THE FOREIGNER

In Western Canada there is to be seen to-day that most fascinating of all human phenomena, the making of a nation. Out of breeds diverse in traditions, in ideals, in speech, and in manner of life, Saxon and Slav, Teuton, Celt and Gaul, one people is being made. The blood strains of great races will mingle in the blood of a race greater than the greatest of them all.

It would be our wisdom to grip these peoples to us with living hooks of justice and charity till all lines of national cleavage disappear, and in the Entity of our Canadian national life, and in the Unity of our world-wide Empire, we fuse into a people whose strength will endure the slow shock of time for the honour of our name, for the good of mankind, and for the glory of Almighty God.

C.W.G. Winnipeg, Canada, 1909.

CHAPTER I — THE CITY ON THE PLAIN

Not far from the centre of the American Continent, midway between the oceans east and west, midway between the Gulf and the Arctic Sea, on the rim of a plain, snow swept in winter, flower decked in summer, but, whether in winter or in summer, beautiful in its sunlit glory, stands Winnipeg, the cosmopolitan capital of the last of the Anglo-Saxon Empires,—Winnipeg, City of the Plain, which from the eyes of the world cannot be hid. Miles away, secure in her sea-girt isle, is old London, port of all seas; miles away, breasting the beat of the Atlantic, sits New York, capital of the New World, and mart of the world, Old and New; far away to the west lie the mighty cities of the Orient, Peking and Hong Kong, Tokio and Yokohama; and fair across the highway of the world's commerce sits Winnipeg, Empress of the Prairies. Her Trans-Continental railways thrust themselves in every direction, —south into the American Republic, east to the ports of the Atlantic, west to the Pacific, and north to the Great Inland Sea.

To her gates and to her deep-soiled tributary prairies she draws from all lands peoples of all tribes and tongues, smitten with two great race passions, the lust for liberty, and the lust for land.

By hundreds and tens of hundreds they stream in and through this hospitable city, Saxon and Celt and Slav, each eager on his own quest, each paying his toll to the new land as he comes and goes, for good or for ill, but whether more for good than for ill only God knows.

A hundred years ago, where now stands the thronging city, stood the lonely trading-post of The Honourable, The Hudson's Bay Company. To this post in their birch bark canoes came the half-breed trapper and the Indian hunter, with their priceless bales of furs to be bartered for blankets and beads, for pemmican and bacon, for powder and ball, and for the thousand and one articles of commerce that piled the store shelves from cellar to roof.

Fifty years ago, about the lonely post a little settlement had gathered—a band of sturdy Scots. Those dour and doughty pioneers of peoples had planted on the Red River their homes upon their little "strip" farms—a rampart of civilization against the wide, wild prairie, the home of the buffalo, and camp ground of the hunters of the plain.

Twenty-five years ago, in the early eighties, a little city had fairly dug its roots into the black soil, refusing to be swept away by that cyclone of financial frenzy known over the Continent as the "boom of '81," and holding on with abundant courage and invincible hope, had gathered to itself what of strength it could, until by 1884 it had come to assume an appearance of enduring solidity. Hitherto accessible from the world by the river and the railroad from the south, in this year the city began to cast eager eyes eastward, and to listen for the rumble of the first trans-continental train, which was to bind the Provinces of Canada into a Dominion, and make Winnipeg into one of the cities of the world. Trade by the river died, but meantime the railway from the south kept pouring in a steady stream of immigration, which distributed itself according to its character and in obedience to the laws of affinity, the French Canadian finding a congenial home across the Red River in old St. Boniface, while his English-speaking fellow-citizen, careless of the limits of nationality, ranged whither his fancy called him. With these, at first in small and then in larger groups, from Central and South Eastern Europe, came people strange in costume and in speech; and holding close by one another as if in terror of the perils and the loneliness of the unknown land, they segregated into colonies tight knit by ties of blood and common tongue.

Already, close to the railway tracks and in the more unfashionable northern section of the little city, a huddling cluster of little black shacks gave such a colony shelter. With a sprinkling of Germans, Italians and Swiss, it was almost solidly Slav. Slavs of all varieties from all provinces and speaking all dialects were there to be found: Slavs from Little Russia and from Great Russia, the alert Polak, the heavy Croatian, the haughty Magyar, and occasionally the stalwart Dalmatian from the Adriatic, in speech mostly Ruthenian, in religion orthodox Greek Catholic or Uniat and Roman Catholic. By their non-discriminating Anglo-Saxon fellow-citizens they are called Galicians, or by the unlearned, with an echo of Paul's Epistle in their minds, "Galatians." There they pack together in their little shacks of boards and tar-paper, with pent roofs of old tobacco tins or of slabs or of that same useful but unsightly tar-paper, crowding each other in close irregular groups as if the whole wide prairie were not there inviting them. From the number of their huts they seem a colony of no great size, but the census taker, counting ten or twenty to a hut, is surprised to find them run up into hundreds. During the summer months they are found far away in the colonies of their kinsfolk, here and there planted upon the prairie, or out in gangs where new lines of railway are in construction, the joy of the contractor's heart, glad to exchange their steady, uncomplaining toil for the uncertain, spasmodic labour of their English-speaking rivals. But winter finds them once more crowding back into the little black shacks in the foreign quarter of the city, drawn thither by their traditionary social instincts, or driven by economic necessities. All they ask is bed space on the floor or, for a higher price, on the home-made bunks that line the walls, and a woman to cook the food they bring to her; or, failing such a happy arrangement, a stove on which they may boil their varied stews of beans or barley, beets or rice or cabbage, with such scraps of pork or beef from the neck or flank as they can beg or buy at low price from the slaughter houses, but ever with the inevitable seasoning of garlic, lacking which no Galician dish is palatable. Fortunate indeed is the owner of a shack, who, devoid of hygienic scruples and disdainful of city sanitary laws, reaps a rich harvest from his fellow-countrymen, who herd together under his pent roof. Here and there a house surrendered by its former Anglo-Saxon owner to the "Polak" invasion, falls into the hands of an enterprising foreigner, and becomes to the happy possessor a veritable gold mine.

