CHAPTER XIX
The Stranger’s Errand
“I could not think of letting you guide me anywhere in this downpour,” said the stranger, who had drawn Pam away from the fine tree against which she was leaning, telling her that it was not safe to shelter under a tree, especially a beech tree, until the storm was over. “If you will tell me which way to go I dare say that I can manage, or, if it is very complicated, perhaps you will let me go with you to the nearest shelter. This rain is going to keep on for a few hours, which will be a good thing for the farmers, but it is not worth while to keep more of it off the ground than we can help.”
“If I am right as to where we are, Mrs. Buckle’s house is the nearest place where we can shelter; and if I am not to lean against a tree, we might as well be going forward, for I don’t feel as if I can breathe with all this water dropping on my face.” Pam was gasping and choking as she turned into the trail which she thought led to Mrs. Buckle’s house, and she felt as if it would be a physical impossibility to reach shelter of any sort unless she could get her breath more easily. She thought of the ruined house on the old tote road, but decided that she would rather be out in the rain than forced to shelter there. Then, too, it was no farther to the house of Mrs. Buckle in one direction than it would be to go back to that place of ill repute.
“Keep your head down, then you will be able to breathe easier!” called out the stranger from the rear, and Pam decided that he was a very understanding sort, and well versed in forest lore likewise, so her curiosity grew and grew as she plodded along through the pouring rain, as wet through as if she had been sitting in the creek.
A turn in the trail, and she saw the angle of the little brown house. She had made no mistake, but had brought the stranger straight as the crow flies to the house he was seeking. They emerged from the forest and were crossing the field, when the door was flung open, and to her surprise Pam saw Jack on the threshold, peering at her and her companion as if he failed to recognize her.
“Just a nice little shower, isn’t it?” she called out, trying to make her voice sound as cheerful as possible, although she was feeling pretty bad by this time.
“Pam, is it you? Why, you are nearly drowned! What has happened to bring you out in such a downpour?” demanded Jack, darting out to help her along those last few steps.
“I went out to find the cow,” she explained; then, reaching the door, paused on the threshold, for the house was clean, and she could not bear to enter in such a condition.
At this moment Mrs. Buckle came upon the scene, and, bursting into a torrent of exclamations and questions, dragged Pam indoors to find dry clothes. Then she made Jack take the stranger away to the barn to change into a suit of her late husband’s. She talked all the time at her very fastest rate, and gave Pam no chance at all of explaining how she came to be in such a plight.
The rain stopped almost as suddenly as it began; the clouds were breaking and the sun was coming out when Pam emerged from Mrs. Buckle’s bedroom wearing an old washing frock of her hostess, which was much too short and much too broad for her. It was at this moment that Jack came hurrying in from the barn, crying excitedly:
“I say, Pam, why didn’t you say that it was Sophy’s policeman that you had in tow? My word, isn’t he a fine chap! Won’t she be pleased to see him, too!”
“Is that Mr. Lester?” cried Pam in amazement. “Why, I never dreamed of such a thing! Besides, he wanted to see Mrs. Buckle!”
“I suppose he can want to see whom he pleases,” retorted Jack. Then, as the stranger came along, looking grotesque and floppy clad in the deceased Sam Buckle’s best “blacks”, he was graceless enough to burst into a shout of laughter, in which he was joined by Pam, who simply could not help her merriment.
“It is not fair that you should laugh at me, Miss Walsh, for your own things are not a very good fit,” said George Lester, and then he shook hands with her, telling her that he was glad to see her, but that he had guessed who she was when they were putting out the fire.
“Why did you not tell me?” she said reproachfully. “If you had said who you were we would have struggled on as far as Ripple instead of coming here, for of course Sophy wants to see you.”
“But I had to see Mrs. Buckle, and it is business first, you know.” He spoke in a quick, firm tone, and, looking at him, Pam decided that certainly Sophy had made no mistake, and that here was a man of whom any girl might very reasonably feel proud.
“Jack and I will go across to the barn and wait while you do your business; then we will guide you to Ripple. Sophy is staying there with us, you know.” Pam spoke a little uncertainly, for after all she did not know how much Mr. Lester might know of the movements of his betrothed.
