ANGELA MEETS A FRIEND
“Hands up!” snapped Jim.
Connie and the silent man obeyed. Tom, clasping his prize, looked thunderstruck.
“Did you git that, you human gorilla? Put ’em up.”
Tom let Angela slip to the floor.
“What’s all this?” he growled.
Jim gripped the deal table with one huge hand and flung it across the room. He advanced on Connie and slapped the latter’s pockets.
“No guns? Good!”
Connie went flying from a violent shove, likewise the silent man.
“Come here—you!” bawled Jim.
Tom came forward, his ugly face curved in a look of intense hate. He felt Jim snatch the revolver from his belt and pocket it. 145
“What’s your lay?” he growled.
Jim put his own revolver away and Tom’s hands dropped to his side.
“So you took a fancy to my property, eh?”
Tom recoiled before the blazing eyes of his adversary. He was big and hefty enough, but no match for the well-proportioned, muscular giant before him. He was good at assessing physical values, and he felt scared.
“She’s mine,” he said. “I won her.”
Angela, crouching at the end of the room, saw the storm brewing. She suddenly remembered the knife, and retrieved it lest one of the trio should lay hands on it. She saw Connie and his silent friend edging behind Jim, and one quick glance from Tom’s vile face told her that the three were filled with a common purpose. Connie suddenly snatched up a log of wood.
“Jim!” she cried, as the three men suddenly sprang forward.
The big figure moved like a streak of lightning. Tom was caught by two powerful arms and lifted clean off his feet. He hung for one brief second, six inches from the ground, and then executed an arc in thin air to come down with a crash 146 against the match-boarded wall. The other two were close upon him. He dealt with the log-swinging man first. Connie’s arm was already raised and the thick piece of wood was on the point of coming down. Had it descended, the Honorable Angela might have been a widow there and then, but a fifty-inch leg prevented that untimely catastrophe. It came out from Jim’s thigh, true in the horizontal plane, and smote Connie in the tenderest part of his anatomy. He made no sound whatever, but dropped in a crumpled heap and lay still. The silent man was caught in mid-air. He had never expected the amazingly quick movement of the arms that held him. He was a miserable specimen, physically, and turned green when he saw the big fist drawn back to strike.
“No, you ain’t big enough to hit,” said Jim. “You seem to like me; come closer honey, come close!”
He gathered the man close in and, exerting all his strength, crushed every atom of breath from the man’s body. Angela, sick with the sight of this animal manifestation, protested.
“You’ll kill him! He never did me any harm.” 147
Jim dropped his victim with a grunt. A queer reaction set in. He was sorry. He could have rescued her without this horse-play, but the sight of her in the arms of a human chimpanzee, who knew no morality but that of the cave-man, had aroused all the innate fury within him. After all, he loved her! Even though she despised him, and preferred the company of licentious beachcombers, he worshiped her. The very thought seemed to mock at him from within.
“Do I have to yank you back, or will you come freely?” he said in a low voice.
“I’ll come,” she replied.
They walked back to the tent in silence. She noticed that the note had gone from the flap. How he had tracked her down was a mystery. He refrained from mentioning the adventure, but she saw that it had had a great effect upon him. He ate no supper, but sat smoking through the mosquito-netting, gazing pensively at the starry heavens. When they retired he uttered his customary “Good-night, Angela.”
“Good-night,” she replied.
The next morning found him busy caulking a big flat-bottomed boat, which was already half 148 laden with stores. She looked at him inquiringly.
“Going down the river,” he informed her. “I’ve staked two claims along a creek called ‘Red Ruin.’”
“Is it far?”
“Matter of five miles.”
“A-ah!”
The remaining gear was placed in the boat. Angela took a seat in the bows whilst Jim threw his weight on the pole, the sole means of propulsion. There was a loud crack, and the punter was almost thrown over the side as the rotten pole broke in the middle. The strong current sent the craft whirling down-stream. Jim grabbed a coil of rope, made it fast to a ring-bolt, and went over the side. He reached the bank and pulled the craft inshore.
“Throw out the ax. I’ll go cut a new pole.”
She handed him the weapon, keen as a razor, and watched him tramp up the steep bank. A slight breeze shifted the mist from the sprawling, muddy river and the sun clove through. An isolated mass of ice swirled along, melting as it went. A small island in the center of the stream was gashed and scoured by the recent ice-flow. 149 Trees along the bank had been shorn clear by the enormous pressure of the bergs as they fought their way to freedom. She was sitting thinking of the inscrutable future when a canoe hove into sight. The occupants—two Indians and a white man—were driving it up-stream at amazing speed, considering the fact that the down current was running at a speed of at least five knots. They were passing her, scarcely a dozen yards distant, when she gave a cry of astonishment.
“D’Arcy!”
The white man ceased paddling and looked up sharply. He turned to the Indians and rapped out an order. The canoe drifted in towards Angela’s craft and D’Arcy held out his hand, with absolute wonder written in his eyes.
“Angela Featherstone, by all that’s holy! What are you doing here?”
“I’m with my husband,” she replied bitterly.
“But I thought—I read that you were giving house parties, attending race-meetings, and all that sort of thing. I came to Canada the week before you were married. I read about it and wondered who the happy man was.”
Angela’s hand played with the running water. 150 D’Arcy was scarcely more than an acquaintance, but at least he was one of her own set. Like a lot of other men, D’Arcy had made love to her and been repulsed.
“Look here, I don’t understand this,” rejoined D’Arcy. “You—you aren’t prospecting?”
