Scarlett of the Mounted Part 22

Within the cabin her father was resting peacefully. While eating the food she set before him, he told Evelyn the history of his wonderful discovery, as it came back, fragmentarily, to his blurred memory, and she, the better to bring him back, as she thought, to sanity, humored his delusion by not betraying incredulity.

At the mission where he had been tended during the long illness that followed his captivity, so he explained, he had purposely given a fict.i.tious name and account of himself, lest the truth should somehow reach Blenksoe, thus furnis.h.i.+ng the clue to the whereabouts of the unstaked mine, which precaution also accounted for his having eluded the diligent search that the Mounted Police had never ceased to prosecute since his disappearance. From Blenksoe, however, he had no longer anything to fear; that arch-conspirator having gone the way of his leader, Dandy Raish, by the avenging bullet from some victim's hand.

And, now, please G.o.d, he concluded, restored health would bring back recollection, enabling him to unearth the pot of gold to which the heavenly sign had pointed him.

When, at last, her loving tendance had won him to sleep, Evelyn went out into the cool air, to draw a long breath and readjust her reckonings with life that the day's events had thus cruelly disturbed.

It was the sunset's glowing aftermath that, to the pilgrims of the north, alone justifies a long journey from conditions that those hide-bound with conventions are inclined to a.s.sociate with creature comfort, opening a new wonderland of beauty. In such regions where nature is elemental, man becomes elementary, feeling himself in the Almighty's workshop, in close communication with the powers of life, dealt with, not by subtle processes that the artificial conditions of city life have engendered, but swiftly, directly, summarily, as in the days of burning bush and pillars of flame.

Gazing over the now prosperous towns.h.i.+p of Lost Shoe Creek, across the lake, to the colossal mountains shutting it in from that "outside," to which even miners so heavily under the mysterious spell of the North that nothing ever could induce them to forsake it, still never ceases fondly to speak of as "G.o.d's country," Evelyn seemed to herself to be born again. Had she known it, it was then that she attained the n.o.blest moment of her being, resolving, even as she already had resolved to meet it bravely, also to meet this uncompromising blow of providence without bitterness; if possible with love.

Hearing Durant move within, she was about to go to him when her attention was arrested by a tatterdemalion figure at her gate, beseeching charity.

"Mademoiselle--peety ze poor!"

"Alphonse!" she exclaimed, recognizing the once jaunty person of her former courier, alias Count St. Hilaire.

Alphonse, who had not thought of her from that day to this, in turn recognizing her, hastened to attribute his present pitiful plight as the deserved vengeance of an outraged Heaven for his baseness in despoiling one of its own angels of kodak and motorcar. "But," he wept, "zese fruits of sin did not long time 'dure. Ze automobile she bust, zen I bust--and now--I have a such hunger."

In spite of the weight of sadness at her heart, Evelyn could not but smile. It was one of the jests of the great powers--jests that are, nevertheless, always tinged with irony, this confronting her with the scarecrow of her whilom splendor at the supreme hour of her misery.

Grateful for food which he devoured eagerly, overwhelmed by the gift of a small sum she bestowed on him to enable him to prosecute his journey, Alphonse sought some expression of his feelings beyond his mere copious Gallic thanks. He was selling photographs for a living, and he besought mademoiselle, could she bring herself to overlook the regrettable fact that they were the product of her own camera, to accept the choicest example of his art--a veritable triumph, an arc-en-ciel--a rainbow!

Involuntarily, Evelyn shuddered at the word. Would the G.o.ds never cease their mocking sport, she wondered, even while with becoming graciousness she thanked Alphonse and sent him on his way, rejoicing. She still held the picture in her hand, carelessly, occupied with her thoughts, when she heard a cry from Durant, who had come out without her noticing him, and was looking over her shoulder.

"My G.o.d! Evelyn! Look," he cried. "The mine--The Rainbow!"

"Father, dear," she sought to soothe him, "it is nothing--merely a chance photograph."

"Nothing? It is my witness, my record," answered Durant. "No, Evie, I'm not mad. This clears away the last cloud. Examine it carefully." Getting out his prospector's gla.s.s, he polished the lens carefully and held it over the photograph.

Evelyn looked, as she was bidden, at first merely to humor him, then with awakening interest as, under the gla.s.s's magnifying power, she studied the picture in detail. In his pa.s.sion for the picturesque Alphonse had, indeed, put her camera to good use. In this composition he had caught a striking moment: Durant himself, in his rough miner's garb, standing with arms flung up, as if in thankfulness to Heaven, while near by, beside a half-uprooted willow-bush, knelt Walter Pierce with an expression of wonder on his young face; while in the background, beyond the creek, stood the imperturbable mountains, spanned by a faint, elusive rainbow.

"This is the very spot!" Durant laughed like a happy boy. "Lost Shoe Creek! Fancy forgetting even the name!--I had always believed in it, though every other miner turned it down. It had shared the fate of hundreds of other northern camps: a new strike; a stampede, prospectors, traders, grafters, from all quarters rus.h.i.+ng madly in; then, disappointment, failure, starvation, desertion to new fields. It became the most G.o.d-forsaken place on earth--an abandoned camp drained of everything but the dregs of its population. I alone held on, having a nose for gold, and scenting it right here, and now and then coming on indications: Blenksoe, Raish, and all the other grafters meanwhile d.o.g.g.i.ng my steps to profit by any strike I might make, jump my claim, and make away with me!--Oh, this brings it all back, this picture: Walter Pierce; your coming; how Nick and the boys covered up my humiliation; my trying to kill myself; and then--the gold!"

