Northern Lights Part 14

"Fifty--why, I'm as young as most men of thirty," he responded, with an uncertain laugh. "I'd have come here to-day if it had been snowing pitchforks and chain-lightning. I made up my mind I would. You saved my life, that's dead sure; and I'd be down among the moles if it wasn't for you and that Piegan pony of yours. Piegan ponies are wonders in a storm--seem to know their way by instinct. You, too--why, I bin on the plains all my life, and was no better than a baby that day; but you--why, you had Piegan in you--why, yes--"

He stopped short for a moment, checked by the look in her face, then went blindly on: "And you've got Blackfoot in you, too; and you just felt your way through the tornado and over the blind prairie like a bird reaching for the hills. It was as easy to you as picking out a maverick in a bunch of steers to me. But I never could make out what you was doing on the prairie that terrible day. I've thought of it a hundred times. What was you doing, if it ain't cheek to ask?"

"I was trying to lose a life," she answered, quietly, her eyes dwelling on his face, yet not seeing him; for it all came back on her, the agony which had driven her out into the tempest to be lost evermore.

He laughed. "Well now, that's good," he said; "that's what they call speaking sarcastic. You was out to save, and not to lose, a life; that was proved to the satisfaction of the court." He paused and chuckled to himself, thinking he had been witty, and continued: "And I was that court, and my judgment was that the debt of that life you saved had to be paid to you within one calendar year, with interest at the usual per cent. for mortgages on good security. That was my judgment, and there's no appeal from it. I am the great Justinian in this case!"

"Did you ever save anybody's life?" she asked, putting the bottle of cordial away, as he filled his gla.s.s for the third time.

"Twice certain, and once divided the honors," he answered, pleased at the question.

"And did you expect to get any pay, with or without interest?" she added.

"Me! I never thought of it again. But yes--by gol, I did! One case was funny, as funny can be. It was Ricky Wharton over on the Muskwat River. I saved his life right enough, and he came to me a year after and said, 'You saved my life, now what are you going to do with it? I'm stony broke. I owe a hundred dollars, and I wouldn't be owing it if you hadn't saved my life. When you saved it I was five hundred to the good, and I'd have left that much behind me. Now I'm on the rocks, because you insisted on saving my life; and you just got to take care of me.' I 'insisted'! Well, that knocked me silly, and I took him on--blame me, if I didn't keep Ricky a whole year, till he went north looking for gold. Get pay?--why, I _paid_!

Saving life has its responsibilities, little gal."

"You can't save life without running some risk yourself, not as a rule, can you?" she said, shrinking from his familiarity.

"Not as a rule," he replied. "You took on a bit of risk with me, you and your Piegan pony."

"Oh, I was young," she responded, leaning over the table and drawing faces on a piece of paper before her. "I could take more risks, I was only nineteen!"

"I don't catch on," he rejoined. "If it's sixteen or--"

"Or fifty," she interposed.

"What difference does it make? If you're done for, it's the same at nineteen as fifty, and _vicey-versey_."

"No, it's not the same," she answered. "You leave so much more that you want to keep, when you go at fifty."

"Well, I dunno. I never thought of that."

"There's all that has belonged to you. You've been married, and have children, haven't you?"

He started, frowned, then straightened himself. "I got one girl--she's East with her grandmother," he said, jerkily.

"That's what I said; there's more to leave behind at fifty," she replied, a red spot on each cheek. She was not looking at him, but at the face of a man on the paper before her--a young man with abundant hair, a strong chin, and big, eloquent eyes; and all around his face she had drawn the face of a girl many times, and beneath the faces of both she was writing _Manette and Julien_.

The water was getting too deep for John Alloway. He floundered toward the sh.o.r.e. "I'm no good at words," he said--"no good at argyment; but I've got a gift for stories--round the fire of a night, with a pipe and tin basin of tea; so I'm not going to try and match you. You've had a good education down at Winnipeg. Took every prize, they say, and led the school, though there was plenty of fuss because they let you do it, and let you stay there, being half-Indian. You never heard what was going on outside, I s'pose. It didn't matter, for you won out. Blamed foolishness, trying to draw the line between red and white that way. Of course, it's the women always, always the women, striking out for all-white or nothing. Down there at Portage they've treated you mean, mean as dirt. The Reeve's wife--well, we'll fix that up all right. I guess John Alloway ain't to be bluffed. He knows too much, and they all know he knows enough. When John Alloway, 32 Main Street, with a ranch on the Katanay, says, 'We're coming, Mr. and Mrs. John Alloway is coming,' they'll get out their cards _visite_, I guess."

Pauline's head bent lower, and she seemed laboriously etching lines into the faces before her--Manette and Julien, Julien and Manette; and there came into her eyes the youth and light and gayety of the days when Julien came of an afternoon and the riverside rang with laughter--the dearest, lightest days she had ever spent.

The man of fifty went on, seeing nothing but a girl over whom he was presently going to throw the la.s.so of his affection and take her home with him, yielding and glad, a white man and his half-breed girl--but such a half-breed!

