Across the river came the call of a robin. A splash of blue fire in the willows was a blue bird's wing. A solitary butterfly made a half circle about him, passing close to him as though to beat him back with its delicate, diaphanous wings. The pale yellowish buds everywhere were changing to a lusty verdant. Air and grass were filled with questing insect life thrilling upward with little voices. The snows were slipping, slipping from the mountainsides, the waters rising in river and lake. The sap was astir in shrub and tree, bursting upward joyously. Nature had breathed her soft command to all of the North Woods; every creature and thing of life in the North Woods had heard the call.
CHAPTER XII
MERE BRUTE … OR JUST PLAIN MAN?
Ygerne, sitting very still, watched Drennen until he had passed around a bend in the river and was lost to her sight behind a clump of willows. His impassioned outburst had been too frenzied not to have moved her powerfully. But the expression in the eyes which followed him was too complex to give any key to the one emotion standing above the others in her breast. When she could see him no longer she rose and followed slowly.
Because the course of the Little MacLeod is full of twists and kinks, spine of ridge and depression of ravine thrusting the stream aside or welcoming it closer, she had no further view of him until they were both near the Settlement, Drennen himself already abreast of the first building at this end of the camp, his own dugout. She thought that he was going to stop at his cabin; then she saw that he had passed on. She had suspected that the man was delirious with the fever upon him; that his brain had reeled from the impact of the blows showered upon it and had staggered from its throne. Now the suspicion came to her that Drennen had come to her in his cups; that the thing which had loosened his tongue and distorted his vision was nothing more nor less than whiskey.
He was lurching as he walked, but bearing on swiftly. She had not been mistaken when she had thought that he had turned in toward his cabin. But in this his action had been involuntary. He had reeled, had paused as he caught and steadied himself, had gone on drunkenly.
There were a score of men up and down the short street. Already some of them had marked his coming. Ygerne turned hurriedly to the left, put the line of houses between her and the street, passing back doors quickly on her way to Père Marquette's.
Only once did Drennen stop. He ran his hand across his eyes as though to brush away some filmy fogginess of vision. There was impatience in the gesture. With a little grunt of satisfaction he went on. He had seen both Lemarc and Sefton talking with other men half way up the street.
As he passed Joe's he was lurching more and more, his walk grown markedly unsteady. His eyes were flaming and growing red; his face was splotched with colour, hot, angry colour; he was muttering to himself, little broken, feverish, illogical outpourings of the seething passion within him. He passed three men who were lounging and smoking. He did not turn his eyes toward them. They were the three big mining men, Madden and Hasbrook and Sothern. They saw him, their eyes following him quickly, each man with his own personal interest.