With her last wailing cry Crysa buried her face in her delicate, ageing hands, and a passion of emotion racked her frail body. Wilder looked on in that helplessness which all men experience in face of a woman’s outburst of genuine grief. He waited. There was nothing else for him to do, and, presently, the distraught creature recovered herself.
Then he reached out, and one hand came to rest on the silken-clad shoulder.
“You’ve told me the truth as far as you know it, my dear,” he said very gently. “You’ve been hit hard. Darn hard. So hard I don’t know just what to say to you. But you’ve done well passing me that story and that paper, and I’m going to do all I know to help you. See here, I’m not going to hand you out all sorts of rash promises, but, if there’s a thing I can do to stop that Indian man, Usak, getting around back here to hurt you, why, I’m just going to do it. Go right back to your man now. He’s been pretty badly punished. So badly it don’t seem to me he needs a thing more of that sort this earth can hand him. And as for you you’ve deserved none of it. Go back to him, and you have my given word, that, just as hard as I’ve worked on the thing the p’lice have sent me out to do, I’ll work to see no harm comes to you from this Indian man. So long.”
CHAPTER VII
THE DREAM HILL
It was less than ten weeks to the time when the first fierce rush of winter might be expected. Already the days were shortening down with their customary rush, and in a brief time only the Caribou Valley, the river, the whole world of the far North would be lost to sight under the white shroud of battling elements, whose merciless warfare would be waged, with only brief intervals of armistice, until such time as the summer daylight dawned again.
Hesther McLeod was sitting in her doorway. It was the favoured sitting place she usually selected when the flies and summer heat made her rough kitchen something approaching the intolerable. The intense heat of summer was lessening, but the ominous chill of winter had not yet made itself felt. The sky had lost something of its summer brilliance, and clouds were wont to bank heavily with the threat of the coming season. But the flies remained. They would undoubtedly remain until swept from the face of the earth by the first heavy frost.
Hesther was assiduously battling with one of her many tasks while she talked in her simple, homely fashion to the Kid, who was standing beside her. The foster-mother was frail but wiry, and, with her greying brown hair and thin face, looked the work-worn, happy philosopher she actually was. The Kid was a picture of charming femininity for all the mannish mode of her working clothes. Her pretty, rounded figure would not be denied under the beaded caribou-skin parka that reached almost to her knees. It was belted in about the waist, and a fierce-looking hunting knife protruded from its slung sheath. Her wealth of fair hair was supposed to be tightly coiled under the enveloping cap drawn down over it. But it had fallen, as it usually fell, upon her shoulders as though refusing to endure imprisonment when the sun it loved to reflect was shining. Her blue eyes were deeply thoughtful just now as they regarded the bowed head of the beloved mother woman. She watched the nimble fingers spread the buckskin patch out over the jagged rent in the seat of Perse’s diminutive breeches.
“You know,” Hesther said, without looking up, “that little feller Perse’ll make good someways. I can’t guess how. But his queer little head’s plumb full of things that stick worse than flies. An’ even though the seat of his pants drops right out, which it’s mostly doing all the time, he’ll foller his notion clear through to the end. He’s got the gold bug now, an’ spends most all his time skiddin’ himself over rocks an’ things chasin’ what he wouldn’t rec’nise if he beat his pore little head right up against it. I want to laff most all the time at his yarns. But I just don’t. I’ve a hunch to see him do things.”
The Kid nodded.