“I’ll fix him to-night!”
That day as he trod the shore, bent under the tracking-line, Stonor had plenty to occupy his mind. Over and over he made his calculations of time and distance:
“This is the twenty-seventh. It was the fifteenth when I sent Tole Grampierre back to Enterprise. If he rode hard he’d get there about noon on the seventeenth. The steamboat isn’t due to start up-stream until the twentieth, but Gaviller would surely let her go at once when he got my message. She’d only need to get wood aboard and steam up. She could steam night and day too, at this stage of water; she’s done it before—that is, if they had anybody to relieve Mathews at the engine. There are plenty of pilots. Surely Gaviller would order her to steam night and day when he read my letter! Even suppose they didn’t get away until the morning of the eighteenth: that would bring them to the Crossing by the twenty-second.
“Lambert, I know, would not lose an hour in setting out over the prairie—just long enough to get horses together and swim them across. I can depend on him. Nobody knows how far it is overland from the Crossing to the Swan River. Nobody’s been that way. But the chances are it’s prairie land, and easy going. Say the rivers are about the same distance apart up there, Lambert ought to reach the Swan on the twenty-fifth, or at the latest the twenty-sixth. That’s only yesterday. But we must have made two hundred or two hundred and fifty miles up-stream. The Swan certainly makes a straighter course than the Spirit. It must be less than a hundred miles from here to the spot where Lambert would hit this stream. He could make seventy-five miles or more a day down-stream. He would work. If everything has gone well I might meet him to-day.
“But things never go just the way you want them to. I must not count on it. Gaviller may have delayed. He’s so careful of his precious steamboat. Or she may have run on a bar. Or Lambert may have met unexpected difficulties. I must know what I’m going to do. Once my hands are tied to-night my goose is cooked. Shall I resist the woman when she tries to tie my hands? But Imbrie always stands beside her with the gun; that would simply mean being shot down before Clare’s eyes. Shall I let them bind me and take what comes?—No! I must put up a fight somehow! Suppose I make a break for it as soon as we land? If there happens to be cover I may get away with it. Better be shot on the wing than sitting down with my hands tied. And if I got clean away, Clare would know there was still a chance. I’ll make a break for it!”
He looked at the sky, the shining river and the shapely trees. “This may be my last day on the old ball! Good old world too! You don’t think what it means until the time comes to say ta-ta to it all; sunny mornings, and starry nights, with the double trail of the Milky Way moseying across the sky. I’ve scarcely tasted life yet—mustn’t think of that! Twenty-seven years old, and nothing done! If I could feel that I had left something solid behind me it would be easier to go.”
Pictures of his boyhood in the old Canadian city presented themselves unasked; the maple-foliage, incredibly dense and verdant, the shabby, comfortable houses behind the trees, and the homely, happy-go-lucky people who lived in the houses and sprayed their lawns on summer evenings; friendly people, like people everywhere prone to laughter and averse to thought. “People are so foolish and likeable, it’s amazing!” thought Stonor, visualizing his kind for the first.
The sights and sounds and smells of the old town came thronging back; the school-bell with its flat clangour, exactly like no other bell on earth—it rang until five minutes before the hour, stopping with a muttering complaint, and you ran the rest of the way. There was the Dominion Hotel, with a tar pavement in front that became semi-liquid on hot days; no resident of that town ever forgot the pungent smell compounded of tar, stale beer, sawdust, and cabbage that greeted you in passing. And the candy-store was next door; the butterscotch they sold there!
How he used to get up early on summer mornings and, with his faithful mongrel Jack, with the ridiculous curly tail, walk and run a mile to the railway-station to see the Transcontinental stop and pass on. How the sun shone down the empty streets before any one was up! Strange how his whole life seemed to be coloured by the newly-risen sun! And the long train with the mysterious, luxurious sleeping-cars, an occasional tousled head at the window; lucky head, bound on a long journey!
“Well, I’ve journeyed some myself since then,” thought Stonor, “and I have a longer journey before me!”