The afternoon was placid and lovely. The temperature was not within many degrees of zero, but the gold of the sunshine was bright, and the air dazzlingly clear. It was absolutely still, not a leaf rustled, not a breath stirred. Nature was in her calmest, gentlest mood; nowhere could there have been a more tranquil arena to witness the passions of men. There was perfect silence, except for the crack of the ice sometimes as it split beneath the firm, resolute steps of the man pacing up and down. His face was set as a stone mask, as immovable and as calm, but the passion of anger increased within him as he waited; a mad impatience for his adversary to return grew at each step that he walked to and fro, with the insult of the morning echoing in his ears.
At last he stopped in his walk and fixed his gaze on the road which led to the miners' cabins. All the men's eyes followed his, and they saw the figure of their fellow-worker coming slowly down towards them. A huge, hulking form, contrasting strongly with the slim one of the man waiting for him. Some of the miners glanced up at Talbot, wondering silently if he "funked it," but there was something in that attitude and that iron countenance that reassured them and stirred a dull admiration in their hearts. Talbot ceased to walk up and down. He planted himself directly in front of the wide open door and waited there. Passion and excitement had dilated his pupils until the usually calm light grey eyes looked black; his nostrils quivered slightly as he watched his enemy coming up. As Marley drew nearer, the miners noted with satisfaction his enormous six-shooter swinging in his belt; the sunlight caught the steel at every other step forward he made. Their hearts beat fast with keen anticipation. There would soon be some fine shooting, and one dead man perhaps, or two, for Marley meant business; and as for the other, he looked like the devil himself as he stood there. And he was a fine shot, there was no mistake about that. Denbigh stared hard at him with round fixed eyes. He was thinking of the nights when he had watched Talbot teaching Dick to shoot straight—teaching the very man he had sent off now to get his pistol to shoot himself with! He remembered how Talbot had stood with Marley at this very tunnel's mouth and showed him how to snuff a candle at thirty yards! And Denbigh stared and glowed with admiration. Marley drew nearer down the path, his heavy crunching steps echoing through the serene and frosty air. A few minutes more and he was close upon the eager, expectant, silent circle; the men watched him with their breath suspended. On he came, sullenly, filled with a sort of dogged, brutal animosity against the man he had wronged and insulted. He stepped between the men, who made a short line, and then into the clear open space, facing Talbot.
For the first time he looked him full in the face, with a fugitive, fleeting glance, and his eyes shifted away. His pace slackened, but he did not stop; his feet dragged loosely over the rough snow and gravel, his huge form seemed to shrink together, to lessen; while to the fascinated eyes of the men watching the two, that slight figure at the doorway, motionless as a statue, seemed to dominate the scene. Marley felt a peculiar, sick paralysis stealing over him, a curious tugging back of his muscles when he tried to get his hand to his hip, a strangling feeling in his throat: that glance seemed petrifying him. The absolute fearlessness, the indomitable will that filled it, seemed to overcome him.
The very fact, perhaps, that Talbot had not even yet drawn his pistol, the extreme coolness that relied upon the swiftness of his wrist to draw it at a second's notice, staggered and scared him. He remembered the skill that had long been his admiration, and that he had at last learned to imitate, the sureness of aim and eye, the dexterity and quickness of that hand, and his tongue fairly cleaved to the roof of his dry mouth. He struggled to draw his revolver, but his arm refused to obey his will. Yet it was not wholly cowardice that swept over him in a sickly tide. As he had met those scornful, indignant eyes, there had rushed back to his mind a thousand small benefits conferred upon him by this man, a thousand instances of friendliness, the memory of the first days they had worked together, how he had slept under his roof, fed at his table, how, more than all, he had been given by him and instructed in the use of this very weapon that now would be turned to the giver's own breast. A horror of killing this man, of wounding him, firing upon him, combined with his terror of being killed, swept over him, and between these he felt cowed and beaten, unable to stand up and face him, unable to do anything but drag one trembling foot behind the other and go by, keeping watch from the side of his eye that that deadly pistol was not drawn upon him. But Talbot never moved, simply stood and watched him too, with fixed eyes; and Marley, overwhelmed by some power he did not understand, as if dragged forward against his will, without another look at his opponent, passed by them all and went on slowly down the road leading to the town. Not a word was spoken, not a breath was drawn, no one moved. They watched his retreating figure, some half hoping, half expecting, some half fearing, he would turn and shoot from a distance,—all wondering greatly, and a little overawed. Then, as he neither turned nor looked back, but kept steadily ahead, his large figure well outlined against the stretches of white snow, his six-shooter glistening in the sun, his head hanging down, till at last by a turn in the road he was lost to view, there was a long-drawn breath of surprise and wonder, a general turning of the eyes to Talbot. It was a victory, though a bloodless one, and they felt it. Each one felt that the conqueror was before them. Talbot said nothing. He simply stood aside from the door, to let the miners who were outside enter. The men took it as a signification that they were to recommence work, and hastened to obey. They did not dare to speak to him, not even to congratulate him. They were awed into submissive silence before him. Not a sound was uttered. The men filed silently into the tunnel like cowed sheep into their pen, leaving their master standing motionless in the sunshine.
CHAPTER III
KATRINE'S NEIGHBOURS
Good Luck Row was a little row of small, insignificant cabins towards the back of the city, and at right angles to the direction of the main street. Dawson faces the Yukon, and its main thoroughfare lies parallel with the river. In the summer, when the Yukon and the Klondike, that joins it just above, are free, the waters of the two rivers united come rolling by in jubilant majesty, tossing loose blocks of ice, the remnants of their winter chains, on their swelling tide. They form a little eddy in front of the city, and their waters roll outward and swirl back again to their course, as if the great stream made a bow to the city front as it swept past. Here in the summer, with the steamboats ploughing through the rocking green water, and the sun streaming down upon the banks crowded with active human beings, glinting on the gay signs of the saloons and the white and green painted doors of the warehouses, with the brilliant azure sky stretched above, and far off the tall green larches piercing it with their slender tops,—in the summer this main street is a pleasant, cheerful sight; but now, with the river solid and silent, the banks black and frozen, and the bleak, bitter sky above, it looked more desolate than the inner streets of the town, more uninviting than Good Luck Row, which had little cabins on each side, and where the inhabitants overlooked their opposite neighbours' firelit interior instead of the frozen river. The side-walks of the row were like the other side-walks of the city, a wealth of soft mud and slush and dirt through the warm weather, and now frozen hard into uneven lumps, big depressions, and rough hummocks. The cabins were uniform in size, small, with one fair-sized window in the front, beside the door, which opened straight into the main room, where the front window was. At the back there was another smaller room with a tiny window, looking out over a black barren ice-field, for Good Luck Row was on the edge of the town.
Katrine lived at No. 13. This cabin had been the last to be occupied on account of its unlucky number, but Katrine only laughed at it, and painted it very large in white paint upon the door. Here Katrine lived alone, though her father, the little stunted Pole who kept the "Pistol Shot," was one of the richest men in the city.
And because she lived alone some of her neighbours declared she was not respectable. As a matter of fact, she was more respectable than many of the married women living in the row, and Katrine knew many a story with which she could have startled an unsuspecting husband when he came into town after a week or two's absence prospecting or at work on the claims; but she did not trouble about other people's affairs; she gave her friendship to those who sought it, and heeded not at all those who condemned her.