It was still broad daylight for all the lateness of the hour. At this time of year darkness was unknown on the Hekor River. The sky was brilliant, with its cloudless summer blue shining with midday splendour.
Marty Le Gros was standing in the doorway of his log-built home, a home of considerable dimensions and comfort for his own hands, and those gentle hands of his dead wife, had erected every carefully trimmed log of it. He had only that day returned, sick at heart with the hideous recollection of the tragedy of his far-off Mission.
He was gazing out over the bosom of the sluggish river, so broad, so peacefully smiling as it stole gently away on its never-ending task of feeding the distant lake whose demands upon it seemed quite insatiable. His mind was gravely troubled, and it was planning the thing which had so suddenly become imperative. In a moment it seemed all the peace, all the quiet delight of his years of ardent labour amongst the Eskimo had been utterly rent and dispelled. He had been caught up in the tide of Usak’s savage understanding of the position of imminent danger in which he and all his belongings were standing. The thing he contemplated must be done, and done at once.
The evening hour, for all its midday brilliance, was no less peaceful than the hours of sundown in lower latitudes. He had learned to love every mood of this far northern world from its bitter storms of winter to the tropical heat of its fly and mosquito-ridden summer. It was the appeal of the remote silence of it all; it was the breadth of that wide northern world so far beyond the sheer pretences of civilization; it was the freedom, the sense of manhood it inspired. Its appeal had never once failed him even though it had robbed him of that tender companionship of the woman whose only thought in the world had been for him and his self-sacrificing labours.
At another time, with the perfect content of a mind at ease, he would have stood there smoking his well-charred pipe contemplating the beauty of this world he had made his own. But all that was changed now. The beauty, the calm of it all, only aggravated his moody unease.
Beyond the mile-wide river the western hills rose up to dizzy, snow-capped heights. Their far off slopes were buried under the torn beds of ages-old glacial fields, or lay hidden behind the dark forest-belts of primordial growth. The sight of them urged him with added alarm. He was facing the west, searching beyond the Alaskan border, and somewhere out there, hidden within those scarce trodden fastnesses lay the pulsing heart of the thing he had suddenly come to fear. Usak had warned him. Usak had convinced him on the seven day paddle down the river. So it was that those far-off ramparts, with their towering serrated crowns lost in the heavy mists enshrouding them, no longer appealed in their beauty. Their appeal had changed to one of serious dread.
He avoided them deliberately. His gaze came back to the nearer distance of the river, and just beyond it where the old fur-trading post, which gave its name to the region, stood out dark and staunch as it had stood for more than a century. A heavy stockade of logs, which the storms of the years had failed to destroy, encompassed it. The sight of the stockade filled him with a satisfaction it had never inspired before. He drew a deep breath. Yes, he was glad because of it. He felt that those old pelt hunters had built well and with great wisdom.
Then the wide river slipping away so gently southward. It was the road highway of man in these remotenesses, passing along just here between low foreshores of attenuated grasses and lichen-covered boulders, lit by the blaze of colour from myriads of tiny Arctic flowers. It was very, very beautiful. But its beauty was of less concern now than another thought. Just as it was a possible approach for the danger he knew to be threatening, so it was the broad highway of escape should necessity demand.
For the time Le Gros was no longer the missionary. He was no less a simple adventurer than those others who peopled the region. Spiritual things had no longer place in his thought. Temporal matters held him. His motherless child was there behind him in his home in the care of the faithful Pri-loo.
Gold! He wondered. What was the curse that clung to the dull yellow creation of those fierce terrestrial fires? A painful trepidation took possession of him as he thought of the tremendous richness of the discovery which the merest chance had flung into his hands. It had seemed absurd, curiously absurd, even at the time. He had had no desire for any of it. He had not yielded himself to the hardship and self-sacrifice of the life of a sub-Arctic missionary and retained any desire for the things which gold would yield him. Perhaps for this very reason an ironical fate had forced her favours upon him.