“God bless you, Bill,” she stammered, as she released his hand with obvious reluctance. “I’ll sure do my best. I just can’t say the things in here,” she went on, clasping her thin bosom with both hands. Then she struggled to smile. “Guess we’ll all be countin’ up till you get back, an’ it can’t be a day sooner than we’re all wishin’. So long, boy.”
Bill turned to the elder children who had remained to speed him on his way and nodded comprehensively.
“So long, folks,” he said. “See you again.”
He passed quickly to the door, where the Kid was awaiting him, and moved out. And a final glance back revealed Hesther framed in the open doorway, with the yellow light of the room behind her, silhouetting her fragile figure, as she waved a farewell in the direction of the swinging lantern.
The Kid’s pretty blue eyes were raised to the smiling face looking down into hers. It was a moment tense with feeling. It was that moment of parting when she felt that all sense of joy, all sense of happiness was to be snuffed right out of her life. And the responsive smile she forced to her eyes was perilously near to tears.
The lantern in her hand revealed the canoe hauled up against the crude landing. Its rays found reflection in the dark spread of water where a skin of ice was already forming, seeking to embed the frail craft at its mooring.
There was little enough relief from the darkness under the heavy night clouds. There was no visible moon. That was screened behind the stormy threat, yet it contrived a faint twilight over the world. Not a single star was to be seen anywhere and the ghostly northern lights were deeply curtained.
Now, in these last moments of parting, the youth in Bill Wilder was once more surging with impulse. As he gazed down into the bravely smiling eyes a hundred desires were beating in his brain. And he yearned desperately to fling every caution to the winds and abandon himself to the love which left him without a thought but of the delight with which the Kid’s presence filled him.
Somehow it seemed to his big nature a wanton cruelty that this girl should be charged with the cares of a struggle for existence in this far-flung northern wilderness. Perhaps as great a feeling as any that stirred him at this moment was a desire to relieve her of the last shadow of anxiety in the monstrous season about to descend upon them. And yet he was compelled to leave her to face alone the very hardships he would have saved her from. And this with an acute understanding of the uncertainty of the outcome of the thing he had planned to accomplish in the darkness of the long winter night. For once in his life his usual confidence was undermined by curious forebodings. But he gave no outward sign, while he listened to the urgent little story the girl had to tell of the Indian Usak.