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Page 8
After that he packed his dunnage and continued south. He wondered if
Conniston ever knew his Manual as he learned it now. At the end of the
sixth day he could repeat it from cover to cover. Every hour he made it
a practice to stop short and salute the trees about him. McDowell would
not catch him there.
"I am Derwent Conniston," he kept telling himself. "John Keith is
dead--dead. I buried him back there under the cabin, the cabin built by
Sergeant Trossy and his patrol in nineteen hundred and eight. My name
is Conniston--Derwent Conniston."
In his years of aloneness he had grown into the habit of talking to
himself--or with himself--to keep up his courage and sanity. "Keith,
old boy, we've got to fight it out," he would say. Now it was,
"Conniston, old chap, we'll win or die." After the third day, he never
spoke of John Keith except as a man who was dead. And over the dead
John Keith he spread Conniston's mantle. "John Keith died game, sir,"
he said to McDowell, who was a tree. "He was the finest chap I ever
knew."
On this sixth day came the miracle. For the first time in many months
John Keith saw the sun. He had seen the murky glow of it before this,
fighting to break through the pall of fog and haze that hung over the
Barrens, but this sixth day it was the sun, the real sun, bursting in
all its glory for a short space over the northern world. Each day after
this the sun was nearer and warmer, as the arctic vapor clouds and
frost smoke were left farther behind, and not until he had passed
beyond the ice fogs entirely did Keith swing westward. He did not
hurry, for now that he was out of his prison, he wanted time in which
to feel the first exhilarating thrill of his freedom. And more than all
else he knew that he must measure and test himself for the tremendous
fight ahead of him.
Now that the sun and the blue sky had cleared his brain, he saw the
hundred pit-falls in his way, the hundred little slips that might be
made, the hundred traps waiting for any chance blunder on his part.
Deliberately he was on his way to the hangman. Down there--every day of
his life--he would rub elbows with him as he passed his fellow men in
the street. He would never completely feel himself out of the presence
of death. Day and night he must watch himself and guard himself, his
tongue, his feet, his thoughts, never knowing in what hour the eyes of
the law would pierce the veneer of his disguise and deliver his life as
the forfeit. There were times when the contemplation of these things
appalled him, and his mind turned to other channels of escape. And
then--always--he heard Conniston's cool, fighting voice, and the red
blood fired up in his veins, and he faced home.
He was Derwent Conniston. And never for an hour could he put out of his
mind the one great mystifying question in this adventure of life and
death, who was Derwent Conniston? Shred by shred he pieced together
what little he knew, and always he arrived at the same futile end. An
Englishman, dead to his family if he had one, an outcast or an
expatriate--and the finest, bravest gentleman he had ever known. It was
the WHYFORE of these things that stirred within him an emotion which he
had never experienced before. The Englishman had grimly and
determinedly taken his secret to the grave with him. To him, John
Keith--who was now Derwent Conniston--he had left an heritage of deep
mystery and the mission, if he so chose, of discovering who he was,
whence he had come--and why. Often he looked at the young girl's
picture in the watch, and always he saw in her eyes something which
made him think of Conniston as he lay in the last hour of his life.
Undoubtedly the girl had grown into a woman now.
Days grew into weeks, and under Keith's feet the wet, sweet-smelling
earth rose up through the last of the slush snow. Three hundred miles
below the Barrens, he was in the Reindeer Lake country early in May.
For a week he rested at a trapper's cabin on the Burntwood, and after
that set out for Cumberland House. Ten days later he arrived at the
post, and in the sunlit glow of the second evening afterward he built
his camp-fire on the shore of the yellow Saskatchewan.
The mighty river, beloved from the days of his boyhood, sang to him
again, that night, the wonderful things that time and grief had dimmed
in his heart. The moon rose over it, a warm wind drifted out of the
south, and Keith, smoking his pipe, sat for a long time listening to
the soft murmur of it as it rolled past at his feet. For him it had
always been more than the river. He had grown up with it, and it had
become a part of him; it had mothered his earliest dreams and
ambitions; on it he had sought his first adventures; it had been his
chum, his friend, and his comrade, and the fancy struck him that in the
murmuring voice of it tonight there was a gladness, a welcome, an
exultation in his return. He looked out on its silvery bars shimmering
in the moonlight, and a flood of memories swept upon him. Thirty years
was not so long ago that he could not remember the beautiful mother who
had told him stories as the sun went down and bedtime drew near. And
vividly there stood out the wonderful tales of Kistachiwun, the river;
how it was born away over in the mystery of the western mountains, away
from the eyes and feet of men; how it came down from the mountains into
the hills, and through the hills into the plains, broadening and
deepening and growing mightier with every mile, until at last it swept
past their door, bearing with it the golden grains of sand that made
men rich. His father had pointed out the deep-beaten trails of buffalo
to him and had told him stories of the Indians and of the land before
white men came, so that between father and mother the river became his
book of fables, his wonderland, the never-ending source of his
treasured tales of childhood. And tonight the river was the one thing
left to him. It was the one friend he could claim again, the one
comrade he could open his arms to without fear of betrayal. And with
the grief for things that once had lived and were now dead, there came
over him a strange sort of happiness, the spirit of the great river
itself giving him consolation.
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