McLeod's part was usually to help with dates or names when Donaldson's memory failed to recall them, but often he too would spin a yarn, and when he did there was always in its telling a gentleness, I can think of no better word, that gave a charm often missing in Donaldson's rougher style.
They were both big men physically, but McLeod had been magnificent. He was now nearly eighty years old and broken with rheumatism, but in the giant frame and noble face and head crowned with its snow-white hair I saw my ideal of what a great Highland Chieftain might have been in the brave days of old.
Donaldson told me one night, while his partner was making a batch of bread in his own cabin, what he knew of McLeod's history. "I have never known a man," he said, "that would measure up to my partner. None of us want our record searched too closely but it wouldn't make any difference to him. Nothing, nobody, seemed to have any power to make Mac do anything crooked or dirty. Whisky, gambling, bad women—he passed them up without apparent effort. Very strange too, even the few good women we have met in these camps never won anything from him but wholesome admiration. He had only to say the word and he could have had any one of them, but he didn't seem to care that way. What his experience had been before we met I do not know, he has never spoken much about it to anyone. But he and I have lived together as partners for nearly half a century, through the crazy, wicked days of all these gold camps, and Mac never did anything that he would be ashamed to tell his own mother."
A fine tribute. Perhaps under the circumstances the finest thing that could be said of any man, for you cannot imagine the thousand almost irresistible temptations that were part of the daily life of the stampeders in those northern camps. Enough for me to say that many men of really good character back East, where they were unconsciously propped up by influences of family, church, and community, failed miserably to keep their footing when they came to the far north where all these supports were absent and temptation was everywhere. I do not judge them. God only knows the fight they had before they surrendered. So it was an arresting event to meet a man who had seen it all and whose partner of forty years told me he had lived clean.
I often wondered what McLeod's story was. I had known him for three years before I ventured to ask him details about his home in Scotland, and why he left it to come so far away. I knew he had been reared in a village south of Edinburgh, in a good home with good parents, and much else he had told me, but there had always been a reticence that made you certain there was something else held back.
One winter night when we were alone in his cabin, he opened his heart to me. He was an old-fashioned Scot. I was his "minister" and he knew me well. Besides he was coming to the end of the trail, and he needed a confidant.
He said his story was hardly worth while bothering me with, I knew most of it, but what he could never tell anyone was about the lassie he had loved and lost. He had fallen in love with the brown eyes and winsome face of Margaret Campbell, a neighbour's daughter. They had gone to the same school, had taken their first communion together, and had both sung in the village church choir. When he revealed his love to her she told him she had guessed his secret and had lang syne given her heart to him. They were betrothed and very happy. But Margaret took ill in the fall and died before the new year. Early in the year he sailed from Leith for Canada, hoping that new scenes would soften his grief. As the years passed he kept moving west and then north. He grew to like the free life of the prospector and had not cared to leave the mountains and the trails.
Time had healed the wound but his love for the sweetheart of his youth was just as true and tender as ever. From a hidden niche at the head of his bed he took down a small box, brought it to the table near the candle and unlocked it. He showed me his simple treasures. His rough, calloused hands trembled as he lifted them carefully from the box. There was a small photo so faded I could barely see the face on it. "You'll see she was very beautiful," he said, for he saw with the clear vision of loving memory what was not for my younger but duller eyes to discern. There was her gold locket with a wisp of brown hair in it. "She left me this," he said, "when she died." Last, there was an old letter, stained and worn, the only love-letter she had ever written him, for he had only once been far enough or long enough away to need letters. He had spent a week in Glasgow after they became engaged and she had written to him. This was all.
Somehow I felt as if I were on sacred ground, that the curtain had been drawn from before a Holy Place, and I was looking upon something more beautiful than I had ever seen before. As the old man put the box away his eyes were shining "with a light that never was on sea or land." Mine were moist, and for a little I couldn't trust my voice to speak as I thought of the life-time of unswerving fealty to his dead lassie. Such long, lonely years they must have been!
We did not say much more that night but the words we spoke were full of understanding and reverence. When it grew late and he handed me the Bible I hesitated in choosing a chapter, but not for long. The comfort and rejoicing of the twenty-third Psalm were all we wanted.