Such a house had come into the possession of Paulina Koval. Three years ago, with two children she had come to the city, and to the surprise of her neighbours who had travelled with her from Hungary, had purchased this house, which the owner was only too glad to sell. How the slow-witted Paulina had managed so clever a transaction no one quite understood, but every one knew that in the deal Rosenblatt, financial agent to the foreign colony, had lent his shrewd assistance. Rosenblatt had known Paulina in the home land, and on her arrival in the new country had hastened to proffer his good offices, arranging the purchase of her house and guiding her, not only in financial matters, but in things domestic as well. It was due to Rosenblatt that the little cottage became the most populous dwelling in the colony. It was his genius that had turned the cellar, with its mud floor, into a dormitory capable of giving bed space to twenty or twenty-five Galicians, and still left room for the tin stove on which to cook their stews. Upon his advice, too, the partitions by which the cottage had been divided into kitchen, parlour, and bed rooms, were with one exception removed as unnecessary and interfering unduly with the most economic use of valuable floor space. Upon the floor of the main room, some sixteen feet by twelve, under Rosenblatt's manipulation, twenty boarders regularly spread their blankets, and were it not for the space demanded by the stove and the door, whose presence he deeply regretted, this ingenious manipulator could have provided for some fifteen additional beds. Beyond the partition, which as a concession to Rosenblatt's finer sensibilities was allowed to remain, was Paulina's boudoir, eight feet by twelve, where she and her two children occupied a roomy bed in one corner. In the original plan of the cottage four feet had been taken from this boudoir for closet purposes, which closet now served as a store room for Paulina's superfluous and altogether wonderful wardrobe.

After a few weeks' experiment, Rosenblatt, under pressure of an exuberant hospitality, sought to persuade Paulina that, at the sacrifice of some comfort and at the expense of a certain degree of privacy, the unoccupied floor space of her boudoir might be placed at the disposal of a selected number of her countrymen, who for the additional comfort thus secured, this room being less exposed to the biting wind from the door, would not object to pay a higher price. Against this arrangement poor Paulina made feeble protest, not so much on her own account as for the sake of the children.

"Children!" cried Rosenblatt. "What are they to you? They are not your children."

"No, they are not my children, but they are my man's, and I must keep them for him. He would not like men to sleep in the same room with us."

"What can harm them here? I will come myself and be their protector," cried the chivalrous Rosenblatt. "And see, here is the very thing! We will make for them a bed in this snug little closet. It is most fortunate, and they will be quite comfortable."

Still in Paulina's slow-moving mind lingered some doubt as to the propriety of the suggested arrangement. "But why should men come in here? I do not need the money. My man will send money every month."

"Ah!" cried the alert and startled Rosenblatt, "every month! Ah! very good! But this house, you will remember, is not all paid for, and those English people are terrible with their laws. Oh, truly terrible!" continued the solicitous agent. "They would turn you and your children out into the snow. Ah, what a struggle I had only last month with them!"

The mere memory of that experience sent a shudder of horror through Rosenblatt's substantial frame, so that Paulina hastened to surrender, and soon Rosenblatt with three of his patrons, selected for their more gentle manners and for their ability to pay, were installed as night lodgers in the inner room at the rate of five dollars per month. This rate he considered as extremely reasonable, considering that those of the outer room paid three dollars, while for the luxury of the cellar accommodation two dollars was the rate.

CHAPTER II — WHERE EAST MEETS WEST

The considerate thoughtfulness of Rosenblatt relieved Paulina of the necessity of collecting these monthly dues, to her great joy, for it was far beyond her mental capacity to compute, first in Galician and then in Canadian money, the amount that each should pay; and besides, as Rosenblatt was careful to point out, how could she deal with defaulters, who, after accumulating a serious indebtedness, might roll up their blankets and without a word of warning fade away into the winter night? Indeed, with all her agent's care, it not unfrequently happened that a lodger, securing a job in one of the cordwood camps, would disappear, leaving behind him only his empty space upon the floor and his debt upon the books, which Rosenblatt kept with scrupulous care. Occasionally it happened, however, that, as in all bookkeeping, a mistake would creep in. This was unfortunately the case with young Jacob Wassyl's account, of whose perfidy Paulina made loud complaints to his friends, who straightway remonstrated with Jacob upon his return from the camp. It was then that Jacob's indignant protestations caused an examination of Rosenblatt's books, whereupon that gentleman laboured with great diligence to make abundantly clear to all how the obliteration of a single letter had led to the mistake. It was a striking testimony to his fine sense of honour that Rosenblatt insisted that Jacob, Paulina, and indeed the whole company, should make the fullest investigation of his books and satisfy themselves of his unimpeachable integrity. In a private interview with Paulina, however, his rage passed all bounds, and it was only Paulina's tearful entreaties that induced him to continue to act as her agent, and not even her tears had moved him had not Paulina solemnly sworn that never again would she allow her blundering crudity to insert itself into the delicate finesse of Rosenblatt's financial operations. Thenceforward all went harmoniously enough, Paulina toiling with unremitting diligence at her daily tasks, so that she might make the monthly payments upon her house, and meet the rapacious demands of those terrible English people, with their taxes and interest and legal exactions, which Rosenblatt, with meritorious meekness, sought to satisfy. So engrossed, indeed, was that excellent gentleman in this service that he could hardly find time to give suitable over-sight to his own building operations, in which, by the erection of shack after shack, he sought to meet the ever growing demands of the foreign colony.

Before a year had gone it caused Rosenblatt no small annoyance that while he was thus struggling to keep pace with the demands upon his time and energy, Paulina, with lamentable lack of consideration, should find it necessary to pause in her scrubbing, washing, and baking, long enough to give birth to a fine healthy boy. Paulina's need brought her help and a friend in the person of Mrs. Fitzpatrick, who lived a few doors away in the only house that had been able to resist the Galician invasion. It had not escaped Mrs. Fitzpatrick's eye nor her kindly heart, as Paulina moved in and out about her duties, that she would ere long pass into that mysterious valley of life and death where a woman needs a woman's help; and so when the hour came, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, with fine contempt of "haythen" skill and efficiency, came upon the scene and took command. It took her only a few moments to clear from the house the men who with stolid indifference to the sacred rights of privacy due to the event were lounging about. Swinging the broom which she had brought with her, she almost literally swept them forth, flinging their belongings out into the snow. Not even Rosenblatt, who lingered about, did she suffer to remain.

"Y're wife will not be nadin' ye, I'm thinkin', for a while. Ye can just wait till I can bring ye wurrd av y're babby," she said, pushing him, not unkindly, from the room.

Rosenblatt, whose knowledge of English was sufficient to enable him to catch her meaning, began a vigorous protest:

"Eet ees not my woman," he exclaimed.

"Eat, is it!" replied Mrs. Fitzpatrick, taking him up sharply. "Indade ye can eat where ye can get it. Faith, it's a man ye are, sure enough, that can niver forget y're stomach! An' y're wife comin' till her sorrow!"

"Eet ees not my—" stormily began Rosenblatt.

"Out wid ye," cried Mrs. Fitzpatrick, impatiently waving her big red hands before his face. "Howly Mother! It's the wurrld's wonder how a dacent woman cud put up wid ye!"

And leaving him in sputtering rage, she turned to her duty, aiding, with gentle touch and tender though meaningless words, her sister woman through her hour of anguish.

