At those clear words spoken by lips which failed so utterly to hide his misery, the Girl’s face turned pale.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
Johnson coloured, hesitated, and finally with a swift glance at the clock, he briefly explained:
“I mean it’s hard to go and leave you here. The clock reminded me that long before this I should have been on my way. I shouldn’t have come up here at all. God bless you, dear,” and here their eyes came together and seemed unable to part,—“I love you as I never thought I could....”
But at Johnson’s queer look she hastened to inquire:
“But it ain’t for long you’re goin’?”
For long! Then she had not understood that he meant to go for all time. How tell her the truth? While he pondered over the situation there came to him with great suddenness the thought that, perhaps, after all, Life never intended that she should be given to him only to be taken away almost as suddenly; and seized with a desire to hold on to her at any cost, he sprang forward as if to take her in his arms, but before he reached her, he stopped short.
“Such happiness is not for me,” he muttered under his breath; and then aloud he added: “No, no, I’ve got to go now while I have the courage, I mean.” He broke off as suddenly as he had begun, and taking her face in his hands he kissed her good-bye.
Now, accustomed as was the Girl to the strange comings and goings of the men at the camp, it did not occur to her to question him further when he told her that he should have been away before now. Moreover, she trusted and loved him. And so it was without the slightest feeling of misgiving that she watched her lover quickly take down his coat and hat from the peg on the wall and start for the door. On the other hand, it must have required not a little courage on the man’s part to have torn himself away from this lovely, if unconventional, creature, just as he was beginning to love truly and appreciate her. But, then, Johnson was a man of no mean determination!
Not daring to trust himself to words, Johnson paused to look back over his shoulder at the Girl before plunging forth into the night. But on opening the door all the multitudinous wild noises of the forests reached his ears: Sounds of whispering and rocking storm-tossed pines, sounds of the wind making the rounds of the deep canyon below them, sounds that would have made the blood run cold of a man more daring, even, than himself. Like one petrified he stood blinded, almost, by the great drifts of snow that were being driven into the room, while the cabin rocked and shook and the roof cracked and snapped, the lights flickered, smoked, or sent their tongues of fire upward towards the ceiling, the curtains swayed like pendants in the air, and while baskets, boxes, and other small furnishings of the cabin were blown in every direction.