The Long Portage Part 36

It was a relief to talk of matters of minor interest, for he dare not let his thoughts dwell too much on the subject that was nearest them.

"Well," he replied, "there's the economic pressure, for one thing; the growth of your cities; the demand for food. I see land lying almost idle that could be made productive at a very moderate outlay. Our people often give nearly as much as it's worth here for no better soil."

"But how do they make it pay?"

He laughed.

"The secret is that they expect very little--enough to eat, a shack they build with their own hands to sleep in--and they're willing to work sixteen hours out of the twenty-four."

"They can't do so in winter."

"The hours are shorter, but where the winter's hardest--on the open middle prairie--the work's more severe. There the little man spends a good deal of his time hauling home stove-wood or building-logs for new stables or barns. He has often to drive several leagues with the thermometer well below zero before he can find a bluff with large enough trees. In the Pacific Slope forests, where it's warmer, work goes on much as usual. The bush rancher spends his days chopping big trees in the rain and his nights making odd things--furniture, wagon-poles, new doors for his outbuildings. What you would call necessary leisure is unknown."

This was not exaggeration; but he spoke of it from a desire to support his resolution by emphasizing the sternest aspects of western life. It had others more alluring: there were men who dwelt more or less at their ease; but they were by no means numerous, and the toilers--in city office, lonely bush, or sawmill--were consumed by or driven into a feverish activity. As one of them, it was his manifest duty to leave this English girl in her sheltered surroundings. There was, however, one remote but alluring possibility that made this a little easier--he might, after all, win enough to surround her with some luxury and cultured friends in one of the cities of the Pacific coast. Though they differed from those in England, they were beautiful, with their vistas of snow-capped mountains and the sea.

"But you are not a farmer," she objected.

"No; mining's my vocation and it keeps me busy. In the city, I'm at work long before they think of opening their London offices, and it's generally midnight before I've finished worrying engineers and contractors at their homes or hotels. In the wilds, we're more or less continuously grappling with rock or treacherous gravel, or out on the prospecting trail, while the northern summer lasts; it's then light most of the night. In the winter, we sometimes sleep in the snow, with the thermometer near the bottom of its register."

Millicent s.h.i.+vered a little, wondering uneasily why he had taken the trouble to impress this upon her. It was, she thought, certainly not to show what he was capable of.

"Are you glad to go back, or do you dread it?" she asked.

"I don't dread it--it's my life, and things may be easier by and by.

Still, I'm very loath to go."

Millicent could believe that. His troubled expression confirmed it; and she was strangely pleased. She had never had a companion in whom she could have so much confidence, and she had already recognized that she was, in one sense of the word, growing fond of him. Indeed, she had begun to be curious about the feeling and to wonder whether it stopped quite short at liking.

"Well," she told him, "I'm glad that you asked me to come with you. I think I was one of your first friends and I'm pleased that you should wish to spend part of your last day in my company."

"You come first of all!"

"That's flattering," she smiled. "What about Nasmyth?"

"An unusually fine man, but he has his limits. You have none."

"I'm not sure I quite understand you."

"Then," he explained seriously, "what I think I mean is this--you're one of the people who somehow contrive to meet any call that is made on them.

You would never sit down, helpless, in a trying situation; you'd find some way of getting over the difficulties. It's a gift more useful than genius."

"You're rating me too highly," she answered with some embarra.s.sment. "You admitted that you thought my place was here--the inference was that I shouldn't fit into a different one."

"No," he corrected her; "you'd adapt yourself to changed conditions; but that wouldn't prevent your suffering in the process. Indeed, I think people of your kind often suffer more than the others."

He was to some extent correct in his estimate of her, but she shrank from the direct personal application of his remarks.

"Aren't the virtues you have described fairly common?" she asked. "I think that must be so, because they're so necessary."

"In a degree, I suppose they are. You see them, perhaps, most clearly in such lands as mine. The pioneer has a good deal against him--frost and floods, hard rock and sliding snow; he must face every discomfort, hunger and stinging cold. The prospector crawls through tangled forests, and packs his stores across snowy divides; shallow shafts cave in, rude dams are swept away. A man worked to exhaustion on the trail runs out of provisions and goes on, starving; he lames himself among the rocks, sets his teeth and limps ahead. I've thought the capacity to do so is humanity's greatest attribute, but after all it's not shown in its finest light battling with material things. When the moral stress comes, the man who would face the other often fails."

"Yes," she a.s.serted; "there are barriers that can't be stormed. Merely to acquiesce is the hardest thing of all, but in that lies the victory."

"It's a bitter one," he answered moodily.

There was silence for a few minutes while they strolled on through the heather. Afterward, Millicent understood where his thoughts had led, but now she was chiefly conscious of a slight but perplexing resentment against the fact that he should discourse rather crude philosophy.