In three days Paulina was again in her place and at her work, and within a week her household was re-established in its normal condition. The baby, rolled up in an old quilt and laid upon her bed, received little attention except when the pangs of hunger wrung lusty protests from his vigorous lungs, and had it not been for Mrs. Fitzpatrick's frequent visits, the unwelcome little human atom would have fared badly enough. For the first two weeks of its life the motherly-hearted Irish woman gave an hour every day to the bathing and dressing of the babe, while Irma, the little girl of Paulina's household, watched in wide-eyed wonder and delight; watched to such purpose, indeed, that before the two weeks had gone Mrs. Fitzpatrick felt that to the little girl's eager and capable hands the baby might safely be entrusted.

"It's the ould-fashioned little thing she is," she confided to her husband, Timothy. "Tin years, an' she has more sinse in the hair outside av her head than that woman has in the brains inside av hers. It's aisy seen she's no mother of hers—ye can niver get canary burrds from owls' eggs. And the strength of her," she continued, to the admiring and sympathetic Timothy, "wid her white face and her burnin' brown eyes!"

And so it came that every day, no matter to what depths the thermometer might fall, the little white-faced, white-haired Russian girl with the "burnin'" brown eyes brought Paulina's baby to be inspected by Mrs. Fitzpatrick's critical eye. Before a year had passed Irma had won an assured place in the admiration and affection of not only Mrs. Fitzpatrick, but of her husband, Timothy, as well.

But of Paulina the same could not be said, for with the passing months she steadily descended in the scale of Mrs. Fitzpatrick's regard. Paulina was undoubtedly slovenly. Her attempts at housekeeping—if housekeeping it could be called—were utterly contemptible in the eyes of Mrs. Fitzpatrick. These defects, however, might have been pardoned, and with patience and perseverance might have been removed, but there were conditions in Paulina's domestic relations that Mrs. Fitzpatrick could not forgive. The economic arrangements which turned Paulina's room into a public dormitory were abhorrent to the Irish woman's sense of decency. Often had she turned the full tide of her voluble invective upon Paulina, who, though conscious that all was not well—for no one could mistake the flash of Mrs. Fitzpatrick's eye nor the stridency of her voice—received Mrs. Fitzpatrick's indignant criticism with a patient smile. Mrs. Fitzpatrick, despairing of success in her efforts with Paulina, called in the aid of Anka Kusmuk, who, as domestic in the New West Hotel where Mrs. Fitzpatrick served as charwoman two days in the week, had become more or less expert in the colloquial English of her environment. Together they laboured with Paulina, but with little effect. She was quite unmoved, because quite unconscious, of moral shock. It disturbed Mrs. Fitzpatrick not a little to discover during the progress of her missionary labours that even Anka, of whose goodness she was thoroughly assured, did not appear to share her horror of Paulina's moral condition. It was the East meeting the West, the Slav facing the Anglo-Saxon. Between their points of view stretched generations of moral development. It was not a question of absolute moral character so much as a question of moral standards. The vastness of this distinction in standards was beginning to dawn upon Mrs. Fitzpatrick, and she was prepared to view Paulina's insensibility to moral distinctions in a more lenient light, when a new idea suddenly struck her:

"But y're man; how does he stand it? Tell me that."

The two Galician women gazed at each other in silence. At length Anka replied with manifest reluctance:

"She got no man here. Her man in Russia."

"What!" exclaimed Mrs. Fitzpatrick in a terrible voice. "An' do ye mane to say! An' that Rosenblatt—is he not her husband? Howly Mother of God," she continued in an awed tone of voice, "an' is this the woman I've been havin' to do wid!"

The wrath, the scorn, the repulsion in her eyes, her face, her whole attitude, revealed to the unhappy Paulina what no words could have conveyed. Under her sallow skin the red blood of shame slowly mounted. At that moment she saw herself and her life as never before. The wrathful scorn of this indignant woman pierced like a lightning bolt to the depths of her sluggish moral sense and awakened it to new vitality. For a few moments she stood silent and with face aflame, and then, turning slowly, passed into her house. It was the beginning of Paulina's redemption.

CHAPTER III — THE MARRIAGE OF ANKA

The withdrawing of Mrs. Fitzpatrick from Paulina's life meant a serious diminution in interest for the unhappy Paulina, but with the characteristic uncomplaining patience of her race she plodded on with the daily routine at washing, baking, cleaning, mending, that filled up her days. There was no break in the unvarying monotony of her existence. She gave what care she could to the two children that had been entrusted to her keeping, and to her baby. It was well for her that Irma, whose devotion to the infant became an absorbing passion, developed a rare skill in the care of the child, and it was well for them all that the ban placed by Mrs. Fitzpatrick upon Paulina's house was withdrawn as far as Irma and the baby were concerned, for every day the little maid presented her charge to the wise and watchful scrutiny of Mrs. Fitzpatrick.

The last days of 1884, however, brought an event that cast a glow of colour over the life of Paulina and the whole foreign colony. This event was none other than the marriage of Anka Kusmuk and Jacob Wassyl, Paulina's most popular lodger. A wedding is a great human event. To the principals the event becomes the pivot of existence; to the relatives and friends it is at once the consummation of a series of happenings that have absorbed their anxious and amused attention, and the point of departure for a new phase of existence offering infinite possibilities in the way of speculation. But even for the casual onlooker a wedding furnishes a pleasant arrest of the ordinary course of life, and lets in upon the dull grey of the commonplace certain gleams of glory from the golden days of glowing youth, or from beyond the mysterious planes of experience yet to be.

All this and more Anka's wedding was to Paulina and her people. It added greatly to Paulina's joy and to her sense of importance that her house was selected to be the scene of the momentous event. For long weeks Paulina's house became the life centre of the colony, and as the day drew nigh every boarder was conscious of a certain reflected glory. It is no wonder that the selecting of Paulina's house for the wedding feast gave offence to Anka's tried friend and patron, Mrs. Fitzpatrick. To that lady it seemed that in selecting Paulina's house for her wedding Anka was accepting Paulina's standard of morals and condoning her offences, and it only added to her grief that Anka took the matter so lightly.

"I'm just affronted at ye, Anka," she complained, "that ye can step inside the woman's dure."

"Ah, cut it out!" cried Anka, rejoicing in her command of the vernacular. "Sure, Paulina is no good, you bet; but see, look at her house—dere is no Rutenian house like dat, so beeg. Ah!" she continued rapturously, "you come an' see me and Jacob dance de 'czardas,' wit Arnud on de cymbal. Dat Arnud he's come from de old country, an' he's de whole show, de whole brass band on de park."

To Anka it seemed an unnecessary and foolish sacrifice to the demands of decency that she should forego the joy of a real czardas to the music of Arnud accompanying the usual violins.

"Ye can have it," sniffed Mrs. Fitzpatrick with emphatic disdain; all the more emphatic that she was conscious, distinctly conscious, of a strong desire to witness this special feature of the festivities. "I've nothing agin you, Anka, for it's a good gurrl ye are, but me and me family is respectable, an' that Father Mulligan can tell ye, for his own mother's cousin was married till the brother of me father's uncle, an' niver a fut of me will go beyant the dure of that scut, Paulina." And Mrs. Fitzpatrick, resting her hands upon her hips, stood the living embodiment of hostility to any suggested compromise with sin.

