“That’s what I said; there’s more to leave behind at fifty,” she replied, a red spot on each cheek. She was not looking at him, but at the face of a man on the paper before her—a young man with abundant hair, a strong chin, and big, eloquent eyes; and all around his face she had drawn the face of a girl many times, and beneath the faces of both she was writing Manette and Julien.
The water was getting too deep for John Alloway.
He floundered towards the shore. “I’m no good at words,” he said—“no good at argyment; but I’ve got a gift for stories—round the fire of a night, with a pipe and a tin basin of tea; so I’m not going to try and match you. You’ve had a good education down at Winnipeg. Took every prize, they say, and led the school, though there was plenty of fuss because they let you do it, and let you stay there, being half-Indian. You never heard what was going on outside, I s’pose. It didn’t matter, for you won out. Blamed foolishness, trying to draw the line between red and white that way. Of course, it’s the women always, always the women, striking out for all-white or nothing. Down there at Portage they’ve treated you mean, mean as dirt. The Reeve’s wife—well, we’ll fix that up all right. I guess John Alloway ain’t to be bluffed. He knows too much and they all know he knows enough. When John Alloway, 32 Main Street, with a ranch on the Katanay, says, ‘We’re coming—Mr. and Mrs. John Alloway is coming,’ they’ll get out their cards visite, I guess.”
Pauline’s head bent lower, and she seemed laboriously etching lines into the faces before her—Manette and Julien, Julien and Manette; and there came into her eyes the youth and light and gaiety of the days when Julien came of an afternoon and the riverside rang with laughter; the dearest, lightest days she had ever spent.
The man of fifty went on, seeing nothing but a girl over whom he was presently going to throw the lasso of his affection, and take her home with him, yielding and glad, a white man, and his half-breed girl—but such a half-breed!
“I seen enough of the way some of them women treated you,” he continued, “and I sez to myself, Her turn next. There’s a way out, I sez, and John Alloway pays his debts. When the anniversary comes round I’ll put things right, I sez to myself. She saved my life, and she shall have the rest of it, if she’ll take it, and will give a receipt in full, and open a new account in the name of John and Pauline Alloway. Catch it? See—Pauline?”
Slowly she got to her feet. There was a look in her eyes such as had been in her mother’s a little while before, but a hundred times intensified: a look that belonged to the flood and flow of generations of Indian life, yet controlled in her by the order and understanding of centuries of white men’s lives, the pervasive, dominating power of race.
For an instant she kept her eyes towards the window. The storm had suddenly ceased, and a glimmer of sunset light was breaking over the distant wastes of snow.
“You want to pay a debt you think you owe,” she said, in a strange, lustreless voice, turning to him at last. “Well, you have paid it. You have given me a book to read which I will keep always. And I give you a receipt in full for your debt.”
“I don’t know about any book,” he answered dazedly. “I want to marry you right away.”