XIV
CONCLUSION
Within the cabin her father was resting peacefully. While eating the food she set before him, he told Evelyn the history of his wonderful discovery, as it came back, fragmentarily, to his blurred memory, and she, the better to bring him back, as she thought, to sanity, humored his delusion by not betraying incredulity.
At the mission where he had been tended during the long illness that followed his captivity, so he explained, he had purposely given a fictitious name and account of himself, lest the truth should somehow reach Blenksoe, thus furnishing the clue to the whereabouts of the unstaked mine, which precaution also accounted for his having eluded the diligent search that the Mounted Police had never ceased to prosecute since his disappearance. From Blenksoe, however, he had no longer anything to fear; that arch-conspirator having gone the way of his leader, Dandy Raish, by the avenging bullet from some victim's hand.
And, now, please God, he concluded, restored health would bring back recollection, enabling him to unearth the pot of gold to which the heavenly sign had pointed him.
When, at last, her loving tendance had won him to sleep, Evelyn went out into the cool air, to draw a long breath and readjust her reckonings with life that the day's events had thus cruelly disturbed.
It was the sunset's glowing aftermath that, to the pilgrims of the north, alone justifies a long journey from conditions that those hide-bound with conventions are inclined to associate with creature comfort, opening a new wonderland of beauty. In such regions where nature is elemental, man becomes elementary, feeling himself in the Almighty's workshop, in close communication with the powers of life, dealt with, not by subtle processes that the artificial conditions of city life have engendered, but swiftly, directly, summarily, as in the days of burning bush and pillars of flame.
Gazing over the now prosperous township of Lost Shoe Creek, across the lake, to the colossal mountains shutting it in from that "outside," to which even miners so heavily under the mysterious spell of the North that nothing ever could induce them to forsake it, still never ceases fondly to speak of as "God's country," Evelyn seemed to herself to be born again. Had she known it, it was then that she attained the noblest moment of her being, resolving, even as she already had resolved to meet it bravely, also to meet this uncompromising blow of providence without bitterness; if possible with love.
Hearing Durant move within, she was about to go to him when her attention was arrested by a tatterdemalion figure at her gate, beseeching charity.
"Mademoiselle—peety ze poor!"