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Page 59
XXIII
All through the starlit hours of that night John Keith trudged steadily
into the Northwest. For a long time his direction took him through
slashings, second-growth timber, and cleared lands; he followed rough
roads and worn trails and passed cabins that were dark and without life
in the silence of midnight. Twice a dog caught the stranger scent in
the air and howled; once he heard a man's voice, far away, raised in a
shout. Then the trails grew rougher. He came to a deep wide swamp. He
remembered that swamp, and before he plunged into it, he struck a match
to look at his compass and his watch. It took him two hours to make the
other side. He was in the deep and uncut timber then, and a sense of
relief swept over him.
The forest was again his only friend. He did not rest. His brain and
his body demanded the action of steady progress, though it was not
through fear of what lay behind him. Fear had ceased to be a
stimulating part of him; it was even dead within him. It was as if his
energy was engaged in fighting for a principle, and the principle was
his life; he was following a duty, and this duty impelled him to make
his greatest effort. He saw clearly what he had done and what was ahead
of him. He was twice a killer of men now, and each time the killing had
rid the earth of a snake. This last time it had been an exceedingly
good job. Even McDowell would concede that, and Miriam Kirkstone, on
her knees, would thank God for what he had done. But Canadian law did
not split hairs like its big neighbor on the south. It wanted him at
least for Kirkstone's killing if not for that of Kao, the Chinaman. No
one, not even Mary Josephine, would ever fully realize what he had
sacrificed for the daughter of the man who had ruined his father. For
Mary Josephine would never understand how deeply he had loved her.
It surprised him to find how naturally he fell back into his old habit
of discussing things with himself, and how completely and calmly he
accepted the fact that his home-coming had been but a brief and
wonderful interlude to his fugitivism. He did not know it at first, but
this calmness was the calmness of a despair more fatal than the menace
of the hangman.
"They won't catch me," he encouraged himself. "And she won't tell them
where I'm going. No, she won't do that." He found himself repeating
that thought over and over again. Mary Josephine would not betray him.
He repeated it, not as a conviction, but to fight back and hold down
another thought that persisted in forcing itself upon him. And this
thing, that at times was like a voice within him, cried out in its
moments of life, "She hates you--and she WILL tell where you are going!"
With each hour it was harder for him to keep that voice down; it
persisted, it grew stronger; in its intervals of triumph it rose over
and submerged all other thoughts in him. It was not his fear of her
betrayal that stabbed him; it was the underlying motive of it, the
hatred that would inspire it. He tried not to vision her as he had seen
her last, in the big chair, crushed, shamed, outraged--seeing in him no
longer the beloved brother, but an impostor, a criminal, a man whom she
might suspect of killing that brother for his name and his place in
life. But the thing forced itself on him. It was reasonable, and it was
justice.
"But she won't do it," he told himself. "She won't do it."
This was his fight, and its winning meant more to him than freedom. It
was Mary Josephine who would live with him now, and not Conniston. It
was her spirit that would abide with him, her voice he would hear in
the whispers of the night, her face he would see in the glow of his
lonely fires, and she must remain with him always as the Mary Josephine
he had known. So he crushed back the whispering voice, beat it down
with his hands clenched at his side, fought it through the hours of
that night with the desperation of one who fights for a thing greater
than life.
Toward dawn the stars began to fade out of the sky. He had been
tireless, and he was tireless now. He felt no exhaustion. Through the
gray gloom that came before day he went on, and the first glow of sun
found him still traveling. Prince Albert and the Saskatchewan were
thirty miles to the south and east of him.
He stopped at last on the edge of a little lake and unburdened himself
of his pack for the first time. He was glad that the premonition of
just such a sudden flight as this had urged him to fill his emergency
grub-sack yesterday morning. "Won't do any harm for us to be prepared,"
he had laughed jokingly to Mary Josephine, and Mary Josephine herself
had made him double the portion of bacon because she was fond of it. It
was hard for him to slice that bacon without a lump rising in his
throat. Pork and love! He wanted to laugh, and he wanted to cry, and
between the two it was a queer, half-choked sound that came to his
lips. He ate a good breakfast, rested for a couple of hours, and went
on. At a more leisurely pace he traveled through most of the day, and
at night he camped. In the ten days following his flight from Prince
Albert he kept utterly out of sight. He avoided trappers' shacks and
trails and occasional Indians. He rid himself of his beard and shaved
himself every other day. Mary Josephine had never cared much for the
beard. It prickled. She had wanted him smooth-faced, and now he was
that. He looked better, too. But the most striking resemblance to
Derwent Conniston was gone. At the end of the ten days he was at Turtle
Lake, fifty miles east of Fort Pitt. He believed that he could show
himself openly now, and on the tenth day bartered with some Indians for
fresh supplies. Then he struck south of Fort Pitt, crossed the
Saskatchewan, and hit between the Blackfoot Hills and the Vermillion
River into the Buffalo Coulee country. In the open country he came upon
occasional ranches, and at one of these he purchased a pack-horse. At
Buffalo Lake he bought his supplies for the mountains, including fifty
steel traps, crossed the upper branch of the Canadian Pacific at night,
and the next day saw in the far distance the purple haze of the Rockies.
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