Was it that he could not bring himself to abandon the poor wretch he had rescued; could that be at the root of his delay? But why did he not take Cheviot into his confidence and get the girl out of the country if she were in hiding hereabouts? Was it conceivable that Mar—
Cheviot got little further in his speculations till the morning when Mar, in the act of making a cast, said under his breath and without moving a muscle, “There’s that fellow again!”
Cheviot turned just in time to see Björk’s head disappear behind a bunch of tall reeds that grew in the hollow by the little fresh water stream below the cabin. “What’s he lurking about like that for?”
“I’m afraid he’s on the track of a poor, wretched girl,” and Mar told the story of the Yakutat witch, but with additions not creditable to Mr. Björk.
“It’s usually an old woman, here as elsewhere, that’s accused and set upon, but this girl can’t be above seventeen, for she hadn’t been long out of the Bride’s House.”
“The what?”
“Oh, the horrible igloo where they confine the marriageable girls for half a year. They stay in there, in the dark all that time, never seeing the face of man; and they come out cowed, and fat, and pallid; and then they’re for sale as wives. Those that no man takes are looked down upon, and left to shift for themselves and must earn their own living. The Yakutat girl was pounced on instantly by a man she hated for some reason. He took her off, but she escaped and made her way to the mission. Nobody was at home at the time but Björk and me. I saw her come in, and I saw her come flying out of the mission parlor wilder even than she’d entered it, and go tearing down to the village. She found shelter there, for a while, with the woman who had brought her up. But public opinion was all against her; and when it was found that the reason her ‘husband,’ Peddykowchee, didn’t come and get her, was that he was ill, they said she had bewitched him. His younger brother said she’d done the same to him, and then a miserable little baby—oh, it was a ghastly business. ’Sh—” and Mar fished in silence for a full hour, with occasional sharp glances through the alder thicket behind him, down among the reeds by the deserted cabin.
The next day the store left in the cracker-box was found to be untouched.
“She’s seen Björk!” said Mar under his breath. “She’s afraid to come any more.”
“Why don’t you help her to get out of the country?” Cheviot asked, setting alight the smudge on the window-sill.