But while determined to maintain at all costs this attitude toward Paulina and her doings, her warm-hearted interest in Anka's wedding made her very ready with offers of assistance in preparing for the feast.

"It's not much I know about y're Polak atin'," she said, "but I can make a batch of pork pies that wud tempt the heart of the Howly Moses himsilf, an' I can give ye a bilin' of pitaties that Timothy can fetch to the house for ye."

This generous offer Anka gladly accepted, for Mrs. Fitzpatrick's pork pies, she knew from experience, were such as might indeed have tempted so respectable a patriarch as Moses himself to mortal sin. The "bilin' of pitaties," which Anka knew would be prepared in no ordinary pot, but in Mrs. Fitzpatrick's ample wash boiler, was none the less acceptable, for Anka could easily imagine how effective such a contribution would be in the early stages of the feast in dulling the keen edge of the Galician appetite.

The preparation for the wedding feast, which might be prolonged for the greater part of three days, was in itself an undertaking requiring careful planning and no small degree of executive ability; for the popularity of both bride and groom would be sufficient to insure the presence of the whole colony, but especially the reputed wealth of the bride, who, it was well known, had been saving with careful economy her wages at the New West Hotel for the past three years, would most certainly create a demand for a feast upon a scale of more than ordinary magnificence, and Anka was determined that in providing for the feast this demand should be fully satisfied.

For a long time she was torn between two conflicting desires: on the one hand she longed to appear garbed in all the glory of the Western girl's most modern bridal attire; on the other she coveted the honour of providing a feast that would live for years in the memory of all who might be privileged to be present. Both she could not accomplish, and she wisely chose the latter; for she shrewdly reasoned that, while the Western bridal garb would certainly set forth her charms in a new and ravishing style, the glory of that triumph would be short-lived at best, and it would excite the envy of the younger members of her own sex and the criticism of the older and more conservative of her compatriots.

She was further moved to this decision by the thought that inasmuch as Jacob and she had it in mind to open a restaurant and hotel as soon as sufficient money was in hand, it was important that they should stand well with the community, and nothing would so insure popularity as abundant and good eating and drinking. So to the preparation of a feast that would at once bring her immediate glory and future profit, Anka set her shrewd wits. The providing of the raw materials for the feast was to her an easy matter, for her experience in the New West Hotel had taught her how to expend to the best advantage her carefully hoarded wages. The difficulty was with the cooking. Clearly Paulina could not be expected to attend to this, for although her skill with certain soups and stews was undoubted, for the finer achievements of the culinary art Paulina was totally unfitted. To overcome this difficulty, Anka hit upon the simple but very effective expedient of entrusting to her neighbours, who would later be her guests, the preparing of certain dishes according to their various abilities and inclinations, keeping close account in her own shrewd mind of what each one might be supposed to produce from the materials furnished, and stimulating in her assistants the laudable ambition to achieve the very best results. Hence, in generous quantities she distributed flour for bread and cakes in many varieties, rice and beans and barley, which were to form the staple portion of the stews, cabbage and beets and onions in smaller measure—for at this season of the year the price was high—sides of pork, ropes of sausages, and roasts of beef from neck and flank. Through the good offices of the butcher boy that supplied the New West Hotel, purchased with Anka's shyest smile and glance, were secured a considerable accumulation of shank bones and ham bones, pork ribs and ribs of beef, and other scraps too often despised by the Anglo-Saxon housekeeper, all of which would prove of the greatest value in the enrichment of the soups. For puddings there were apples and prunes, raisins and cranberries. The cook of the New West Hotel, catching something of Anka's generous enthusiasm, offered pies by the dozen, and even the proprietor himself, learning of the preparations and progress, could think of nothing so appropriate to the occasion as a case of Irish whiskey. This, however, Anka, after some deliberation, declined, suggesting beer instead, and giving as a reason her experience, namely, that "whiskey make too quick fight, you bet." A fight was inevitable, but it would be a sad misfortune if this necessary part of the festivities should occur too early in the programme.

Gradually, during the days of the week immediately preceding the ceremony, there began to accumulate in the shacks about, viands of great diversity, which were stored in shelves, in cupboards,—where there were any,—under beds, and indeed in any and every available receptacle. The puddings, soups and stews, which, after all, were to form the main portion of the eating, were deposited in empty beer kegs, of which every shack could readily furnish a few, and set out to freeze, in which condition they would preserve their perfect flavour. Such diligence and such prudence did Anka show in the supervision of all these arrangements, that when the day before the feast arrived, on making her final round of inspection, everything was discovered to be in readiness for the morrow, with the single exception that the beer had not arrived. But this was no over-sight on the part of Jacob, to whom this portion of the feast had been entrusted. It was rather due to a prudence born of experience that the beer should be ordered to be delivered at the latest possible hour. A single beer keg is an object of consuming interest to the Galician and subjects his sense of honour to a very considerable strain; the known presence of a dray load of beer kegs in the neighbourhood would almost certainly intensify the strain beyond the breaking point. But as the shadows of evening began to gather, the great brewery dray with its splendid horses and its load of kegs piled high, drew up to Paulina's door. Without loss of time, and under the supervision of Rosenblatt and Jacob himself, the beer kegs were carried by the willing hands of Paulina's boarders down to the cellar, piled high against the walls, and carefully counted. There they were safe enough, for every man, not only among the boarders but in the whole colony, who expected to be present at the feast, having contributed his dollar toward the purchase of the beer, constituted himself a guardian against the possible depredations of his neighbours. Not a beer keg from this common store was to be touched until after the ceremony, when every man should have a fair start. For the preliminary celebrations during the evening and night preceding the wedding day the beer furnished by the proprietor of the New West Hotel would prove sufficient.

It was considered a most fortunate circumstance both by the bride and groom-elect, that there should have appeared in the city, the week before, a priest of the Greek Catholic faith, for though in case of need they could have secured the offices of a Roman priest from St. Boniface, across the river, the ceremonial would thereby have been shorn of much of its picturesqueness and efficacy. Anka and her people had little regard for the services of a Church to which they owed only nominal allegiance.