Indeed, the feeling almost amounted to disappointment--it was their last walk, and though she did not know what she had expected from him, it was something different from this. Walking by her side, with his fine poise, his keen eyes that regarded her steadily when she spoke, and his resolute brown face, he appealed to her physically, and in other ways she approved of him. It was borne in upon her more clearly that she would miss him badly, and she suspected that he would not find it easy to part from her.

In the meanwhile he recognized that she had, no doubt unconsciously, given him a hint--when the moral difficulties were unsurmountable one must quietly submit.

They stopped when they reached the highest strip of moor. The sun was low, the vast sweep of country beneath them was fading to neutral color, woods, low ridges, and river valleys losing their sharpness of contour as the light left them. A faint cold wind sighed among the heather, emphasizing the desolation of the moorland.

Millicent s.h.i.+vered.

"We'll go down," Lisle said quietly; "the brightness has gone. I've had a great time here--something to think of as long as I live--but now it's over."

"But you'll come back some day?" she suggested.

"I may; I can't tell," he answered. "I've schemes in view, to be worked out in the North, that may make my return possible; but even then it couldn't be quite the same. Things change; one mustn't expect too much."

His smile was a little forced; his mood was infectious, and an unusual melancholy seized upon Millicent as they moved down-hill across the long, sad-colored slopes of heather. Then they reached a bare wood where dead leaves that rustled in the rising wind lay in drifts among the withered fern and the slender birch trunks rose about them somberly. The light had almost gone, the gathering gloom reacted upon both of them, and there was in the girl's mind a sense of something left unsaid. Once or twice she glanced at her companion; his face was graver than usual and he did not look at her.

It was quite dark when they walked down the dale beneath the leafless oaks, talking now with an effort about indifferent matters, until at last Millicent stopped at the gate of the drive to her house.

"Will you come in?" she asked.

"No; Nasmyth's waiting. I'm glad you came with me, but I won't say good-by. I'll look forward to the journey we're to make together through British Columbia."

She held out her hand; in another moment he turned away, and she walked on to the house with a strange sense of depression.

CHAPTER XXII

STARTLING NEWS

It was snowing in the northern wilderness and the bitter air was filled with small, dry flakes, which whirled in filmy clouds athwart the red glow of a fire. A clump of boulders stood outlined beside a frozen river, and behind the boulders a growth of willows rose crusted with snow, while beyond them, barely distinguishable, were the stunted shapes of a few birches. So far the uncertain radiance reached when the fire leaped up, but outside it all was shut in by a dense curtain of falling snow.

It had been dark for some time, and Lisle was getting anxious as he lay, wrapped in a ragged skin coat, in a hollow beside a boulder. A straining tent stood near the fire, but the big stone afforded better shelter, and drawing hard upon his pipe, he listened eagerly. The effort to do so was unpleasant as well as somewhat risky, for he had to turn back the old fur cap from his tingling ears; and he s.h.i.+vered at every variation of the stinging blast. There was nothing to be heard except the soft swish of the snow as it swirled among the stones and the hollow rumble of the river pouring down a rapid beneath a rent bridge of ice.

The man had spent the early winter, when the snow facilitates traveling, in the auriferous regions of the North, arranging for the further development of the mineral properties under his control. That done, he had, returning some distance south, struck out again into the wilds to examine some alluvial claims in which he had been asked to take an interest. It was difficult to reach the first of them; and then he had spent several weeks in determined toil, cutting and hauling in wood to thaw out the frozen surface sufficiently to make investigations.

Crestwick had accompanied him, but during the last few days he had gone down to a Hudson Bay post with the owners of the claim, who were returning satisfied with the arrangements made. His object was to obtain any letters that might have arrived, and Lisle, going on to look at another group of claims, had arranged to meet him where he had camped.

It would be difficult to miss the way, for it consisted of the frozen river, but Crestwick should have arrived early in the afternoon and Lisle felt uneasy. On the whole, the Canadian was satisfied with the conduct of his companion. Deprived during most of the time of any opportunity for dissipation, scantily fed, and forced to take his share in continuous labor, the lad's better qualities had become manifest and he had responded pluckily to the demands on him. Abstinence and toil were already producing their refining effect. Still, he had not come back, and with the snow thickening, it was possible that he might not be able to keep to the comparatively plain track of the river. There was also the risk that by holding on too far when he saw the fire he might blunder in among the fissured ice at the foot of the rapid.

Rising at length, Lisle walked toward the dangerous spot, guiding himself by sound, for once he was out of the firelight there was nothing to be seen but a white driving cloud. He knew when he had reached the neighborhood of the rapid by the increased clamor of the stream, and he crept on until he decided that he was abreast of the pool below. The rapid was partly frozen, but the ice was fissured and piled up at the tail of it.