She nodded.
“Great Scott! It’s bad enough for men, but for a woman——!” He looked round. “Is your husband about?”
“He’s up the bank cutting a new pole.”
“I see.”
He gave her another searching look, the meaning of which was clear to her. In the same mute but eloquent language she gave him to understand the chief fact—she was unhappy.
“To bring you here—to bring a cultured woman into a country like this——!”
Words failed him. He touched her hand softly.
“Where are you making for?”
“A creek down the river called ’Red Ruin.’ He has staked two claims there.”
“I’m making for Dawson for some gear. I’ll drop in and see you some day if I may?”
“Do. I should enjoy a talk with you.”
“Your—your husband won’t object?”
“Does it matter?”
He laughed and, shaking her hand, paddled his frail craft out into the stream. Looking up, she saw Jim coming down the bank, with the ax swinging in one hand and a new pole over his shoulder. He unfastened the rope and entered the boat.
“Who was that?” he asked.
“An old friend,” she replied coldly.
She saw his eyes flash as he threw his weight on the pole and sent the boat hurtling down the river. But for the bitterness rankling within her, she might have found time to admire her pilot. Big as he was, there was nothing ungainly about him. Every movement was beautiful in its perfect exhibition of muscular energy. The hard knotted muscles in his bare arms swelled and relaxed as they performed the work allotted them. Little beads of perspiration sparkled on the bare neck, and the wind played among the streaming mass of his black hair. But she had no 152 eyes for this. From the moment when he had unceremoniously forced her on this journey of horror and desolation her wounded pride had smothered every other emotion. Her soul hungered for one thing—escape. Thwarted though her other attempts had been, she meant to try again. To try, and try, until he grew sick of holding a woman against her will. The unexpected genesis of D’Arcy raised her hopes to high pitch.
They ultimately entered the narrow, sluggish creek, and Jim beached the boat on the northern side. She saw several stakes driven in the earth, and realized that these marked the boundaries of the two claims.
They pitched the tent some distance from the claims—high up on the bank, to guard against the trickling water that ran down the bluff and into the creek.
On the morrow Jim started digging. She condescended to take a little interest in this, for the experience was novel. A lucky strike might mean freedom from this life of hardship and misery. Once back in England—— The thought was tantalizing. She watched Jim commence to 153 drive a hole through the matted undergrowth, exhibiting surprise when the pick rang hard on the frozen earth beneath.
“Rock?” she queried.
“Nope—earth. It’s froze right down for a hundred feet. Bed-rock ought to be three or four feet down. That’s where the gold is—or ought to be.”
“And if it isn’t there?”
“Sink another hole, an’ keep on doin’ it till I git it.”
Later in the day he reached bed-rock, at a depth of six feet from the surface. The washing-pan came into operation, and he sought eagerly for the golden dust—in vain.
“Muck!” he ejaculated.
The next pan, and the next, produced similar results. He commenced another hole about six feet from the first, driving through fallen trees and vegetable matter that had lain there for tens of centuries. When the evening came no sign of gold had appeared. He went to the tent and partook of the meal that Angela had prepared.
“Any luck?” she asked.
“Nope, but it’ll come. If not here, then somewhere 154 else. But there’s five hundred feet of frontage to be bored yet.”
Angela shrugged her shoulders. He talked as though time was of no importance. She knew he would go on and on until he had achieved what he set out to do. The summer was short—a brief four months. In October down would come the winter, freezing everything solid for eight long months. Between October 21 and November 8 the Yukon would close until the middle of May. She realized that she had, as yet, tasted but the latter end of winter. To live through the whole length of the Arctic night, away in the vast wilderness of the North, was a prospect that appalled her.
She wandered up the bank, and through the dense growth of hemlock that led to a precipitous hill. High up on its slope she stopped and surveyed the landscape. Despite the bitterness of her soul, she could not repress an exclamation of wonderment.
Stretching away in all directions was tier upon tier of snow-clad peaks, aglow with the soft radiance of the low-lying sun as it swept the horizon towards the North in its uninterrupted 155 circuit of the heavens. The southern end of the Alaskan range seemed like an opalescent serrated bow, changing to violet through all the darker hues of the spectrum by some strange freak of the atmosphere, only to leap into glorious amber as the fringe of a cloud passed across the origin of illumination.
Everything seemed so vast, so forbidding, it reduced her to a state of ignominy. If one desired a sense of Eternity, here it was. Time and space merged into one inscrutable entity—the Spirit of the North. She had felt that Spirit when crossing the passes that led to the Klondyke. Here it was limned in clearer form. The everlasting peaks; the aquamarine glaciers, roaring and plunging into the sea; the vast forests sprawling across the valleys and up the bases of the mountains to some two thousand feet, virgin as they were ten thousand years ago; the noisy fiords cumbered with the ice of crystal rivers, breaking the deathlike silence with ear-splitting concussions—all combined in one awe-inspiring picture of nature’s incomparable handiwork.
And here under her feet were fragrant flowers, 156 lured from the shallow covering of earth and matted creeper to last but a brief season, and then to sleep the whole long winter under the snow.
She sighed and made her way down the hill towards the tent. Beside the fire was Jim, gazing into the past. She thought her husband was like this strange immense land—cruel but magnificent, primal and alluring, yet hateful. As she approached, a similar comparison entered Jim’s mind, with her as the object.
“Cold and proud as a mountain peak,” he muttered. “There’s no sun that can melt her, no storm that can move her. God, but she’s beautiful!”