While he was speaking, he had hurried to the clearing at the back of the cabin, comparing the lay of the land with the picture, Evelyn following with keenest anxiety at this new phase of his delusion, yet not knowing how to restrain him.

"Father, dear, don't," she remonstrated, seeing him uprooting a willow with frenzied eagerness. "Why, that's the bush on which I spread out my wash."

But Durant only laughed and went on spading up the soft earth with a bit of wood. Wild as were his actions, his face and bearing had regained all their old, light-hearted poise. He was as Evelyn always had known him on his occasional visits to her, when they spent money like princes and amused themselves like children.

Soon he threw his improvised tool aside. "Here we are! Look at this, Evie!"

Evelyn took the substance he handed to her, and, as the earth crumbled from it, saw that it was of irregular shape, and oddly indented, as though some underground giant had chewed it with t.i.tanic teeth before spewing it up for man's good or ill, as fate might decree. A slight, bluish hue with which it first met the eye melted softly into that indefinable l.u.s.tre that proclaims gold and only gold--the l.u.s.t for which is more potent than the love of woman, wine; in whose quest more lives have been sacrificed than for any other cause since the world began; for whose possession souls innumerable are being bartered every day.

"A sixty-dollar nugget," Durant appraised it, weighing it in his expert hand, "and valuable merely as an earnest of what lies beneath--just a chip of the old block; a clue to the great Lode! Now, to take possession formally!" He paced the ground, whittled and marked the stakes, and was preparing to post them, when a sudden thought arrested him. "But--the land now lies within the towns.h.i.+p limits!" he groaned. "Oh, my girl, what, if, after all, my luck should fail you!"

Evelyn smiled happily. "I think I can come to your a.s.sistance in that matter. If you will call to-morrow morning at the office of E. Durant you can acquire the mineral rights from the present owner of the lot, who happens to be--myself. Then you can record it as soon as the Commissioner's books are open."

"But----" Durant looked about with a touch of the furtive apprehension that had shadowed his recent life, and that never wholly left him.

"Suppose some one has seen--how can I defend it?"

"Oh," cried Evelyn, "no fear about that! There are no claim-jumpers in this camp, thanks to Scarlett of the Mounted."

"Aye, Scarlett. A fine fellow that. He did me a great kindness last year," said her father. "It began by his finding your picture, which I had dropped, and giving it back to me. If my foresight had been equal to my hindsight, I should have confided my discovery to him as soon as I made it, and so saved you this year of bitter experience, my girl."

"Well, daddy," replied Evelyn, "if you haven't suffered too much by it, not only do I not regret it, but I'm glad. It has taught me to value the gifts of the mother Lode infinitely less, and infinitely more, than formerly. I can hardly wait overnight to claim my pot of gold from the rainbow's foot--but I'm humbler about the possession of wealth than I used to be. And I want the whole camp to be 'in it.'"

"And so they shall, my girl," responded Durant, heartily. Then, as two figures came in sight, "There goes the Sergeant now, with Mr. Maclane, pa.s.sing by the gate. Suppose we begin with them, Evie. Suppose we call them in and tell them all about it." He already was summoning them.

"Suppose, for the present, you take charge of Mr. Maclane," amended Evelyn, as the two drew near, "and leave the Sergeant to me."

Scarlett and the minister were bent on some errand in another quarter of the town, but by tacit consent had taken the road past Evelyn's cabin, actuated, in the case of the older man, by a kind wish not to lose sight of her for long, and in the case of the lover by the force that guides all steps toward the beloved. For, dismissed as he had been, and dejected as he found himself accordingly, yet in his heart of hearts there still lurked a hope that she might relent toward him. When, therefore, they saw Evelyn, radiant, and beckoning to them from the veranda, they joined her and her father with alacrity. Nor did good Maclane need any suggestion from Durant that the two young people should be left to make their peace unaided.

"Sergeant Scarlett," Evelyn began when the older men had withdrawn to examine Durant's discovery, "I want to beg your pardon for the way I treated you this afternoon! I felt bitter, cheated--oh, it wasn't your fault one bit; it was my own, which was why I was so angry with you. And you--all along you have behaved so generously to me--n.o.bly!--Yes, let me finish," she cried, retreating from the advance with which he sought to interrupt her. "I shall always think it--but I may not ever be in the mood to tell you again quite how well I think of you."

"But, Evelyn, dearest, what's the good of compliments to a hungry man?"

cried Scarlett. "I'm asking ye for bread--and ye give me the blarney-stone."

Evelyn laughed, and, sitting, patted the place beside her, invitingly.

"I'll tell you the whole story. It's like a romance--I was going to write you a letter about it if you had not come."

"We'll write it together. We'll write it all our lives." Her lover slipped an arm about her. "But we'll start with the postscript."