The blue eyes were fiercely alight. There was no wavering in them now. Passionate desire to fight was stirring in the trader. And somehow his emotion seemed to rob his body of its appearance of physical ungainliness.
The missionary seemed less disturbed as he set the bag back in his pocket. He had passed through his bad time. Now his decision was taken. Now he was no longer the missionary but a simple man of single purpose which he intended to put through in such way as lay within his power, aided by the friendship of Jim McLeod.
A shadowy smile lit his eyes.
“Yes. It’s the gold now,” he said, with an expressive gesture. “But,” he went on, with a shake of the head, “for the life of me I can’t get behind the minds of these mysterious northern—devils. Why, why in the name of all that’s sane and human should these Euralians descend on a pitiful bunch of poor, simple fisher-folk, and butcher and burn them off the face of the earth? It’s senseless, inhuman barbarity. Nothing else. If they want my secret, if they want the truth I denied to you as well as the rest, it’s here, in my head,” he said, tapping his broad forehead with a forefinger. “Not out there with those poor dead creatures who never harmed a soul on God’s earth. If they want it they must come to me. And when they come they—won’t get it.”
The man was transformed. Not for a moment had he raised his voice to any tone of bravado or defiance. Cold decision was shining in his eyes and displayed itself in the clip of his jaws as he returned his pipe to his mouth. Jim waited. His moment of passionate protest had passed. He was absorbed in that which he felt was yet to come.
“Here, listen, Jim,” Le Gros went on, after the briefest pause, with a sharp intake of breath which revealed something of the reality of the emotions he was labouring under. “You’re my good friend, and I want to tell you things right here and now, to-night. That’s why I came over in a hurry. You’ve always known me as a missionary. The man in me was kind of lost. That’s so. But now you’ve got to know me as a man. You were the first I told of my ‘strike.’ You were the first I showed those nuggets to. And you guessed they were worth five thousand dollars between ’em.”
“All o’ that. Maybe ten thousand dollars.”
Jim’s fleshy lips fondled the words.
“When I showed you that stuff I was the missionary. The thing began to fall off when I watched you looking at them. But it wasn’t till some of the trailmen, and even the Indians, heard the story, and showed their amazing lust for the thing I’d discovered, that I got a full grip on all that yellow stuff meant. Then I forgot to be a missionary and was just a man the same as they were. I was startled, shocked. I was half scared. I saw at a glance I’d made a bad break in telling my story, and so, when you all asked me the whereabouts of the strike, I—lied.”
He paused, passing a hand over his forehead, and smoothed back his ample black hair.