Just for one instant the tearful eyes stared up at him. Then the threatened storm broke. The lantern clattered to the ground and extinguished itself, and the girl’s face was buried in her mitted hands.
The sight of her distress was unendurable. The man no longer had power to deny himself. Impulse leapt from under all restraint. That wonderful impulse that is the very essence of the human soul, the inspiration of all life. He caught her up in his fur-clad arms, and held her crushed against a heart leaping madly with the triumph of glowing manhood.
The grey daylight was still faint over the south-eastern horizon. It was growing slowly, transforming the darkened world under a grey twilight that was hard set to dispel the night shadows. Still it was daylight, and just sufficient to serve as a reminder that behind the drear Arctic winter lay the promise of ultimate golden day.
The teeming rapids lay ahead, a cauldron of furiously boiling waters, and away beyond them the stately course of the Hekor River. To the south lay the wide woodland bluff that had witnessed the years-old tragedy of Marty Le Gros’ home, flinging deep shadows across the turbulent waters. While to the north, far as the eye could see, lay the low lichen-grown land rollers inclining gently away to the purple distance.
Bill Wilder and Chilcoot had pulled in to the northern bank. Their two light canoes were moored just at the head of the narrow, deep, swift channel down to the greater river, which was the only open passage through the boiling rapids. They were made fast to an up-standing boulder, and the men were afoot on the shore, gazing down at their outfit, and engaged in earnest talk.
Chilcoot was listening for the moment while his thoughtful eyes searched anywhere but in the direction of the purposeful face of his friend. And Wilder was talking rapidly and with a decision that forbade all protest.
“Old friend, ther’s just one thing I don’t want from you now,” he said. “That’s any sort of old kick. Maybe I’m handing you reason enough to set you kicking like a crazy steer. But you won’t do it, boy, for the sake of all the years we’ve ground at the queer old mill of life together. You’re the one feller, the only feller, I look to to help me along when I’m set neck deep in a tight hole, and if you fail me I’ll have to squeal on the thing above all others that seems right to me. I gave a promise, and I’ve got to make that promise good if it beats the life out of me, and robs me of all that little gal back there means to me. I’m going right up the big river to the Valley of the Fire Hills, while you get right on down to Placer, and pull every darn wire in my name and your own to fix the ‘strike’ right. Later I’m gambling to get along down and join you, if this darn country don’t beat the life out of me. I’ve got to go if hell freezes over. Ther’s a helpless woman, and a blinded man right up there, and if I don’t make ’em first they’ll be murdered by a savage who’s just stark mad to slaughter ’em. They’re the folk I got the plans of the ‘strike’ from. And I got it on a sort of promise I’d see no harm got around their way from the feller who hates ’em so he’d beat his way out of the gates of hell to get after ’em.”
“Usak.”
The bright eyes of the older man searched his friend’s.