“My business is rather public than private—at least, so far as you and your brother are concerned. You had better stay and hear about it, then we will go to Ripple together. Sophy told me in her last letter that I should find her staying there.” Mr. Lester then turned from Pam to speak to Mrs. Buckle, and Pam sat down on the nearest chair, feeling tremendously curious as to the errand that had brought George Lester to this house before he made any attempt to see Sophy, from whom he had been parted for a year.
Amanda Higgins had gone home for the day to help her mother, so there were only Jack and Pam with Mrs. Buckle when George Lester began to state his errand.
“I think you used to know a man named Mose Paget?” He was looking at Mrs. Buckle as he spoke, and Pam felt a queer contraction of her heart as she told herself that Mose was dead; she was sure of it from the stranger’s manner of speaking.
“Yes, I knew him, but I’m sorry to say he was not very well worth knowing,” answered Mrs. Buckle. “He was downright good to my poor husband when he was dying, but the fellow played me rather a dirty trick afterwards in going off and leaving me in the lurch just at seeding time. I can’t think how I would have got through if it had not been for Miss Walsh and her brother. The way Mose treated that poor little half-brother of his was just shameful, too, so I’m not to say proud of his acquaintance.”
“The man is dead.” George Lester spoke in a quiet tone, but his voice sounded loud in the ears of Pam, who had difficulty in suppressing a sob. She was thinking of all the tragedies that lay behind the wasted days of Mose Paget, and of Galena’s spoiled life, for spoiled it had been to a certain extent.
Mrs. Buckle threw up her hands in surprise.
“Dead, is he? Well, the world isn’t much the poorer anyhow. Not but what he had his good streaks; but there! a man would be bad indeed if there was not some good in him.”
“Did you know that he had a quarrel with your husband?” asked George Lester, who had opened a bulky pocket-book, and was busy sorting papers.
“Why, no, Sam never told me anything about it,” replied Mrs. Buckle.
Pam gave a sudden start as a wonderful possibility flashed upon her mind. She went rather white, too, and there was a sound of surging waters in her ears, so that the voice of George Lester seemed to come to her from a great distance.
“Two nights before I left on furlough,” he was saying, “we had word brought us of a shooting affray at a saloon in the mining town at the bottom of Black Cow Pass. Things are pretty lively down there as a rule, and we have to go fully armed; we have to use our weapons, too, for mostly that man is safest who is first in with the shooting irons. On this night I went down with one other man, and we found that there had been a fight between two of the miners, and the one getting the worst of it had pulled out his revolver, shooting wildly. He did not hit the man with whom he had been fighting, but another man sitting in a far corner got the bullet in his chest. It was easy to see the poor fellow had been badly hit, and one of the boys started to ride for the doctor; fifteen miles he would have to ride, on a bad trail, and the rain coming down at a pour.
“We made the injured man as comfortable as we could, but we could not do much, for it was a hopeless case from the first. I stayed with him, for I knew most of what was best to be done. I took the medical course before I joined the Mounted Police, and that is such a help at times like this. I told the man that if he had anything to say he had better out with it while he had the power to talk. Then he told me his name was Mose Paget, that he came from this part of New Brunswick, and that there was something on his mind that must be told before he died.”
“Ah! I thought it was strange that he should leave here in such a hurry, it was such a trumped-up story!” said Mrs. Buckle. George Lester nodded, then went on with his story, only now he was turning over the papers and sorting out some sheets covered closely with writing.
“The man told me that he owned a strip of ground running by the side of land belonging to Sam Buckle, who had the creek frontage, but only a narrow strip about two hundred yards deep. This bit of land had always been coveted by Mose, who felt that he could develop the land that was his own so much better if he could front the creek. Often and often he had asked Sam Buckle to put a price on it, but he could never get a satisfactory reply.”
“Sam was just like that!” sighed Mrs. Buckle, dropping a tear to her husband’s memory, while she shook her head in disapproval of his unneighbourly ways.
Again George Lester nodded; but he never took his eyes from the papers, and when Mrs. Buckle ceased speaking, he took up the thread of his narrative once more.
