CHAPTER XV
The bridal pair were at once astonished and gratified by the entertainment offered them in this remote wilderness. There was nothing remarkable in their surroundings at the cabin. The fare provided was of the simplest. The effect on the two visitors was produced wholly by the personality of the man himself. As the men sat in easy communion over their pipes, while Nell listened eagerly, Jim Maxwell, still under the influence of that softer feeling aroused by gratitude to the two who had rescued him, relaxed from the usual aloofness toward his fellows, and talked of many things in a manner of singular charm. Jack Reeves had had excellent advantages in education, before ever the spirit of adventure drove him toward the Arctic. As he perceived the extent of the older man's experience, he plied his host with questions. To these, Jim responded readily—at first from courtesy, and then, moved by patent interest on the part of his hearers, with a certain enthusiasm. He found a long-forgotten pleasure in thus speaking at ease of the things he felt to sympathetic auditors. In the years of his wandering and suffering, the man's nature had deepened and mellowed, even though it was shut within the crust of bitterness. So, to-night, he gave himself unreservedly to this new mood of genial intercourse. He marveled over his own changed mood, but indulged it to the full, nevertheless. In a gentle, unfamiliar fashion, Jim Maxwell was almost happy to-night—almost happy, for the first time in twelve years.
Nell's presence moved him deeply, though she sat silent for the most part. Her close attention was a compliment greater than any words she could have uttered. Jim Maxwell felt this, and yielded to the inspiration of it. He was by no means unaware of the piquant loveliness of the girl. His critical appreciation was betrayed by many swift, penetrating glances at the rapt face. The dusk, lucent beauty of her eyes especially appealed to him. In them, he glimpsed her soul, full of the joy of life, a-thrill with expectation of the happiness that awaited, pure and undaunted by any fear of evil. As he looked on her, Jim's admiring gaze was always a little wistful. Since the tragedy in his life, women had had no interest for him, because he had lost her whom he loved. To-night, somehow, it was different. He felt himself strangely drawn to this unknown girl. His heart stirred toward her. It was not an emotion of which even a bridegroom could complain—it was something utterly untouched by any instinct of sex, something subtle and exquisite. Jim himself could not understand his feeling in the least. Only, he yielded to the spell of it with delight.
The host left his guests in possession, when it came the hour for retiring. He was deaf to their remonstrances, and betook himself to an outbuilding, which had been his first shelter in this place, before the making of the cabin.
Left alone with her husband, Nell spoke musingly, very softly:
"What a wonderful man, Jack! He is the sort of man I should like—" She broke off, staring with vaguely puzzled, unseeing eyes at the glowing stove.
"Now, what do you mean by that?" the bridegroom demanded, with asperity.
Nell aroused from introspection at the shortness of the husband's tone. Then she laughed.
"Don't be absurd, goosie!" she bantered. "I actually believe you'd like to be jealous of the first man I've met on our honeymoon." Her voice softened. "Well, you needn't be. But he is a dear, all the same."
Something in her tone quelled the young husband's impulse of alarm. Straightway, he spoke his own admiration, without further jealousy.
"He sure is a wonder," he declared emphatically. "He's one of the sort who could make himself at home—and make himself the center of attraction, too—anywhere around the world, with high or low or Jack or the game."
A little later, he spoke again, reflectively:
"I wonder what he did!"
"What he did!" Nell repeated, bewildered.
"Whether he robbed a bank, or just murdered somebody," Jack explained.
Nell flared.
"He's not that sort!" she flung at him. Then, her eyes grew dreamy again.
"But," she added—and there was a note of sympathetic tenderness in her voice—"perhaps it was something that somebody else did."
"Eh?" Jack demanded, perplexed in his turn.
"I mean," Nell said, half-apologetically, "perhaps it was something—some crime even—some one else did that made Mr. Maxwell come away off here, to live alone in the mountains. A man like him!"
Next morning, Jack and Nell went on their way, almost regretfully, so great was the impression made upon both by this man whom they had rescued from death. Still without haste, Jack drove his dogs over the level valley-crust. As it drew toward night, he selected for his camp a point where a few stunted spruce grew a little way up the slope.