The wedding day dawned clear, bright, and not too cold to forbid a great gathering of the people outside Paulina's house, who stood reverently joining with those who had been fortunate enough to secure a place in Paulina's main room, which had been cleared of all beds and furniture, and transformed for the time being into a chapel. The Slav is a religious man, intensely, and if need be, fiercely, religious; hence these people, having been deprived for long months of the services of their Church, joined with eager and devout reverence in the responses to the prayers of the priest, kneeling in the snow unmoved by and apparently unconscious of the somewhat scornful levity of the curious crowd of onlookers that speedily gathered about them. For more than two hours the religious part of the ceremony continued, but there was no sign of abating interest or of waning devotion; rather did the religious feeling appear to deepen as the service advanced. At length there floated through the open window the weirdly beautiful and stately marriage chant, in which the people joined in deep-toned guttural fervour, then the benediction, and the ceremony was over. Immediately there was a movement toward the cellar, where Rosenblatt, assisted by a score of helpers, began to knock in the heads of the beer kegs and to hand about tin cups of beer for the first drinking of the bride's health. Beautiful indeed, in her husband's eyes and the eyes of all who beheld her, appeared Anka as she stood with Jacob in the doorway, radiant in the semi-barbaric splendour of her Slavonic ancestry.

This first formal health-drinking ceremony over, from within Paulina's house and from shacks roundabout, women appeared with pots and pails, from which, without undue haste, but without undue delay, men filled tin cups and tin pans with stews rich, luscious, and garlic flavoured. The feast was on; the Slav's hour of rapture had come. From pot to keg and from keg to pot the happy crowd would continue to pass in alternating moods of joy, until the acme of bliss would be attained when Jacob, leading forth and up and down his lace-decked bride, would fling the proud challenge to one and all that his bride was the fairest and dearest of all brides ever known.

Thus with full ceremonial, with abundance of good eating, and with multitudinous libations, Anka was wed.

CHAPTER IV — THE UNBIDDEN GUEST

The northbound train on the Northern Pacific Line was running away behind her time. A Dakota blizzard had held her up for five hours, and there was little chance of making time against a heavy wind and a drifted rail. The train was crowded with passengers, all impatient at the delay, as is usual with passengers. The most restless, if not the most impatient, of those in the first-class car was a foreign-looking gentleman, tall, dark, and with military carriage. A grizzled moustache with ends waxed to a needle point and an imperial accentuated his foreign military appearance. At every pause the train made at the little wayside stations, this gentleman became visibly more impatient, pulling out his watch, consulting his time table, and cursing the delay.

Occasionally he glanced out through the window across the white plain that stretched level to the horizon, specked here and there by infrequent little black shacks and by huge stacks of straw half buried in snow. Suddenly his attention was arrested by a trim line of small buildings cosily ensconced behind a plantation of poplars and Manitoba maples.

"What are those structures?" he enquired of his neighbour in careful book English, and with slightly foreign accent.

"What? That bunch of buildings. That is a Mennonite village," was the reply.

"Mennonite! Ah!"

"Yes," replied his neighbour. "Dutch, or Russian, or something."

"Yes, Russian," answered the stranger quickly. "That is Russian, surely," he continued, pointing eagerly to the trim and cosy group of buildings. "These Mennonites, are they prosperous—ah—citizens—ah—settlers?"

"You bet! They make money where other folks would starve. They know what they're doing. They picked out this land that everybody else was passing over—the very best in the country—and they are making money hand over fist. Mighty poor spenders, though. They won't buy nothing; eat what they can't sell off the farm."

"Aha," ejaculated the stranger, with a smile.

"Yes, they sell everything, grain, hogs, eggs, butter, and live on cabbages, cheese, bread."

"Aha," repeated the stranger, again with evident approval.

"They are honest, though," continued his neighbour judicially; "we sell them implements."

"Ah, implements?" enquired the stranger.

"Yes, ploughs, drills, binders, you know."

"Ah, so, implements," said the stranger, evidently making a mental note of the word. "And they pay you?"

"Yes, they are good pay, mighty good pay. They are good settlers, too."

"Not good for soldiers, eh?" laughed the stranger.

"Soldiers? No, I guess not. But we don't want soldiers."

"What? You have no soldiers? No garrisons?"

"No, what do we want soldiers for in this country? We want farmers and lots of them."

The stranger was apparently much struck with this remark. He pursued the subject with keen interest. If there were no soldiers, how was order preserved? What happened in the case of riots? What about the collecting of taxes?

"Riots? There ain't no riots in this country. What would we riot for? We're too busy. And taxes? There ain't no taxes except for schools."

"Not for churches?" enquired the foreigner.

"No, every man supports his own church or no church at all if he likes it better."

The foreigner was deeply impressed. What a country it was, to be sure! No soldiers, no riots, no taxes, and churches only for those who wanted them! He made diligent enquiry as to the Mennonite settlements, where they were placed, their size, the character of the people and all things pertaining to them. But when questioned in regard to himself or his own affairs, he at once became reticent. He was a citizen of many countries. He was travelling for pleasure and to gather knowledge. Yes, he might one day settle in the country, but not now. He relapsed into silence, sitting with his head fallen forward upon his breast, and so sat till the brakeman passing through shouted, "Winnipeg! All change!" Then he rose, thanked with stiff and formal politeness his seat-mate for his courtesy, put on his long overcoat lined with lambskin and adorned with braid, placed his lambskin cap upon his head, and so stood looking more than ever like a military man.

The station platform at Winnipeg was the scene of uproar and confusion. Railway baggagemen and porters, with warning cries, pushed their trucks through the crowd. Hotel runners shouted the rates and names of their hotels. Express men and cab drivers vociferously solicited custom. Citizens, heedless of every one, pushed their eager way through the crowd to welcome friends and relatives. It was a busy, bustling, confusing scene. But the stranger stood unembarrassed, as if quite accustomed to move amid jostling crowds, casting quick, sharp glances hither and thither.

Gradually the platform cleared. The hotel runners marched off in triumph with their victims, and express drivers and cab men drove off with their fares, and only a scattering few were left behind. At one end of the platform stood two men in sheepskin coats and caps. The stranger slowly moved toward them. As he drew near, the men glanced at first carelessly, then more earnestly at him. For a few moments he stood gazing down the street, then said, as if to himself, in the Russian tongue, "The wind blows from the north to-night."

Instantly the men came to rigid attention.

"And the snow lies deep," replied one, raising his hand in salute.

"But spring will come, brother," replied the stranger.

One of the men came quickly toward him, took his hand and kissed it.

"Fool!" said the stranger, drawing away his hand, and sweeping his sharp glance round the platform. "The bear that hunts in the open is himself soon hunted."

"Ha, ha," laughed the other man loudly, "in this country there is no hunting, brother."

"Fool!" said the stranger again in a low, stern voice. "Where game is, there is always hunting."

"How can we serve? What does my brother wish?" replied the man.

"I wish the house of Paulina Koval. Do you know where it is?"

"Yes, we know, but—" the men hesitated, looking at each other.

"There is no place for our brother in Paulina Koval's house," said the one who had spoken first. "Paulina has no room. Her house is full with her children and with many boarders."

"Indeed," said the stranger, "and how many?"

"Well," replied the other, counting upon his fingers, "there is Paulina and her three children, and—"

"Two children," corrected the stranger sharply.

