A Gentleman of Courage: A Novel of the Wilderness

by James Oliver Curwood

As each week brought nearer the day of their own supreme happiness Mona and Peter no longer sensed this menace, or even thought of it, and because Aleck was so utterly outside all the possibilities of her life the deeper sentiment of womanhood growing in Mona compelled her to treat him more kindly. Even Simon's suspicions were dulled, for during the winter preceding her nineteenth birthday Aleck visited the settlement only twice. Another spring and summer followed. The twelfth of the coming October was Mona's birthday. On that day she would become Peter's wife. It was planned that they should live with Pierre and Josette until the good logging snows came, when all of Five Fingers would join in building their home.

It was on a day in August that Mona set out alone for the beaver pond, carrying a basket in which was her own and Peter's supper. Peter, returning from a trip up the shore, had promised to meet her before sundown in their old trysting-place, where two winters before he had built her a little "play-house" cabin.

And on this same afternoon, as Mona left the settlement, a stranger was making his way toward it.

An attitude of unusual caution and a haunted way of looking about him were the two things one would have noticed first as he came out of a swamp into an open forest of white pine. He drew in a deep breath of the freer air, and with a gesture of relief wiped his face with a hand that was rough and twisted and scratched by contact with briers. He was oddly disheveled and smeared with swamp oil. His gray head with its grizzled and uncut hair wore no hat, his shirt was in rags at the throat and sleeves and his trousers were tucked into high boots which bore evidence of having gone through mud and water to their tops. Upon his shoulders he carried a pack, and though the tenuity of its folds emphasized its lightness in weight, the man freed himself from his burden with an audible gasp of relief.

Then he leaned against a pine and looked back at the swamp from which he had come, listening with singular intentness for any sound which might strike with warning or unusual import upon the languorous stillness of the afternoon. His face was pallid under its stubble of beard even after the heat and exertion he had passed through; his cheeks were sunken as if by sickness or hunger, and his lips were drawn and thin. In his eyes seemed to lie all the strength that remained in the man. They were furtive and questing as they watched, missing no shadow that moved.

The sweetness of ripened summer, its lazy whisperings and the stillness which comes in a deep wood when the sun is overhead lay about him or trembled softly in the air. For hours he had been in an oven of swamp heat and winged pests; here it was cool. In the pine tops a hundred and fifty feet above his head was a faint stir of the breeze that came from Lake Superior. It reached down and touched his hot cheeks. He could taste the invigorating freshness of it, and there came slowly a change in his restless eyes, a softening of the tense lines about his mouth, a lighting up of his face where before it had held only suspense and watchful uncertainty. He picked up his shoulder pack, carrying it in his hand as he turned away from the swamp.

The transformation in the man's face was strangely at odds with the painful physical effort which accompanied his tedious progress. He no longer looked behind him but kept his eyes ahead, as if anticipating at any moment the appearance of something of vital importance toward which he was struggling with the last bit of strength that remained in his body. When at last he came to a little brook, gurgling between the pine roots, he fell rather than knelt beside it, and drank like one dying of thirst. Then again and again he plunged his face into hands filled with cold water and wet his head until his gray hair was dripping.

He followed the brook. Several times he stumbled and fell in the rougher places and once his toe caught a root and he plunged into the stream itself. At the end of an hour he had traveled a mile. Then he came to a knoll of hardwoods, crossed it and made his way down through a lacework of yellow birch until he arrived at the edge of a deep, still pond that began in sunlight and lost itself in the almost cavernous coolness and shadow of a spruce and cedar forest. Instinctively the man knew it was a beaver pond, and almost instantly he had proof it was alive. A warning tail lashed the water with the sound of a paddle struck sideways, and across the pool, a short stone's throw away, an object moved through the water.

Dizzily the man sat down. His vision was clouded so that it was difficult for him to see even the moving object. He fell upon his side and stretched himself out on a couch of thick green grass. In another moment he was lying with his eyes closed but with ears keenly alert. During the next half-hour he heard every sound about him; then his pale eyelids closed heavily and a weariness of brain and body which he could no longer combat dulled his senses to a physical and mental inertness which was almost sleep.