into her face. "But, I think . . . at the end . . . life is good."

"I have done everything wrong," she said slowly. "I have never had anything in life worth while . . . but George's love. And I threw that away."

"When a man has loved once he loves always," Sothern told her quietly.

"And a thing like that you can't throw away."

Presently, from deep thoughtfulness, she said hesitantly:

"I want to talk to Mr. Drennen. There is something I must say to him."

"Let it wait a day or so," Sothern answered. "He is not himself right now. And George might misunderstand."

CHAPTER XXI

CHANCE HEARD IN THE NIGHT

Before sunrise the five beings whose lives were so intimately intertwined and yet who were held by constraint one from the other, took up the trail. There was but one way to go and this fact alone held them together; they must keep close to the lake sh.o.r.e for upon the right the mountains swept upward in a series of cliffs and into a frowning barrier. Marshall Sothern and Ernestine, walking together in the rear, spoke little as the day wore on. Max, Drennen and Kootanie George, ahead, spoke not at all. In silence, never the elbow of one touching the coat of another, the three men felt and manifested the jealous rivalry which all day fought to place each one ahead of the others. George, fleeced as Drennen had been and at a time when the Canadian's soul had listened avidly to the voice of his wrath, embittered as Drennen was by the act of a woman, was scarcely less eager to be first than Drennen himself. And Max, reading the signs, grew watchful as his own eagerness mounted.

Before night they found the trail which Drennen knew that, soon or late, he would come upon. Here, perhaps a week ago, certainly not more than ten days ago, two or three men and one woman had pa.s.sed. They had had with them two or three pack animals and the trail, coming in abruptly from a canon at the westward, was plain.

At nightfall they were at the foot of the sixth of the nine lakes, the broad trail running on straight along its marge. The fathomless, bluish water, looking in the dusk a mere rudely circular mirror which was in truth a liquid cone whose tip was hidden deep in the bowels of earth, lay in still serenity before them. On all sides the cliffs, sheer falls half a thousand, sometimes quite a thousand feet high, seemed actually to stoop their august, beetling brows forward that they might frown down upon their own unbroken reflections. There would be a pa.s.s through the mountains at the northern end of the lake, a deeply cleft gorge, maybe, but from here, with the first dimness of the new night upon everything, there seemed no way through.

Each man, the silent meal done, threw his bed where he saw fit, apart from the others. Sothern, having aided Ernestine, telling her good night and receiving a wan smile of grat.i.tude, went back to the fire where Max was brooding. The lieutenant looked up, glad of the companionship. The two men from silence grew to talk in low voices.

Max had something he wanted to say and the opportunity for saying it seemed to have come. He looked about him, saw Drennen's form and George's through the trees, saw where Ernestine was stamping out the glowing embers of her fire, and began to speak. Something else he saw and forgot, its being of no importance to his brain. It was merely the pipe which Drennen had laid upon a stone near the camp fire and had left there when he had gone away.

But Drennen, being in no mood for sleep, missed his pipe. Coming back toward the fire a little later it happened that he approached behind the two men's backs and in the thick shadows. It happened, too, that they were very deep in their own thoughts and conversation and that they did not hear him until he had caught a part of their talk. After that Drennen, grown as still as the rocks about him, listened and made no sound. He had caught the words from Max:

". . . a man named Drennen; an embezzler. Not a common name, is it?

I've a notion that this David Drennen is the son of that John Harper Drennen."

Drennen, listening, got nothing from this, but stood still, frowning and wondering. His eyes, upon Max's face outlined by the fire, took no note of Sothern's.

"We've got the report," went on Max thoughtfully, "that the other Drennen, John Harper Drennen, is somewhere in this country. Lord," and he laughed softly, "it would be some white feather in my cap if I could bring the old fox in, wouldn't it, Mr. Sothern? He's given the police the slip for a dozen years."

Now, Drennen, with a quick start of full understanding, looked anxiously at the old man. Sothern's face stood in clear relief against the fire. There came no change into it; he looked gravely at Max, drew a moment contemplatively at his pipe, and then in a voice grave and steady answered:

"John Harper Drennen. . . . I remember the name. The papers were full of it. But wasn't he reported to have died a long time ago?"

"A dodge as old as the hills," grunted Max. "And G.o.d knows it works often enough, at that. No, he isn't dead and he is somewhere in this corner of the Dominion. By Heaven!" his young voice rising with the ambition in it, "if it's in my run of luck to bring him in I'll go up for promotion in two days! And I'm going to get him!"

Sothern's smile, a little tense, seemed only the smile of age upon the vaunting ambition of youth.

"I am not the man to doubt your ability to do pretty nearly anything you set your mind and hand to, Max," he said after a little. And then, "Isn't it a little strange that after all these years interest in John Harper Drennen should awake?"

"Not so strange," replied Max. "The odd thing, perhaps, is that David Drennen, the son, and the sort of man he seems to be, should have paid off his father's obligation of forty thousand dollars just as soon as he sold the Golden Girl to you people."

Sothern, offering no remark, looked merely casually interested. Max went on.

"That's the first thing which began to stimulate dormant interest," he said. "Queer, isn't it, that the most honest and unselfish and altogether praiseworthy thing he has ever been known to do should succeed chiefly in drawing attention to his father, so long thought dead? We've had our eyes on him for pretty close to a year now. I'm up a tree to know whether he knows his father is living, even."

"That's not all of the evidence you've got that John Harper Drennen is alive, is it?" Sothern's voice asked quietly.

"Lord, no. That's not evidence at all. In fact, there isn't any evidence; there's just a tip. There came a letter to the Chief in Montreal. I got a copy of it. It said merely: 'John Harper Drennen, wanted for embezzlement in New York, is in hiding in the North Woods country. He is the father of David Drennen of MacLeod's Settlement.

Watch young Drennen and you'll find the thief.'"

When Max paused, leaning toward the fire for a burning splinter of wood for his pipe, Sothern pa.s.sed his hand swiftly across his eyes. As Max straightened up the old man said:

"The letter might have said more. It doesn't give you a great deal to work upon."

Max laughed.

"But it does. The letter wasn't signed, even, and was typewritten, so you'd say it wasn't worth reading twice. And yet I know right now who wrote it."

"Yes?"

"Yes." There was triumph unhidden in Max's voice, in his eyes turned full upon Sothern's. "For I've been after that man for more than seventeen months, the man who has cause to hate John Harper Drennen like poison, the man who'd like to entangle both the father and son in the mesh of the law. It's the man I'm going to get at the end of this trail, a man calling himself Sefton. And when I get him he's going to talk, he's going to identify John Harper Drennen, and I'm going to put the two of them where they'll see the sun through the bars for more years than is pleasant to look upon!"

Again there was silence and the calm smoking of pipes.

"Why do you tell me this, Max?" asked Sothern after a little.

Suddenly Max's hand shot out, resting upon Sothern's shoulder. Drennen started, his hands shutting tight, as he waited breathlessly for the words: "John Harper Drennen, you are my prisoner!" He fancied that he saw Sothern's body shaken with a little tremor. The words which he heard at last in Max's quiet voice were these:

"I tell you, Mr. Sothern, because I come pretty near the telling of everything to you. Because for six years you have been more a father to me than my own father ever was. Because everything that I am I owe to you. You set my feet in the right path, and now that I am succeeding, for by G.o.d, success is coming to me, I want you to know it!

I have never talked to you of the things which I have felt most. . . ."

For a moment he broke off; Drennen fancied his eyes glistened and that he had choked on the simple words. "You know what I mean . . . you don't think I'm a sentimental fool, do you?"