She did not seem, for an instant, to hear his voice or sense his words. "I understand now," she was saying, the letter crumpling in her fingers. "I was sick for almost a year, Derry. They thought I was going to die. He must have written it then, and they destroyed my letters to you, and when I was better they told me you were dead, and then I didn't write any more. And I wanted to die. And then, almost a year ago, Colonel Reppington came to me, and his dear old voice was so excited that it trembled, and he told me that he believed you were alive. A friend of his had just returned from British Columbia, and this friend told him that three years before, while on a grizzly shooting trip, he had met a man named Conniston, an Englishman. We wrote a hundred letters up there and found the man, Jack Otto, who was in the mountains with you, and then I knew you were alive. But we couldn't find you after that, and so I came—"
He would have wagered that she was going to cry, but she fought the tears back, smiling.
"And—and I've found you!" she finished triumphantly.
She snuggled close to him, and he slipped an arm about her waist, and they walked on. She told him about her arrival in Halifax, how Colonel Reppington had given her letters to nice people in Montreal and Winnipeg, and how it happened one day that she found his name in one of the Mounted Police blue books, and after that came on as fast as she could to surprise him at Prince Albert. When she came to that point, Keith pointed once more into the west and said:
"And there is our new world. Let us forget the old. Shall we, Mary Josephine?"
"Yes," she whispered, and her hand sought his again and crept into it, warm and confident.
XV
They went on through the golden morning, the earth damp under their feet, the air filled with its sweet incense, on past scattered clumps of balsams and cedars until they came to the river and looked down on its yellow sand-bars glistening in the sun. The town was hidden. They heard no sound from it. And looking up the great Saskatchewan, the river of mystery, of romance, of glamour, they saw before them, where the spruce walls seemed to meet, the wide-open door through which they might pass into the western land beyond. Keith pointed it out. And he pointed out the yellow bars, the glistening shores of sand, and told her how even as far as this, a thousand miles by river—those sands brought gold with them from the mountains, the gold whose treasure-house no man had ever found, and which must be hidden up there somewhere near the river's end. His dream, like Duggan's, had been to find it. Now they would search for it together.
Slowly he was picking his way so that at last they came to the bit of cleared timber in which was his old home. His heart choked him as they drew near. There was an uncomfortable tightness in his breath. The timber was no longer "clear." In four years younger generations of life had sprung up among the trees, and the place was jungle-ridden. They were within a few yards of the house before Mary Josephine saw it, and then she stopped suddenly with a little gasp. For this that she faced was not desertion, was not mere neglect. It was tragedy. She saw in an instant that there was no life in this place, and yet it stood as if tenanted. It was a log chateau with a great, red chimney rising at one end curtains and shades still hung at the windows. There were three chairs on the broad veranda that looked riverward. But two of the windows were broken, and the chairs were falling into ruin. There was no life. They were facing only the ghosts of life.