"I seen enough of the way some of them women treated you," he continued, "and I sez to myself, Her turn next. There's a way out, I sez, and John Alloway pays his debts. When the anniversary comes round I'll put things right, I sez to myself. She saved my life, and she shall have the rest of it, if she'll take it, and will give a receipt in full, and open a new account in the name of John and Pauline Alloway. Catch it? See--Pauline?"

Slowly she got to her feet. There was a look in her eyes such as had been in her mother's a little while before, but a hundred times intensified, a look that belonged to the flood and flow of generations of Indian life, yet controlled in her by the order and understanding of centuries of white men's lives, the pervasive, dominating power of race.

For an instant she kept her eyes toward the window. The storm had suddenly ceased, and a glimmer of sunset light was breaking over the distant wastes of snow.

"You want to pay a debt you think you owe," she said, in a strange, l.u.s.treless voice, turning to him at last. "Well, you have paid it. You have given me a book to read which I will keep always. And I give you a receipt in full for your debt."

"I don't know about any book," he answered, dazedly. "I want to marry you right away."

"I am sorry, but it is not necessary," she replied, suggestively. Her face was very pale now.

"But I want to. It ain't a debt. That was only a way of putting it. I want to make you my wife. I got some position, and I can make the West sit up and look at you and be glad."

Suddenly her anger flared out, low and vivid and fierce, but her words were slow and measured. "There is no reason why I should marry you--not one. You offer me marriage as a prince might give a penny to a beggar. If my mother were not an Indian woman, you would not have taken it all as a matter of course. But my father was a white man, and I am a white man's daughter, and I would rather marry an Indian, who would think me the best thing there was in the light of the sun, than marry you. Had I been pure white you would not have been so sure; you would have asked, not offered.

I am not obliged to you. You ought to go to no woman as you came to me.

See, the storm has stopped. You will be quite safe going back now. The snow will be deep, perhaps, but it is not far."

She went to the window, got his cap and gloves, and handed them to him. He took them, dumbfounded and overcome.

"Say, I ain't done it right, mebbe, but I meant well, and I'd be good to you and proud of you, and I'd love you better than anything I ever saw,"

he said, shamefacedly, but eagerly and honestly, too.

"Ah, you should have said those last words first," she answered.

"I say them now."

"They come too late; but they would have been too late in any case," she added. "Still, I am glad you said them."

She opened the door for him.

"I made a mistake," he urged, humbly. "I understand better now. I never had any schoolin'."

"Oh, it isn't that," she answered, gently. "Good-bye."

Suddenly he turned. "You're right--it couldn't ever be," he said.

"You're--you're great. And I owe you my life still!"

He stepped out into the biting air.

For a moment Pauline stood motionless in the middle of the room, her gaze fixed upon the door which had just closed; then, with a wild gesture of misery and despair, she threw herself upon the couch in a pa.s.sionate outburst of weeping. Sobs shook her from head to foot, and her hands, clenched above her head, twitched convulsively.

Presently the door opened and her mother looked in eagerly. At what she saw her face darkened and hardened for an instant, but then the girl's utter abandonment of grief and agony convinced and conquered her. Some glimmer of the true understanding of the problem which Pauline represented got into her heart and drove the sullen selfishness from her face and eyes and mind. She came over heavily and, sinking upon her knees, swept an arm around the girl's shoulder. She realized what had happened, and probably this was the first time in her life that she had ever come by instinct to a revelation of her daughter's mind or of the faithful meaning of incidents of their lives.

"You said no to John Alloway," she murmured.

Defiance and protest spoke in the swift gesture of the girl's hands. "You think because he was white that I'd drop into his arms! No--no--no!"

"You did right, little one."

The sobs suddenly stopped, and the girl seemed to listen with all her body. There was something in her Indian mother's voice she had never heard before--at least, not since she was a little child and swung in a deerskin hammock in a tamarac-tree by Renton's Lodge, where the chiefs met and the West paused to rest on its onward march. Something of the accents of the voice that crooned to her then was in the woman's tones now.

"He offered it like a lump of sugar to a bird--I know. He didn't know that you have great blood--yes, but it is true. My man's grandfather, he was of the blood of the kings of England. My man had the proof. And for a thousand years my people have been chiefs. There is no blood in all the West like yours. My heart was heavy, and dark thoughts came to me, because my man is gone, and the life is not my life, and I am only an Indian woman from the Warais, and my heart goes out there always now. But some great Medicine has been poured into my heart. As I stood at the door and saw you lying there, I called to the Sun. 'O great Spirit,' I said, 'help me to understand, for this girl is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, and Evil has come between us!' And the Sun Spirit poured the Medicine into my spirit, and there is no cloud between us now. It has pa.s.sed away, and I see. Little white one, the white life is the only life, and I will live it with you till a white man comes and gives you a white man's home. But not John Alloway. Shall the crow nest with the oriole?"