"No, three children. Yes, three." He paused in his enumeration as if struck by a belated thought. "It is three children, Joseph?" he proceeded, turning to his friend.

Joseph confirmed his memory. "Yes, Simon, three; the girl, the boy and the baby."

The stranger was clearly perplexed and disturbed.

"Go on," he said curtly.

"There is Paulina and the three children, and Rosenblatt, and—"

"Rosenblatt!" The word shot from the stranger's lips with the vehemence of a bullet from a rifle. "Rosenblatt in her house! S-s-s-o-o-o!" He thrust his face forward into the speaker's with a long hissing sound, so fiercely venomous that the man fell back a pace. Quickly the stranger recovered himself. "Look you, brothers, I need a room for a few days, anywhere, a small room, and I can pay well."

"My house," said the man named Joseph, "is yours, but there are six men with me."

Quickly the other took it up. "My poor house is small, two children, but if the Elder brother would accept?"

"I will accept, my friend," said the stranger. "You shall lose nothing by it." He took up the bag that he had placed beside him on the platform, saying briefly, "Lead the way."

"Your pardon, brother," said Simon, taking the bag from him, "this is the way."

Northward across the railway tracks and up the street for two blocks, then westward they turned, toward the open prairie. After walking some minutes, Simon pointed to a huddling group of shacks startlingly black against the dazzling snow.

"There," he cried with a laugh, "there is little Russia."

"Not Russia," said Joseph, "Galicia."

The stranger stood still, gazing at the little shacks, and letting his eye wander across the dazzling plain, tinted now with crimson and with gold from the setting sun, to the horizon. Then pointing to the shacks he said, "That is Canada. Yonder," sweeping his hand toward the plain, "is Siberia. But," turning suddenly upon the men, "what are you?"

"We are free men," said Joseph. "We are Canadians."

"We are Canadians," answered Simon more slowly. "But here," laying his hand over his heart, "here is always Russia and our brothers of Russia."

The stranger turned a keen glance upon him. "I believe you," he said. "No Russian can forget his fatherland. No Russian can forget his brother." His eyes were lit with a dreamy light, as he gazed far beyond the plain and the glowing horizon.

At the door of the little black shack Simon halted the party.

"Pardon, I will prepare for my brother," he said.

As he opened the door a cloud of steaming odours rushed forth to meet them. The stranger drew back and turned his face again to the horizon, drawing deep breaths of the crisp air, purified by its sweep of a thousand miles over snow clad prairie.

"Ah," he said, "wonderful! wonderful! Yes, that is Russia, that air, that sky, that plain."

After some minutes Simon returned.

"Enter," he said, bowing low. "This is your house, brother; we are your slaves."

It was a familiar Russian salutation.

"No," said the stranger, quickly stretching out his hand. "No slaves in this land, thank God! but brothers all."

"Your brothers truly," said Simon, dropping on his knee and kissing the outstretched hand. "Lena," he called to his wife, who stood modestly at the other side of the room, "this is the Elder of our Brotherhood."

Lena came forward, dropped on her knees and kissed the outstretched hand.

"Come, Margaret," she cried, drawing her little girl of six toward the stranger, "come and salute the master."

Little Margaret came forward and offered her hand, looking up with brave shyness into the stranger's face.

"Shame! shame!" said Lena, horrified. "Kneel down! Kneel down!"

"She does not understand how to salute," said her father with an apologetic smile.

"Aha, so," cried the stranger, looking curiously at the little girl. "Where did you learn to shake hands?"

"In school," said the child in English.

"In school?" replied the stranger in the same language. "You go to school. What school?"

"The public school, sir."

"And do they not teach you to kneel when you salute in the public school?"

"No, sir, we never kneel."

"What then do you learn there?"

"We sing, and read, and write, and march, and sew."

"Aha!" cried the stranger delighted. "You learn many things. And what do you pay for all this?" he said in Russian to the father.

"Nothing."

"Wonderful!" cried the stranger. "And who taught her English?"

"No one. She just learned it from the children."

"Aha, that is good."

The father and mother stood struggling with their pride in their little girl. A sound of shouting and of singing made the stranger turn toward the window.

"What is that?" he cried.

"A wedding," replied Simon. "There is a great wedding at Paulina's. Every one is there."

"At Paulina's?" said the stranger. "And you, why are you not there?"

"We are no friends of Rosenblatt."

"Rosenblatt? And what has he to do with it?"

"Rosenblatt," said Joseph sullenly, "is master in Paulina's home."

"Aha! He is master, and you are no friends of his," returned the stranger. "Tell me why this is so?"

"We are Russian, he is Bukowinian; he hires men to the railroad, we hire ourselves; he has a store, we buy in the Canadian stores, therefore, he hates us."

The stranger nodded his head, comprehending the situation.

"And so you are not invited to the wedding."

"No, we are not invited to the wedding," said Joseph in a tone of regret.

"And they are your friends who are being married?"

"Yes."

"And there is good eating and drinking?"

"Yes," cried Joseph eagerly. "Such a feast! Such a load of beer! And such a dance!"

"It is a pity," said the stranger, "to miss it all. You fear this Rosenblatt," he continued, with a hardly perceptible sneer.

"Fear!" cried Simon. "No! But one does not enter a shut door."

"Aha, but think of it," said the stranger, "the feasting and the dancing, and the beer! I would go to this wedding feast myself, were I not a stranger. I would go if I knew the bride."

"We will take our brother," cried Joseph eagerly. "Our friends will welcome him."

Simon hesitated.

"I like not Rosenblatt."

"But Rosenblatt will be too drunk by this time," suggested the stranger.

"Not he," replied Simon. "He never gets drunk where there is a chance to gather a dollar."

"But the feast is free?"

"Yes, the feast is free, but there is always money going. There is betting and there is the music for the dancing, which is Rosenblatt's. He has hired Arnud and his cymbal and the violins, and the dancers must pay."

"Aha, very clever," replied the stranger. "This Rosenblatt is a shrewd man. He will be a great man in this city. He will be your lord some day."

The eyes of both men gleamed at his jibes. "Aha," the stranger continued, "he will make you serve him by his money. Canada is, indeed, a free country, but there will be master and slaves here, too."

It was a sore spot to the men, for the mastery of Rosenblatt was no imagination, but a grim reality. It was with difficulty that any man could get a good job unless by Rosenblatt's agency. It was Rosenblatt who contracted for the Galician labour. One might hate Rosenblatt, or despise him, but it was impossible to ignore him.

"What say you, my brothers," said the stranger, "shall we attend this feast?"

The men were eager to go. Why should Rosenblatt stand in their way? Were they not good friends of Jacob and Anka? Was not every home in the colony open to a stranger, and especially a stranger of rank? Simon swallowed his pride and led the way to Paulina's house.