“It came to the ears of Mose that Sam Buckle intended planting his strip of frontage with black spruce; the young trees had been already bargained for, and were to be planted before the frost came if the ground could be got ready. This was like a deathknell to the hopes of Mose, and he determined to make one more effort to get Sam to put a price on the land. He had made up his mind that if he could get hold of that piece of ground he would leave off his lazy ways and work hard to retrieve the past. He would have a saw-mill on the creek, and he knew that with the help of his young step-brother he would be able to make his venture pay in very quick time.
“He went in search of Sam Buckle directly he heard the rumour, and meant to have it out with him and to know for certain what he had to expect. When he got near to this house he saw Sam leaving the door and going off across the field in the direction of Ripple, so, without approaching the house, Mose started in pursuit, for he guessed that the other was going to a fence which had been a bone of contention between Sam Buckle and his neighbour for many years past. When he reached the place he found Sam Buckle in a towering rage. It appeared that Sam had been working on putting up the fence on the previous day, and that Wrack Peveril must have come at dawn and chopped it all down, and then gone away in such a hurry that he had left his axe lying on the ground.
“Mose started on his grievance right away, asking Sam if it was neighbourly, kind, or Christian to try to take the bread out of a man’s mouth. Sam answered that he treated his neighbours as his neighbours in their turn treated him; then he pointed to the demolished fence, and to Wrack’s axe lying on the ground, and he said that because of that last outrage from the old man at Ripple he would do as he chose about planting his frontage with black spruce. It was his right to do as he liked with his land, and no one should stop him. Then Mose seemed to go mad, and flying at Sam, the two fought as only madmen will. Of course Sam got the worst of it. Mose was the younger man; he was, too, the man with the grievance, and that lent power to his arms, while his passion gave him double strength. But it was not until Sam dropped apparently dead at his feet that he realized where his strength had led him. Then he was afraid and fled, for the curse of Cain was on him, and he believed that he had killed his fellow-man.”
“Oh, why did he not come for help straight away? We might have saved poor Sam if only help had been there in time. The Doctor said so!” wailed Mrs. Buckle, while Pam cried from sheer sympathy, and Jack sat staring out through the open door, making the most horrible grimaces at the landscape, as if the peaceful scene had in some way offended him.
“A good deal of misery would be averted if only people would own up when they have done wrong,” remarked George Lester. Then he went on again: “It was not until quite late in the evening that Mose chanced to hear that Sam Buckle was still alive. He had been making up his mind to leave the neighbourhood that night, for he felt that he was a murderer, and from thenceforth he must be a wanderer. If Sam was alive, however, then there was hope for him still. But Sam Buckle died, and, as of course you know, he died saying nothing but the last words that had been on his lips before he and Mose fought—it was his right to do what he would with his own. Mose would have run away then, but he realized that, Wrack Peveril having disappeared, it was safest for him to stay where he was, while the old man’s memory bore the blame.”
“If Wrack Peveril did not hurt my husband, what made him go away?” demanded Mrs. Buckle.
“That is what we want to know,” put in Pam, brushing away her tears, and looking at George as if she expected him to explain that mystery also.
“Ah, that is more than I can tell you,” he replied. “But doubtless time, which has cleared this mystery, will clear that one also. Of course I was not here to know anything about it. I had no acquaintance with the old man, but from what Sophy has told me in her letters I should incline to the belief either that he went away because he felt he did not dare stay where he was any longer, or else that something happened to him.”
“But he has been seen,” put in Pam in a jerky tone. She always hated to speak of this, because the circumstance seemed to write the old man down as a wrongdoer straight away. “A man met him at a lumber camp in the back country last winter, but Grandfather did not like being recognized.”
“What man was it?” asked George Lester quickly. It was plain he doubted the evidence, and Pam made haste to state her authority.
“He was a man named O’Brien, who used to work for Mr. Luke Dobson at Hunt’s Crossing, years ago. He told Mose Paget of this meeting with Grandfather, and he spoke of it also to Dr. Grierson, but he said he had told no one else, because he was afraid of putting the police on the track of Grandfather’s whereabouts.”
“If it was that O’Brien—Cassidy O’Brien, his full name was—then we shall never know more about it than we do now, for he, too, is dead,” said George, referring again to the papers in his hand. “Do you remember the night when someone entered the house at Ripple, and took the money from the desk?”
