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Page 36
He turned to the letters. They were postmarked Darlington, England. His
fingers tingled as he opened the first. It was as he had expected, as
he had hoped. They were from Mary Josephine. He arranged them--nine in
all--in the sequence of their dates, which ran back nearly eight years.
All of them had been written within a period of eleven months. They
were as legible as print. And as he passed from the first to the
second, and from the second to the third, and then read on into the
others, he forgot there was such a thing as time and that Mary
Josephine was waiting for him. The clippings had told him one thing;
here, like bits of driftage to be put together, a line in this place
and half a dozen in that, in paragraphs that enlightened and in others
that puzzled, was the other side of the story, a growing thing that
rose up out of mystery and doubt in segments and fractions of segments
adding themselves together piecemeal, welding the whole into form and
substance, until there rode through Keith's veins a wild thrill of
exultation and triumph.
And then he came to the ninth and last letter. It was in a different
handwriting, brief, with a deadly specificness about it that gripped
Keith as he read.
This ninth letter he held in his hand as he rose from the table, and
out of his mouth there fell, unconsciously, Conniston's own words,
"It's devilish queer, old top--and funny!"
There was no humor in the way he spoke them. His voice was hard, his
eyes dully ablaze. He was looking back into that swirling, unutterable
loneliness of the northland, and he was seeing Conniston again.
Fiercely he caught up the clippings, struck a match, and with a grim
smile watched them as they curled up into flame and crumbled into ash.
What a lie was life, what a malformed thing was justice, what a monster
of iniquity the man-fabricated thing called law!
And again he found himself speaking, as if the dead Englishman himself
were repeating the words, "It's devilish queer, old top--and funny!"
XIV
A quarter of an hour later, with Mary Josephine at his side, he was
walking down the green slope toward the Saskatchewan. In that direction
lay the rims of timber, the shimmering valley, and the broad pathways
that opened into the plains beyond.
The town was at their backs, and Keith wanted it there. He wanted to
keep McDowell, and Shan Tung, and Miriam Kirkstone as far away as
possible, until his mind rode more smoothly in the new orbit in which
it was still whirling a bit unsteadily. More than all else he wanted to
be alone with Mary Josephine, to make sure of her, to convince himself
utterly that she was his to go on fighting for. He sensed the nearness
and the magnitude of the impending drama. He knew that today he must
face Shan Tung, that again he must go under the battery of McDowell's
eyes and brain, and that like a fish in treacherous waters he must swim
cleverly to avoid the nets that would entangle and destroy him. Today
was the day--the stage was set, the curtain about to be lifted, the
play ready to be enacted. But before it was the prologue. And the
prologue was Mary Josephine's.
At the crest of a dip halfway down the slope they had paused, and in
this pause he stood a half-step behind her so that he could look at her
for a moment without being observed. She was bareheaded, and it came
upon him all at once how wonderful was a woman's hair, how beautiful
beyond all other things beautiful and desirable. In twisted, glowing
seductiveness it was piled up on Mary Josephine's head, transformed
into brown and gold glories by the sun. He wanted to put forth his hand
to it, and bury his fingers in it, and feel the thrill and the warmth
and the crush of the palpitant life of it against his own flesh. And
then, bending a little forward, he saw under her long lashes the sheer
joy of life shining in her eyes as she drank in the wonderful panorama
that lay below them to the west. Last night's rain had freshened it,
the sun glorified it now, and the fragrance of earthly smells that rose
up to them from it was the undefiled breath of a thing living and
awake. Even to Keith the river had never looked more beautiful, and
never had his yearnings gone out to it more strongly than in this
moment, to the river and beyond--and to the back of beyond, where the
mountains rose up to meet the blue sky and the river itself was born.
And he heard Mary Josephine's voice, joyously suppressed, exclaiming
softly,
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