He ran on. His knees felt weak. He shouted the name again, and the other voice was silent. Things loomed up out of the mist ahead of him, between him and the glowing windows. Some one—two people—were advancing to meet him, doubtfully, wonderingly. Kent was staggering, but he cried the name again, and this time it was a woman's cry that answered, and one of the two came toward him swift as a flash of light.
Three paces apart they stood, and in that gloom of the after-twilight their burning eyes looked at each other, while for a space their bodies remained stricken in the face of this miracle of a great and merciful God.
The dead had risen. By a mighty effort Kent reached out his arms, and Marette swayed to him. When the other man came up, he found them crumpled to their knees on the earth, clasped like children in each other's arms. And as Kent raised his face, he saw that it was Sandy McTrigger who was looking down at him, the man whose life he had saved at Athabasca Landing.
CHAPTER XXV
How long it was before his brain cleared, Kent never could have told. It might have been a minute or an hour. Every vital force that was in him had concentrated into a single consciousness—that the dead had come to life, that it was Marette Radisson, the flesh and blood and living warmth of her, he held in his arms. Like the flash of a picture on a screen he had seen McTrigger's face close to him, and then his own head was crushed down again, and if the valley had been filled with the roar of cannon, he would have heard only one sound, a sobbing voice crying over and over again, "Jeems—Jeems—Jeems—"
It was McTrigger, in the beginning of the starlight, who alone looked with clear vision upon the wonder of the thing that was happening. After a little Kent realized that McTrigger was talking, that a hand was on his shoulder, that the voice was both joyous and insistent. He rose to his feet, still holding Marette, her arms clinging to him. Her breath was sobbing and broken. And it was impossible for Kent to speak. He seemed to stumble over the distance between them and the lights, with McTrigger on the other side of Marette. It was McTrigger who opened a door, and they came into a glow of lamplight. It was a great, strange-looking room they entered. And over the threshold Marette's hands dropped from Kent, and Kent stepped back, so that in the light they faced each other, and in that moment came the marvelous readjustment from shock and disbelief to a glorious certainty.
Again Kent's brain was as clear as the day he faced death at the head of the Chute. And swift as a hot barb a fear leaped into him as his eyes met the eyes of the girl. She was terribly changed. Her face was white with a whiteness that startled him. It was thin. Her eyes were great, slumbering pools of violet, almost black in the lamp glow, and her hair—piled high on her head as he had seen it that first day at Cardigan's—added to the telltale pallor in her cheeks. A hand trembled at her throat, and its thinness frightened him. For a space—a flash of seconds—she looked at him as if possessed of the subconscious fear that he was not Jim Kent, and then slowly her arms opened, and she reached them out to him. She did not smile, she did not cry out, she did not speak his name now; but her arms went round his neck as he took her to him, and her face dropped on his breast. He looked at McTrigger. A woman was standing beside him, a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman, and she had laid a hand on McTrigger's arm, Kent, looking at them, understood.
The woman came to him. "I had better take her now, m'sieu," she said. "Malcolm—will tell you. And a little later,—you may see her again."
Her voice was low and soft. At the sound of it Marette raised her head, and her two hands stole to Kent's cheeks in their old sweet way, and she whispered,