Her "mush—mush on!" to the dogs rang clear and gave the policeman further speech with the factor.
"You couldn't have her there to-night, Karmack, in view of what I have to tell her to-morrow. Her brother's things scattered all about——she'd ask too many questions. Have you tangled in no time."
Again Karmack nodded agreement. He hadn't thought of that, but only of being hospitable. It would have been a treat, though, to entertain such a charmer under the chaperonage of the missionary couple. He would send up some butter for their supper. That of the police stores smelled to the heavens.
"That's fine; if ours came from cows, they were athletes," Seymour replied with a grimace. "Come up with yourself for coffee. And I wish you'd send your man for their dogs and kennel them for the night. My malamutes raise Billy-blue when there's any new canine clan in sniffing distance."
The isolation of Armistice, with its difficulties of transportation, combined with its newness as a police post caused even the living room of the detachment to take on a barracks-like austerity.
The scant furniture had been made on the spot and was all too rustic. There were bunks along three walls and a scattering of skins upon the rough boards of the floor. A lithograph of King George, draped with the colors, occupied a position of honor, the only other decoration being a print of the widely popular "Eddie," Prince of Wales. But logs blazed cheerfully in the stone fireplace and Moira O'Malley, divested of her outer trail clothes, looked very much at home as she stood to its warmth.
Not until he returned from the kitchen and the starting of a "company" supper did Russell Seymour realize in full the startling beauty of the Irish girl who had come to them at such an unfortunate moment. She was within an inch of being as tall as himself as she stood there on the hearth. Her lampblack hair, coiled low on her lovely neck, actually was dressed to show her small ears—and almost had he forgotten that white women had pairs of such.
A generous mouth, full and red of lips, sent his eyes hastening on their fleeting inspection when she became aware of his presence in the kitchen doorway. If the even rows of pearls behind those lips had flashed him a smile then, the temptation must have been too great. Her slender figure merely hinted at rounding out in its mould of black blanket-cloth. He glanced shyly at her ankles—always the cover-point in his estimate of feminine pulchritude. She still wore her trail muckluks of fur, clumsy looking as a squaw's sacking, but he knew beyond doubt how silk stockings and pumps would become her.
In the eyes he had remarked on the trail, however, Moira's beauty reached its highest peak, he decided. They were as blue as the heart of an Ungova iceberg and as warm as the fire which glowed behind her. They looked out at him in a friendly, inquiring way from behind lashes as dark as an Arctic winter night.
And on the morrow those lashes would be wet with tears of grief. At the moment he'd gladly have given his hope of heaven to have ushered a laughing young Oliver O'Malley into the room.