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Page 10
Duggan nodded uncertainly. He was evidently puzzled at not being able
to place his man. "It's always fine on the river, rain 'r shine.
Anybody who says it ain't is a God A'mighty liar!"
He was still the old Duggan, ready to fight for his river at the drop
of a hat! Keith wanted to hug him. He shifted his pack and said:
"I've slept with it for a week--just to have it for company--on the way
down from Cumberland House. Seems good to get back!" He took off his
hat and met the riverman's eyes squarely. "Do you happen to know if
McDowell is at barracks?" he asked.
"He is," said Duggan.
That was all. He was looking at Keith with a curious directness. Keith
held his breath. He would have given a good deal to have seen behind
Duggan's beard. There was a hard note in the riverman's voice, too. It
puzzled him. And there was a flash of sullen fire in his eyes at the
mention of McDowell's name. "The Inspector's there--sittin' tight," he
added, and to Keith's amazement brushed past him without another word
and disappeared into the bush.
This, at least, was not like the good-humored Duggan of four years ago.
Keith replaced his hat and went on. At the farther side of the clearing
he turned and looked back. Duggan stood in the open roadway, his hands
thrust deep in his pockets, staring after him. Keith waved his hand,
but Duggan did not respond. He stood like a sphinx, his big red beard
glowing in the early sun, and watched Keith until he was gone.
To Keith this first experiment in the matter of testing an identity was
a disappointment. It was not only disappointing but filled him with
apprehension. It was true that Duggan had not recognized him as John
Keith, BUT NEITHER HAD HE RECOGNIZED HIM AS DERWENT CONNISTON! And
Duggan was not a man to forget in three or four years--or half a
lifetime, for that matter. He saw himself facing a new and unexpected
situation. What if McDowell, like Duggan, saw in him nothing more than
a stranger? The Englishman's last words pounded in his head again like
little fists beating home a truth, "You win or lose the moment McDowell
first sets his eyes on you." They pressed upon him now with a deadly
significance. For the first time he understood all that Conniston had
meant. His danger was not alone in the possibility of being recognized
as John Keith; it lay also in the hazard of NOT being recognized as
Derwent Conniston.
If the thought had come to him to turn back, if the voice of fear and a
premonition of impending evil had urged him to seek freedom in another
direction, their whispered cautions were futile in the thrill of the
greater excitement that possessed him now. That there was a third hand
playing in this game of chance in which Conniston had already lost his
life, and in which he was now staking his own, was something which gave
to Keith a new and entirely unlooked-for desire to see the end of the
adventure. The mental vision of his own certain fate, should he lose,
dissolved into a nebulous presence that no longer oppressed nor
appalled him. Physical instinct to fight against odds, the inspiration
that presages the uncertainty of battle, fired his blood with an
exhilarating eagerness. He was anxious to stand face to face with
McDowell. Not until then would the real fight begin. For the first time
the fact seized upon him that the Englishman was wrong--he would NOT
win or lose in the first moment of the Inspector's scrutiny. In that
moment he could lose--McDowell's cleverly trained eyes might detect the
fraud; but to win, if the game was not lost at the first shot, meant an
exciting struggle. Today might be his Armageddon, but it could not
possess the hour of his final triumph.
He felt himself now like a warrior held in leash within sound of the
enemy's guns and the smell of his powder. He held his old world to be
his enemy, for civilization meant people, and the people were the
law--and the law wanted his life. Never had he possessed a deeper
hatred for the old code of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth
than in this hour when he saw up the valley a gray mist of smoke rising
over the roofs of his home town. He had never conceded within himself
that he was a criminal. He believed that in killing Kirkstone he had
killed a serpent who had deserved to die, and a hundred times he had
told himself that the job would have been much more satisfactory from
the view-point of human sanitation if he had sent the son in the
father's footsteps. He had rid the people of a man not fit to live--and
the people wanted to kill him for it. Therefore the men and women in
that town he had once loved, and still loved, were his enemies, and to
find friends among them again he was compelled to perpetrate a clever
fraud.
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