"I guess we're alone in our glory," he commented, as his eyes swept the scene. "Not a stampeder in sight—and I'm glad of it. You see," he continued, as Nell looked at him inquiringly, "I've been over this way before. There's a creek flows in here from the other side of the valley. I was up it once. It showed some prospects. I'd like another look at it—without any stampeders by. And there's not a one in sight."
"I wonder!" While Jack went to straighten out the over-lively dogs, Nell took the field-glasses from their case, and amused herself with a careful scrutiny of this white world over which now lay a purpling glamour as the sun sank wearily below the horizon.
Suddenly, there was a moving blur, a fleeting black shadow, in the line of vision. Hitherto, there had been no sign of life anywhere. This trace of activity, in the stillness of the snow-clad wild, interested her, even startled her a little, though she had no thought that it could be more than a glimpse of some stampeder plodding through the distance.
Nell adjusted the glasses, and sought again. Then, in a flash, she saw clearly—a camp-fire burning, a man squatted close to the flames. There was nothing out of the ordinary in the scene. It was not the sight of camp-fire and man beside it that caused Nell's cheek to pale, that caused her hand to shake, until for a moment the vision was blurred, that caused the little gasp from her lips. It was another figure thus revealed there in the far distance that so affected her—another figure high up on the slope, which moved with a craftiness and stealth that were in themselves sinister. These were the slinking movements of a beast of prey. But the figure was that of a man.
Nell called to Jack—softly, as if she feared lest, across the valley-space, that skulking man might hear her cry.
When Jack came to her, Nell put the glasses in his hands.
"Look there!" she directed, and pointed. Afterward, she sat tensed and apprehensive in her place on the sled, while her husband stood at her side, and looked as she had bidden him.
An ejaculation burst from Jack as his eyes caught the action in that drama across the valley. Through a long minute, and another, he rested rigid, silent. Suddenly, with an imprecation, he tossed the glasses toward Nell. He pointed desperately across the valley, then sprang to the dogs, and straightened them out, his voice so harsh that they cringed under it.
HE POINTED DESPERATELY ACROSS THE VALLEY.
"Mush!" he yelled savagely, and the whiplash hissed its message to the leaders.... They were off at full speed.
"Too late!" Jack groaned, as the dogs bounded forward. "Oh, damn him! I hope he hangs for it—the dirty murderer!"
It was, indeed, too late. When they were come up the lesser valley, through which the creek ran, to a point near where the body of Sam Ward was lying, Jack halted the dogs, and went forward alone. He would not yield to Nell's pleadings that she be allowed to accompany him. He was not minded that she should thus look on the assassin's victim.
Jack returned very soon.
"Dead as a door-nail!" he said shortly. His face was a little pale under the bronze of open-air living. "A knife-blade in his chest—handle broken off. We've seen the chap. It was Sam Ward. Had a secret mine, they said."
Jack chose a camp-site close at hand, to which he removed the body of the murdered man, so that it would be protected from any prowling wolf. He brought down to his camp the dead man's pack, and he covered the still and rigid shape decently with one of the blankets that had been Sam Ward's. He made no attempt to trace the assassin. To have done so would have been useless in itself, and would have been to risk the like death. Nor did he make even a cursory search for the secret mine. He had no wish for personal profit out of this grewsome event. On the contrary, he was willing to delay his operations in the mountains, in order that he might deliver the corpse to the authorities, and make known to them the facts in the case.
"We'll put him on the sled in the morning," he said to Nell, who was very quiet, and who turned her eyes from time to time fearfully toward a place just on the edge of the firelight, where flickering shadows danced grotesquely over a deeper shadow—a shadow huge and misshapen and menacing.
"We'll take him up to Kalmak. It's a little place on the way to Malamute. But they have a sheriff, and that's what we need."
And neither he nor his wife, who looked from time to time affrightedly toward the shadows, had any hint as to the irony that the Fates had put into the husband's concluding words.