“Why, yes. I thought it was—I mean, I had believed it might be Grandfather come back for his own money, to which, of course, he had a perfect right.” Pam’s tone always became defiant when she spoke of her grandfather’s supposed return. How much she hated having to defend that coming back, no one but herself could know. She realized perfectly that it had been a dastardly thing to lure two unprotected girls from the shelter of a warm house on a night in midwinter, when the wolves were hunting in packs, and that no man worthy the name would have done it. But for the sake of her mother she would not alter her attitude, although it was impossible not to feel a little resentful about it all.
“It was not your grandfather who entered the house that night and forced open the desk where the money was kept, then walked off with all he could find. It was Mose Paget,” said George. Pam started up with a little cry of sheer amazement, for if Mose were the thief, how was it that the money had been found with those poor remains which the melting snows had revealed at the time of sugaring?
“How do you know?” she demanded, her heart beating furiously. Had she been misjudging the poor old man all this time? How good it would be to feel that she could respect him in her own private heart, and not have to continually fight down her secret mistrust of him!
“It is here, in the confession,” replied George, giving a shuffle to the papers he was holding; “but because they are mostly in shorthand, as I took the statement down, and I have not had time to transcribe them, I have told my story instead of writing it. Cassidy O’Brien came back to this part of the world to hunt out Mose Paget, who owed him money. He threatened that if Mose did not pay up he, O’Brien, would make known to the police a bit of the past of Mose that would not bear the light of day. The debt was not a big one, but it was more than Mose could pay. He had heard Mrs. Buckle pressing Miss Walsh to take the money to supply the wants of Wrack Peveril if the old man should come creeping back to his home in want. He had heard Miss Walsh say where she intended putting the money, so that her grandfather would be sure to find it if he came when she was not about. It is the opportunity that makes the thief, and because it was all made so plain for him, Mose determined to get that money from Ripple, and to clear his debt with it.
“He arranged to meet O’Brien at a certain place and to take the money to him. It was fifty dollars he owed the man, but there was not sufficient to pay all; so he kept some of the cash for himself, and gave the rest of the cash and the paper money to O’Brien, who vowed that he would go straight to the police and tell what he knew. Apparently he must have started, for the direction in which his remains were found would seem to point to his having tried to hit the trail to the police head-quarters. Either he sat down and was frozen to death, or else he was chased by wolves, and died that way; this we shall never know.
“Mose was amazed to find that his old enemy made no sign. But when the bones were found in the forest it seemed to him as if fate had been working for him, and henceforth he had nothing to fear. Then Jack Walsh came out from England, and suddenly the blow of which Mose had stood in dread fell from a most unexpected quarter. He was coming into the house to see Mrs. Buckle about some small matter connected with his work, when to his horror he saw Mrs. Buckle with Sam’s watch in her hand. He had taken away Sam’s watch and the money in the man’s pockets after their fight, just to make it look like a case of robbery and violence. Then when he had been so ill in St. John from the after-effect of the mauling he got from the lynx, he had sold the watch to pay the doctor.”
“My word!” cried Mrs. Buckle; “he was a bad lot to rob the man he had knocked about so badly!”
“He had got out of the straight, and when once a man gets on the slant, there is no saying what he will do,” replied George, who then went on to tell them how Mose had worked his way out west, tracking backwards and forwards in the going, in order to hide his trail. But the fugitive had known no rest and no peace, and had faced starvation and hardship, until at last he had come by his death-wound in a fray between two strangers, when the bullet meant for another man found its billet in his breast. It was, indeed, a sad and tragic story.
“There is one thing for which I shall be grateful to my dying day,” said Mrs. Buckle between her sobs, “and that is that I was never tempted to visit what I supposed Wrack Peveril had done to my poor man on his granddaughter. She has always been my dear friend, and though sometimes I’ll admit I felt a bit wicked about it all, I stuck to what my instincts told me, and I’m just more glad about it than I can say.”
“You have been truly good to me, and to Jack too!” murmured Pam. Then, the confession having come to an end, she declared that they must be going, for it was not fair to Sophy to keep Mr. Lester away any longer.
“I will come with you,” said Jack. “When I got to the Gittins’s place this morning, Nathan told me he could not get the machine until to-morrow, so, of course, we could not start haymaking; and as he did not need me, I came over to put in some time at Mrs. Buckle’s hoeing corn. Then the rain came and I bolted indoors for shelter, and that is how I happened to be loafing round, apparently doing nothing, in the middle of the day.”
