Isobel : A Romance of the Northern Trail

by James Oliver Curwood

“Mama,” she lisped.

Pelliter tried to speak, but something rose like a knot in his throat and choked him. A fire leaped all at once through his body; the joy of that one word blinded him with hot tears. When he spoke at last his voice was broken, like a sobbing woman’s.

“That’s it.” he said. “You’re right, little one. She’s your mama!”

IX

THE SECRET OF THE DEAD

On the eighth day after Pelliter found the Eskimo igloo Billy MacVeigh came up through a gray dawn with his footsore dogs, his letters, and his medicines. He had traveled all of the preceding night, and his feet dragged heavily. It was with a feeling of fear that he at last saw the black cliffs of Fullerton rising above the ice. He dreaded the first opening of the cabin door. What would he find? During the past forty-eight hours he had figured on Pelliter’s chances, and they were two to one that he would find his partner dead in his bunk.

And if not, if Pelliter still lived, what a tale there would be to tell the sick man! For he knew that he must tell some one, and Pelliter would keep his secret. And he would understand. Day after day, as he had hurried straight into the north, Billy’s loneliness and heartbreak weighed more and more heavily upon him. He tried to force Isobel out of his thoughts, but it was impossible. A thousand visions of her rose before him, and each mile that he drew himself farther away from her seemed only to add to the nearness of her spirit at his side and to the strange pain in his heart that rose now and then to his lips in sobbing breaths that he fought with himself to stifle. And yet, with his own grief and hopelessness, he experienced more and more each day a compensating joy. It was the joy of knowing that he had given back life and hope to Isobel and her husband. Each day he figured their progress along with his own. From the Eskimo village he had sent a messenger back to Churchill with a long report for the officer in command there, and in that report he had lied. He reported Scottie Deane as having died of the injury he had received in the snow-slide. Not for a moment had he regretted the falsehood. He also promised to report at Churchill to testify against Bucky Smith as soon as he reached Pelliter and put him on his feet.

On this last day, as he saw the towering cliffs of Fullerton ahead of him, he wondered how much he would tell to Pelliter if he found him alive. Mentally he rehearsed the amazing story of what came to him that night on the Barren, of the dogs coming across the snow, the great, dark, frightened eyes of the woman, and the long, narrow box on the sledge. He would tell pelliter all that. He would tell how he had made a camp for her that night, and how, later, he had told her that he loved her and had begged one kiss. And then the disclosures of the morning, the deserted tent, the empty box, the little note from Isobel, and the revelation that the box had contained the living body of the man for whom he and Pelliter had patrolled this desolate country for two thousand miles. But would he tell the truth of what had happened after that?

He quickened his tired pace as the dogs climbed up from the ice of the Bay to the sloping ridge, and stared hard ahead of him. The dogs tugged harder as the smell of home entered their nostrils. At last the roof of the cabin came in view. MacVeigh’s bloodshot eyes were like an animal’s in their eagerness.

“Pelly, old boy,” he gasped to himself. “Pelly—”