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Page 33
Keith swallowed hard, too. "Not to speak of," he said. "You see, Mary
Josephine, I've got a tremendous surprise for you, if you'll promise it
won't spoil your appetite. Last night was the first night I've spent in
a real bed for three years."
And then, without waiting for her questions, he began to tell her the
epic story of John Keith. With her sitting opposite him, her beautiful,
wide-open, gray eyes looking at him with amazement as she sensed the
marvelous coincidence of their meeting, he told it as he had not told
it to McDowell or even to Miriam Kirkstone. A third time the facts were
the same. But it was John Keith now who was telling John Keith's story
through the lips of an unreal and negative Conniston. He forgot his own
breakfast, and a look of gloom settled on Wallie's face when he peered
in through the door and saw that their coffee and toast were growing
cold. Mary Josephine leaned a little over the table. Not once did she
interrupt Keith. Never had he dreamed of a glory that might reflect his
emotions as did her eyes. As he swept from pathos to storm, from the
madness of long, black nights to starvation and cold, as he told of
flight, of pursuit, of the merciless struggle that ended at last in the
capture of John Keith, as he gave to these things words and life
pulsing with the beat of his own heart, he saw them revisioned in those
wonderful gray eyes, cold at times with fear, warm and glowing at other
times with sympathy, and again shining softly with a glory of pride and
love that was meant for him alone. With him she was present in the
little cabin up in the big Barren. Until he told of those days and
nights of hopeless desolation, of racking cough and the nearness of
death, and of the comradeship of brothers that had come as a final
benediction to the hunter and the hunted, until in her soul she was
understanding and living those terrible hours as they two had lived
them, he did not know how deep and dark and immeasurably tender that
gray mystery of beauty in her eyes could be. From that hour he
worshiped them as he worshiped no other part of her.
"And from all that you came back the same day I came," she said in a
low, awed voice. "You came back from THAT!"
He remembered the part he must play.
"Yes, three years of it. If I could only remember as well, only half as
well, things that happened before this--" He raised a hand to his
forehead, to the scar.
"You will," she whispered swiftly. "Derry, darling, you will!"
Wallie sidled in and, with an adoring grin at Mary Josephine, suggested
that he had more coffee and toast ready to serve, piping hot. Keith was
relieved. The day had begun auspiciously, and over the bacon and eggs,
done to a ravishing brown by the little Jap, he told Mary Josephine of
some of his bills of fare in the north and how yesterday he had filled
up on bacon smell at Andy Duggan's. Steak from the cheek of a walrus,
he told her, was equal to porterhouse; seal meat wasn't bad, but one
grew tired of it quickly unless he was an Eskimo; polar bear meat was
filling but tough and strong. He liked whale meat, especially the
tail-steaks of narwhal, and cold boiled blubber was good in the winter,
only it was impossible to cook it because of lack of fuel, unless one
was aboard ship or had an alcohol stove in his outfit. The tidbit of
the Eskimo was birds' eggs, gathered by the ton in summer-time, rotten
before cold weather came, and frozen solid as chunks of ice in winter.
Through one starvation period of three weeks he had lived on them
himself, crunching them raw in his mouth as one worries away with a
piece of rock candy. The little lines gathered in Mary Josephine's
forehead at this, but they smoothed away into laughter when he
humorously described the joy of living on nothing at all but air. And
he added to this by telling her how the gluttonous Eskimo at feast-time
would lie out flat on their backs so that their womenfolk could feed
them by dropping chunks of flesh into their open maws until their
stomachs swelled up like the crops of birds overstuffed with grain.
It was a successful breakfast. When it was over, Keith felt that he had
achieved a great deal. Before they rose from the table, he startled
Mary Josephine by ordering Wallie to bring him a cold chisel and a
hammer from Brady's tool-chest.
"I've lost the key that opens my chest, and I've got to break in," he
explained to her.
Mary Josephine's little laugh was delicious. "After what you told me
about frozen eggs, I thought perhaps you were going to eat some," she
said.
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