Pam laughed. It was rich to hear Jack trying to explain that he was more industrious than he looked, for those who knew anything about it at all had no trouble in making up their minds as to his hard work, though he always seemed to think that he might do a bit more if only he were a little more energetic. But it was not Jack or his doings that interested her most just then. She was turning over and over in her mind the problem of her grandfather’s mysterious conduct. Now that the old man’s name was entirely cleared, his conduct in going away was more mysterious than ever. Why did he choose to leave home without any warning on the very day that she had arrived at Ripple? It was not even as if he had not known of her coming. To Pam, in her fit of depression, it looked as if he had gone away because of her. A bitter humiliation this! How she winced in her secret heart to think that perhaps it was her self-will in coming that had driven the old man from his home! It might be that his mind had become a little unhinged from his long years of living alone since her mother left him. Perhaps he had vowed that he would never live in a house again that had a woman in it. But how strange that he should drop everything and go like that!
George Lester was talking to Jack, as they went along the trail, of the solitudes of the far west, but Pam was silent, thinking and thinking of her grandfather, and making herself so acutely miserable over the mystery of his disappearance that she was perilously near the verge of tears.
Then Jack began to speculate on what Sophy would think of her betrothed husband tricked out in the go-to-meeting garments of the late Sam Buckle.
“It looks as if there ought to be some tucks let down in one direction, and some tucking put in in another direction,” said Jack, falling back a few steps to get a better view of what the new-comer looked like from the rear.
“Get in front of me and see how I look from there,” said George. “You don’t surely think I have come over two thousand miles for my wife to give her any chance of seeing a back view of me on the very first day of my arrival, do you? It is the front that matters. A smudge down my nose, or anything of that sort, might be serious; but I can sort of snap my fingers at my clothes, especially as they are big enough. If I couldn’t move without fear of a burst somewhere it would be a different matter, but you can’t deny that they are roomy.”
Jack hopped round to the front of the stranger, and walking backwards began a lively criticism from that point of view.
“Too much ankle, and, though you have a fairly big foot of your own, the late Sam Buckle had a bigger. Then you stick your arms too far through your sleeves; can’t you shrug them up a bit? That is better! Quite an inch of raw wrist has disappeared. I suppose you will do, and your face is the same whatever clothes you wear; but I can’t help being reminded of a man who bought an undertaking business, and the late proprietor’s clothes were thrown in to make the bargain a little better for him.”
“Oh, Jack, you are horrid!” cried Pam, who had to laugh in spite of her low spirits. “Mr. Lester, you do not look like a second-hand undertaker, and Sophy will be so glad to see you that she will not have a thought to spare for your clothes.”
“I hope she will be glad to see me,” said George simply, but there was something in his tone that made Pam say hurriedly, when they came in sight of the house at Ripple:
“There is the house, Mr. Lester, do you go right in and introduce yourself. Jack and I have some work to do in the barn, and we shall be in presently.”
“But——” began Jack, who for all his sharpness lacked the insight of Pam. Her intuition perhaps came from a sympathetic feeling of what she herself would like under the same circumstances.
“But me no buts, only come, as I tell you,” she said with a laugh, catching at his arm and giving it a playful squeeze. “Look, Jack, look, there is the cow, so she came back alone after all! We must milk her straight away. Oh, the silly creature, what a chase she has led us!”
“I guess it was the old dog that brought her home; and see, there lies the creature in the gap in the fence by which the cow broke out of the pasture!”
Jack and Pam turned abruptly away across the grass to where the cow was feeding as quietly as if she had never broken bounds. But George Lester went with a quick step towards the house. His weird garments of sombre black flapped and flopped with every step he took, and, as Jack had said, his arms and legs stuck ever so much too far through them; but nothing could detract from the real dignity of the man or hamper the splendid alertness of his movements.
As he drew near to the house the door flew open, and Sophy appeared on the threshold.
“George! Is it really you? I thought you were not coming until next week.”
“Have I come too soon?” he asked, as he covered the remaining distance in a few long strides.
“You could not do that,” she said, holding out her hands to him; and gathering them into a tight clasp he drew her over the threshold and shut the door.