There was no need of a guide to the house where the feasting was in progress. The shouting and singing of the revellers hailed them from afar, and as they drew near, the crowd about the door indicated the house of mirth. Joseph and Simon were welcomed with overflowing hospitality and mugs of beer. But when they turned to introduce the stranger, they found that he had disappeared, nor could they discover him anywhere in the crowd. In their search for him, they came upon Rosenblatt, who at once assailed them.

"How come you Slovaks here?" he cried contemptuously.

"Where the trough is, there the pigs will come," laughed one of his satellites.

"I come to do honour to my friend, Jacob Wassyl," said Simon in a loud voice.

"Of course," cried a number of friendly voices. "And why not? That is quite right."

"Jacob Wassyl wants none of you here," shouted Rosenblatt over the crowd.

"Who speaks for Jacob Wassyl?" cried a voice. It was Jacob himself, standing in the door, wet with sweat, flushed with dancing and exhilarated with the beer and with all the ardours of his wedding day. For that day at least, Jacob owned the world. "What?" he cried, "is it my friend Simon Ketzel and my friend Joseph Pinkas?"

"We were not invited to come to your wedding, Jacob Wassyl," replied Simon, "but we desired to honour your bride and yourself."

"Aye, and so you shall. You are welcome, Simon Ketzel. You are welcome, Joseph Pinkas. Who says you are not?" he continued, turning defiantly to Rosenblatt.

Rosenblatt hesitated, and then grunted out something that sounded like "Slovak swine!"

"Slovak!" cried Jacob with generous enthusiasm. "We are all Slovak. We are all Polak. We are all Galician. We are all brothers. Any man who says no, is no friend of Jacob Wassyl."

Shouts of approval rose from the excited crowd.

"Come, brothers," shouted Jacob to Simon and Joseph, "come in. There is abundant eating. Make way for my friends!" He crowded back through the door, taking especial delight in honouring the men despised of Rosenblatt.

The room was packed with steaming, swaying, roaring dancers, both men and women, all reeking with sweat and garlic. Upon a platform in a corner between two violins, sat Arnud before his cymbal, resplendent in frilled shirt and embroidered vest, thundering on his instrument the favourite songs of the dancers, shouting now and then in unison with the melody that pattered out in metallic rain from the instrument before him. For four hours and more, with intervals sufficient only to quench their thirst, the players had kept up their interminable accompaniment to dance and song. It was clearly no place for hungry men. Jacob pushed his way toward the inner room.

"Ho! Paulina!" he shouted, "two plates for men who have not eaten."

"Have not eaten!" The startling statement quickened Paulina's slow movements almost to a run. "Here, here," she said, "bring them to the window at the back."

Another struggle and Jacob with his guests were receiving through the window two basins filled with luscious steaming stew.

As they turned away with their generous host, a man with a heavy black beard appeared at the window.

"Another hungry man, Paulina," he said quietly in the Galician tongue.

"Holy Virgin! Where have these hungry men been?" cried Paulina, hurrying with another basin to the window.

The man fumbled and hesitated as he took the dish.

"I have been far away," he said, speaking now in the Russian tongue, in a low and tense voice.

Paulina started. The man caught her by the wrist.

"Quiet!" he said. "Speak no word, Paulina."

The woman paled beneath the dirt and tan upon her face.

"Who is it?" she whispered with parched lips.

"You know it is Michael Kalmar, your husband. Come forth. I wait behind yon hut. No word to any man."

"You mean to kill me," she said, her fat body shaking as if with palsy.

"Bah! You Sow! Who would kill a sow? Come forth, I say. Delay not."

He disappeared at once behind the neighbouring shack. Paulina, trembling so that her fingers could hardly pin the shawl she put over her head, made her way through the crowd. A few moments she stood before her door, as if uncertain which way to turn, her limbs trembling, her breath coming like sobs. In this plight Rosenblatt came upon her.

"What is the matter with you, Paulina?" he cried. "What is your business here?"

A swift change came over her.

"I am no dog of yours," she said, her sullen face flaming with passion.

"What do you mean?" cried Rosenblatt. "Get into your house, cat!"

"Yes! cat!" cried the woman, rushing at him with fingers extended.

One swift swoop she made at his face, bringing skin and hair on her nails. Rosenblatt turned, and crying, "She is mad! She is mad!" made for the shelter of the cellar, followed by the shouts and jeers of the men standing about.

Raging, at the door Paulina sought entrance, crying, "I was a good woman. He made me bad." Then turning away, she walked slowly to the back of her house and passed behind the neighbouring shack where the man stood waiting her.

With dragging steps she approached, till within touch of him, when, falling down upon her knees in the snow, she put her head upon his feet.

"Get up, fool," he cried harshly.

She rose and stood with her chin upon her breast.

"My children!" said the man. "Where are my children?"

She pointed towards the house of her neighbour, Mrs. Fitzpatrick. "With a neighbour woman," she said, and turned herself toward him again with head bowed down.

"And yours?" he hissed.

She shuddered violently.

"Speak," he said in a voice low, calm and terrible. "Do you wish me to kill you where you stand?"

"Yes," she said, throwing her shawl over her face, "kill me! Kill me now! It will be good to die!"

With a curse, his hand went to his side. He stood looking at her quietly for a few moments as if deliberating.

"No," he said at length, "it is not worth while. You are no wife of mine. Do you hear?"

She gave no sign.

"You are Rosenblatt's swine. Let him use you."

Another shudder shook her.

"Oh, my lord!" she moaned, "kill me. Let me die!"

"Bah!" He spat on the snow. "Die, when I have done with you, perhaps. Take me where we can be alone. Go."

She glanced about at the shacks standing black and without sign of life.

"Come," she said, leading the way.

He followed her to a shack which stood on the outskirts of the colony. She pushed open the door and stood back.

"Go in," he said savagely. "Now a light."

He struck a match. Paulina found a candle which he lit and placed on a box that stood in the corner.

"Cover that window," he commanded.

She took a quilt from the bed and pinned it up. For a long time he stood motionless in the centre of the room, while she knelt at his feet. Then he spoke with some deliberation.

"It is possible I shall kill you to-night, so speak truly to me in the name of God and of the Holy Virgin. I ask you of my children. My girl is eleven years old. Have you protected her? Or is she—like you?"

She threw off her shawl, pulled up her sleeves.

"See," she cried, "my back is like that. Your daughter is safe."

Livid bars of purple striped her arms. The man gazed down at her.

"You swear this by the Holy Cross?" he said solemnly.

She pulled a little iron cross from her breast and kissed it, then looked up at him with dog's eyes of entreaty.

"Oh, my lord!" she began. "I could not save myself. I was a stranger. He took my money. We had no home."

"Stop, liar," he thundered, "I gave you money when you left Galicia."

"Yes, I paid it for the house, and still there was more to pay."

"Liar again!" he hissed; "I sent you money every month. I have your receipts for it."

