The snapping eyes of the younger man were half smiling as he contemplated the shimmering waters of the river ahead. The man beside him stirred. His curious eyes lit with a gleam of irony as he withdrew his gaze from the distant smoke cloud which lolled ponderously on the still air.
“Oh, yes. There will be a big noise,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. Maybe p’lice will come.” He laughed coldly. “An’ when they come—what? Later they go away. Later it is forgotten. Winter comes and everything is forgotten. It is the way of this far-north country. Only is this country for the man who lives in it. Not for those who mark it on a map, and say—‘it is mine.’ No. It is for us, Sate. It is ours. We make the law which says the thing we desire must be ours. Le Gros was a big fool. But it would have been useless to have his secret and leave him living. One word, and they would have flooded the country with white trash from every corner of the earth. It will not be that way now. We wait for the p’lice to come. We wait for them to go. Then this thing is ours, the same as all the rest.”
Sate turned his dark eyes upon the strong profile of his father.
“Yes,” he agreed, while his eyes questioned.
There was usually a question in his eyes when regarding his parent; a question in his hot impulsive mind when he listened to the cold tone of authority that was always addressed to him. The filial attitude of the youth was no more than skin deep.
“You have the plans safe?” he inquired presently, while he watched the brown fingers of the other filling the familiar red-clay pipe. “You have not passed them for me to read?”
The tone was a complaint, and it brought the curious regard of the tawny eyes to the discontented face. For a moment Sate confronted them boldly. Then he yielded, and his gaze was turned upon the scenes of the river. “You will see them when—it is necessary.”
A dark fire was burning behind the boy’s pre-occupied gaze. Nor was it likely that the father failed to understand the mood his denial had aroused. He watched the lowering of the black brows, the savage setting of the youthful jaws, and a shadowy smile that had nothing pleasant in it made its way to his cold eyes.
For all his surge of feeling Sate continued to regard the surrounding mountains through which they were passing. There was not a detail of the course of this little, hidden river that held even a passing interest for the youth. His whole life had been lived within the Valley of the Fire Hills and its beauty, the mystery of it affected him no more congenially than might a prisoner be affected by the bare walls and iron bars of his cell. His heart and mind were in fierce rebellion. He was chafing impotently. But he was held silent, for he dared not pit himself against the iron will, the inhuman cruelty which he knew to lie behind the cold eyes which, in his brief twenty years of life, he had only learned to obey through fear.
The man beside him had lit his pipe without a shadow of concern, and now he sat smoking it like any native, with its stem supported by his strong jaws thrust in the centre of his hard mouth. He held the little bowl in both hands.