Like a beast the boy’s anxiety for his brother began to prowl about the walls of his mind. He imagined Hugh appearing at the trading-station. He pictured the curious glances of the Indians and the white natives. This limping, extravagant, energetic Hugh with his whitening hair and eyebrows and flaring hazel eyes—with his crooked nose and mouth, his magnificently desperate manner and his magnificently desperate voice—attention would inevitably fasten upon him anywhere; how much more in an empty land such as this! Pete fancied the inquiring looks turned from the man to the man’s posted picture. It was no longer a faithful likeness, of course; still, it was a likeness. There was no other man in all the world like Hugh! He was made of odd, fantastic fragments, of ill-fitting parts—physically, mentally, spiritually. It was as if a soul had seen itself in a crooked mirror and had fashioned a form to match the distorted image. Hugh wouldn’t, couldn’t force himself to be inconspicuous. He would swagger; he would talk loud; his big, beautiful voice would challenge attention, create an audience. He would have some impossible, splendid tale to tell.
Pete sat up straighter in his chair, gingerly rearranging the ankle, and lifted his blue and haunted eyes—the eyes of the North—to the window.
The dazzle of noon had faded to a glow. The short winter day was nearly done. There would be a long violet twilight, and then, the blaze of stars.
But for his aching ankle Pete would be sliding out on soundless skis, now poised for breathless flight down some long slope, now leaping fallen trees or buried ditches. He spent half of his wild young restlessness in such long night runs when, in a sort of ecstasy, he outraced the stifled longings of his exiled youth. But there would be no ski-running for several nights now. He was a prisoner, and at a time when imprisonment was hard to bear.
If only there were some way of getting quick news of Hugh! Why had Bella and he let this thing happen? Why had they stood helplessly by and allowed the rash fool to go singing to his own destruction? They might have held him by force, if not by argument, long enough to bring him to his senses. They had been weak; they were always weak before Hugh’s magnetic strength—always the audience, the following; Bella, for all her devastating tongue, no less than himself. And Hugh’s liberty, perhaps his life, might be the price of their acquiescence.
Straining forward in his chair, listening, there came to Pete, across the silence, the sound of skis.
He rose and hopped to the door, flinging it wide. He could not see above the top of the drift which rose just beyond the roof to a height of nine or ten feet, but listening intently, he thought he recognized a familiar slight unevenness in the sliding of the skis.
“Bella!” he shouted, his boy-voice ringing with relief. “Bella! Here’s Hugh. He’s come back.”
Bella was instantly at his side. They stood waiting in the doorway. Against the violet sky darkening above the blue wall of snow, a bulky figure rose, blotting out the light. It half slid, half tumbled down upon them, clumsy and shapeless.
“Let us in,” panted Hugh. “Let us in.”