"I had no money from you," she said humbly. "He forced me to have men sleep in my house and in my room, or lose my home. And the children, what could I do? They could not go out into the snow."

"You got no money from me?" he enquired.

Again she kissed the little cross. "I swear it. And what could I do?"

"Do!" cried the man, his voice choked with rage. "Do! You could die!"

"And the children?"

He was silent, looking down upon her. He began to realize the helplessness of her plight. In a strange land, she found herself without friends, and charged with the support of two children. The money he had given her she had invested in a house, through Rosenblatt, who insisted that payments were still due. No wonder he had terrified her into submission to his plans.

While his contempt remained, her husband's rage grew less. After a long silence he said, "Listen. This feast will last two days?"

"Yes, there is food and drink for two days."

"In two days my work here will be done. Then I go back. I must go back. My children! my children! what of my children? My dead Olga's children!" He began to pace the room. He forgot the woman on the floor. "Oh, fatherland! My fatherland!" he cried in a voice broken with passionate grief, "must I sacrifice these too for thee? God in heaven! Father, mother, brother, home, wife, all I have given. Must I give my children, too?" His strong dark face was working fiercely. His voice came harsh and broken. "No, no! By all the saints, no! I will keep my children for Olga's sake. I will let my wretched country go. What matter to me? I will make a new home in this free land and forget. Ah, God! Forget? I can never forget! These plains!" He tore aside the quilt from the window and stooping looked out upon the prairie. "These plains say Russia! This gleaming snow, Russia! Ah! Ah! Ah! I cannot forget, while I live, my people, my fatherland. I have suffered too much to forget. God forget me, if I forget!" He fell on his knees before the window, dry sobs shaking his powerful frame. He rose and began again to stride up and down, his hands locked before him. Suddenly he stood quite still, making mighty efforts to regain command of himself. For some moments he stood thus rigid.

The woman, who had been kneeling all the while, crept to his feet.

"My lord will give his children to me," she said in a low voice.

"You!" he cried, drawing back from her. "You! What could you do for them?"

"I could die for them," she said simply, "and for my lord."

"For me! Ha!" His voice carried unutterable scorn.

She cowered back to the floor.

"My children I can slay, but I will leave them in no house of lust."

"Oh!" she cried, clasping her hands upon her breast and swaying backwards and forwards upon her knees, "I will be a good woman. I will sin no more. Rosenblatt I shall send—"

"Rosenblatt!" cried the man with a fierce laugh. "After two days Rosenblatt will not be here."

"You will—?" gasped the woman.

"He will die," said the man quietly.

"Oh, my lord! Let me kill him! It would be easy for me at night when he sleeps. But you they will take and hang. In this country no one escapes. Oh! Do not you kill him. Let me."

Breathlessly she pleaded, holding him by the feet. He spurned her with contempt.

"Peace, fool! He is for none other than me. It is an old score. Ah, yes," he continued between his teeth, "it is an old score. It will be sweet to feel him slowly die with my fingers in his throat."

"But they will take you," cried the woman.

"Bah! They could not hold me in Siberia, and think you they can in this land? But the children," he mused. "Rosenblatt away." With a sudden resolve he turned to the woman. "Woman," he said, in a voice stern and low, "could you—"

She threw herself once more at his feet in a passion of entreaty. "Oh, my lord! Let me live for them, for them—and—for you!"

"For me?" he said coldly. "No. You have dishonoured my name. You are wife of mine no longer. Do you hear this?"

"Yes, yes," she panted, "I hear. I know. I ask nothing for myself. But the children, your children. I would live for them, would die for them!"

He turned from her and gazed through the window, pondering. That she would be faithful to the children he well knew. That she would gladly die for him, he was equally certain. With Rosenblatt removed, the house would be rid of the cause of her fall and her shame. There was no one else in this strange land to whom he could trust his children. Should death or exile take him in his work—and these were always his companions—his children would be quite alone. Once more he turned and looked down upon the kneeling woman. He had no love for her. He had never loved her. Simply as a matter of convenience he had married her, that she might care for the children of his dead wife whom he had loved with undying and passionate love.

"Paulina," he said solemnly, but the contempt was gone from his voice, "you are henceforth no wife of mine; but my children I give into your care."

Hitherto, during the whole interview, she had shed no tear, but at these words of his she flung her arms about his knees and burst into a passion of weeping.

"Oh, my lord! My dear lord! Oh, my lord! my lord!" she sobbed, wildly kissing his very boots.

He drew away from her and sat down upon a bench.

"Listen," he said. "I will send you money. You will require to take no man into your house for your support. Is there any one to whom I could send the money for you?"

She thought for a few moments.

"There is one," she said, "but she does not love me. She will come no longer into my house. She thinks me a bad woman." Her voice sank low. Her face flamed a dark red.

"Aha," said the man, "I would see that woman. To-morrow you will bring me to her. At dusk to-morrow I will pass your house. You will meet me. Now go."

She remained kneeling in her place. Then she crawled nearer his feet.

"Oh, my lord!" she sobbed, "I have done wrong. Will you not beat me? Beat me till the blood runs down. He was too strong for me. I was afraid for the children. I had no place to go. I did a great wrong. If my lord would but beat me till the blood runs down, it would be a joy to me."

It was the cry of justice making itself heard through her dull soul. It was the instinctive demand for atonement. It was the unconscious appeal for reinstatement to the privileges of wifehood.

"Woman," he said sternly, "a man may beat his wife. He will not strike a woman that is nothing to him. Go."

Once more she clutched his feet, kissing them. Then she rose and without a word went out into the dusky night. She had entered upon the rugged path of penitence, the only path to peace for the sinner.

After she had gone, the man stepped to the door and looked after her as if meditating her recall.

"Bah!" he said at length, "she is nothing to me. Let her go."

He put out the light, closed the door and passing through the crowd of revellers, went off to Simon's house.

CHAPTER V — THE PATRIOT'S HEART

The inside of Paulina's house was a wreck. The remains of benches and chairs and tables mingled with fragments of vessels of different sorts strewn upon the filth-littered floor, the windows broken, the door between the outer and inner rooms torn from its hinges, all this debris, together with the battered, bruised and bloody human shapes lying amidst their filth, gave eloquent testimony to the tempestuous character of the proceedings of the previous night.

The scene that greeted Paulina's eyes in the early grey of the morning might well have struck a stouter heart than hers with dismay; for her house had the look of having been swept by a tornado, and Paulina's heart was anything but stout that morning. The sudden appearance of her husband had at first stricken her with horrible fear, the fear of death; but this fear had passed into a more dreadful horror, that of repudiation.

Seven years ago, when Michael Kalmar had condescended to make her his wife, her whole soul had gone forth to him in a passion of adoring love that had invested him in a halo of glory. He became her god thenceforth to worship and to serve. Her infidelity meant no diminution of this passion. