For a minute or so he sat silent, frowning at the candle on the table between my bunk and his.
“How he would bait me,” he went on presently, “if he knew that killing him is the one thing I desire to avoid, at any cost! I hope it doesn’t come to that. It would be only just, but I have no wish to mete out justice to him. His miserable life is safe from me, for her sake—no, I’ll be honest: for my own. I want him to live, till I can force him to tell her a few truths that she will never believe except from his own lips. I was a seven times fool for not doing that long before we reached Benton. I could have forestalled all this. But I didn’t suspect he was tolling her on—for a purpose.”
He stopped again. It was not the first time that Barreau had touched upon that theme, and always his tongue had been stricken with a semi-paralysis just short of complete revelation. In a general way it was plain enough to me, from the verbal collisions between himself and Montell on that same subject. And though I was humanly curious enough to want the particulars at first hand, I made no effort to draw forth his story. Hence I was surprised when he took up the thread of the conversation where he had left off.
“One reads of these peculiar situations in books,” he rested his chin in the palms of his hands and stared abstractedly at me, “but they are seldom encountered in everyday living. I dare say the world is full of women, good women, beautiful, brilliant women, that I might have won. Yet I must fall victim to an insane craving for an elfin-faced, hot-tempered sprite who will have none of me. Six or seven years ago she was a big-eyed school-girl, with a mop of unruly hair. Then all at once, she grew up, and—and I’ve been the captive of her bow and spear ever since. Love—the old, primal instinct to mate! It’s a brutal force, Bob, when it focuses all a man’s being on one particular woman. I never told her, but I’m sure she knew; I know she did. And she—well, a man never can tell what a woman thinks or feels or will do or say, or whether she means what she says when she says it. I don’t know. But I’ve thought that she did care—only she wouldn’t admit it until I made her. She’s the type that wouldn’t give herself to even the man she loved without a struggle. And I’m just savage enough to be glad of that. I’ve only been waiting till this spring and the end of this fur deal, so that we would have the wherewith to live, before I cornered her and fought it out.
“But I’ve waited too long, I’m afraid. You see, Montell has always been against me; that is, he has secretly been cutting the ground from under my feet since he learned that I wanted her. The old fool looks into his own heart and seeing perfect bliss in an alliance with ‘blood’ and ‘money,’ straightway determines that these two will insure her future happiness—oh, I can read him, like an open book. He’d move the heavens to bring about what he’d term ‘a good match.’
“As it happens I can compare pedigrees with the best of them—Good Lord!” he broke off and laughed ironically. “That’s sickening; but I’m trying to make the thing clear. Naive recital this, I must say. Well, anyway, I measured up to the standard of breeding, but fell wofully short on the financial requirements. And, somehow, foxy Simon grew afraid that I was in a fair way to upset his cherished plans for Jess. This was after we’d gone in together on this fur business. He had always acted rather guardedly about Jessie and myself, but I had him there; so long as she went out, I could meet her socially, and he could not prevent. Then a year ago last summer the Hudson’s Bay undertook to run me out of this country. That bred the trouble on High River, and after that I was really outlawed. I expect he began at once to figure how he could turn that to his advantage—regarding me as a dishtowel that he could wring dry and throw aside. He has nursed a direct, personal grudge since the first season. Naturally, he wanted to dominate everything, and I wouldn’t let him. He thought himself the biggest toad in the puddle, and it angered him when he found himself outsplashed. He made mistakes. I corrected them, and held him down at every turn; I had to. It was a ticklish job, and I made him move according to my judgment. Which was a very bitter sort of medicine for a man of Montell’s domineering stamp. So he was not long in developing a rancorous dislike of me, which seems to have thrived on concealment.
“Where I made the grand mistake was in letting him keep her from knowing that we were partners in this business. Without giving the matter a second thought I had kept our business strictly to myself. He hinted that others might follow our lead, and at first we had visions of making terms with the Hudson’s Bay and building up a permanent trade here. After two or three years of this I didn’t think it well to plunge into explanations last spring. I made a mistake there, however; the mistake, I should say. Jessie had gone out a good deal the last two winters, both in St. Louis and New Orleans, and she was becoming quite a belle. For all that, I think—oh, well, it doesn’t matter what I think. To make a long story short, a day or two before the Moon went upstream she told me that she was going as far as Benton with her father. I, of course had to rise to the occasion, be very properly surprised and inform her that I, too, contemplated a trip on that same steamer. And I straightway hunted Montell up and tried to have him dissuade her from the journey.
“I didn’t fathom the purport of it, even then—although I knew that he would welcome any chance to put me wrong in her eyes. It was too late, I felt, to volunteer any details concerning my part in her father’s business up North. So I contented myself with his assurance and her statement, that she would see him as far as Benton and then return on the Moon.
“You see, I could easily imagine what would be her opinion of me, if she learned all the unsavory details with which the Northwest has been pleased to embellish the record of Slowfoot George. She has such a profound scorn for anything verging on dishonesty, and according to the sources of her information I’ve got some very shady things laid at my door. I can’t be anything but a moral degenerate, in her eyes. Oh, he engineered it skilfully. If I had only waited at Benton till the bull-train was ready to start!
“You know how her returning panned out. I believe now, that he intended from the first that she should go on to MacLeod. I’d come to the conclusion that he would knife me on the business end, and that was why I wanted Walt Sanders with me. But it didn’t occur to me that his plans were so far-reaching. That unfortunate Police raid delivered me into his hands at the psychological moment I was like a cornered rat that day she came to the guardhouse and peered in on us through the cell door. I couldn’t help lashing back when she was so frankly contemptuous. I could see so clearly how he had managed it. And having accomplished his purpose he saw to it that escape was made easy, for he still needed me up here. Mind you, it would have been pretty much the same if I had not been taken by the Police. He would have seen that she was well posted before she left MacLeod.