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Page 6
Half an hour later he stood in the edge of the scrub timber that rimmed
in the arctic plain, and looked for the last time upon the little cabin
under the floor of which the Englishman was buried. It stood there
splendidly unafraid in its terrible loneliness, a proud monument to a
dead man's courage and a dead man's soul. Within its four walls it
treasured a thing which gave to it at last a reason for being, a reason
for fighting against dissolution as long as one log could hold upon
another. Conniston's spirit had become a living part of it, and the
foxes might yap everlastingly, and the winds howl, and winter follow
winter, and long night follow long night--and it would stand there in
its pride fighting to the last, a memorial to Derwent Conniston, the
Englishman.
Looking back at it, Keith bared his head in the raw dawn. "God bless
you, Conniston," he whispered, and turned slowly away and into the
south.
Ahead of him was eight hundred miles of wilderness--eight hundred miles
between him and the little town on the Saskatchewan where McDowell
commanded Division of the Royal Mounted. The thought of distance did
not appall him. Four years at the top of the earth had accustomed him
to the illimitable and had inured him to the lack of things. That
winter Conniston had followed him with the tenacity of a ferret for a
thousand miles along the rim of the Arctic, and it had been a miracle
that he had not killed the Englishman. A score of times he might have
ended the exciting chase without staining his own hands. His Eskimo
friends would have performed the deed at a word. But he had let the
Englishman live, and Conniston, dead, was sending him back home. Eight
hundred miles was but the step between.
He had no dogs or sledge. His own team had given up the ghost long ago,
and a treacherous Kogmollock from the Roes Welcome had stolen the
Englishman's outfit in the last lap of their race down from Fullerton's
Point. What he carried was Conniston's, with the exception of his rifle
and his own parka and hood. He even wore Conniston's watch. His pack
was light. The chief articles it contained were a little flour, a
three-pound tent, a sleeping-bag, and certain articles of
identification to prove the death of John Keith, the outlaw. Hour after
hour of that first day the zip, zip, zip of his snowshoes beat with
deadly monotony upon his brain. He could not think. Time and again it
seemed to him that something was pulling him back, and always he was
hearing Conniston's voice and seeing Conniston's face in the gray gloom
of the day about him. He passed through the slim finger of scrub timber
that a strange freak of nature had flung across the plain, and once
more was a moving speck in a wide and wind-swept barren. In the
afternoon he made out a dark rim on the southern horizon and knew it
was timber, real timber, the first he had seen since that day, a year
and a half ago, when the last of the Mackenzie River forest had faded
away behind him! It gave him, at last, something tangible to grip. It
was a thing beckoning to him, a sentient, living wall beyond which was
his other world. The eight hundred miles meant less to him than the
space between himself and that growing, black rim on the horizon.
He reached it as the twilight of the day was dissolving into the deeper
dusk of the night, and put up his tent in the shelter of a clump of
gnarled and storm-beaten spruce. Then he gathered wood and built
himself a fire. He did not count the sticks as he had counted them for
eighteen months. He was wasteful, prodigal. He had traveled forty miles
since morning but he felt no exhaustion. He gathered wood until he had
a great pile of it, and the flames of his fire leaped higher and higher
until the spruce needles crackled and hissed over his head. He boiled a
pot of weak tea and made a supper of caribou meat and a bit of bannock.
Then he sat with his back to a tree and stared into the flames.
The fire leaping and crackling before his eyes was like a powerful
medicine. It stirred things that had lain dormant within him. It
consumed the heavy dross of four years of stupefying torture and
brought back to him vividly the happenings of a yesterday that had
dragged itself on like a century. All at once he seemed unburdened of
shackles that had weighted him down to the point of madness. Every
fiber in his body responded to that glorious roar of the fire; a thing
seemed to snap in his head, freeing it of an oppressive bondage, and in
the heart of the flames he saw home, and hope, and life--the things
familiar and precious long ago, which the scourge of the north had
almost beaten dead in his memory. He saw the broad Saskatchewan
shimmering its way through the yellow plains, banked in by the
foothills and the golden mists of morning dawn; he saw his home town
clinging to its shore on one side and with its back against the purple
wilderness on the other; he heard the rhythmic chug, chug, chug of the
old gold dredge and the rattle of its chains as it devoured its tons of
sand for a few grains of treasure; over him there were lacy clouds in a
blue heaven again, he heard the sound of voices, the tread of feet,
laughter--life. His soul reborn, he rose to his feet and stretched his
arms until the muscles snapped. No, they would not know him back
there--now! He laughed softly as he thought of the old John
Keith--"Johnny" they used to call him up and down the few
balsam-scented streets--his father's right-hand man mentally but a
little off feed, as his chum, Reddy McTabb, used to say, when it came
to the matter of muscle and brawn. He could look back on things without
excitement now. Even hatred had burned itself out, and he found himself
wondering if old Judge Kirkstone's house looked the same on the top of
the hill, and if Miriam Kirkstone had come back to live there after
that terrible night when he had returned to avenge his father.
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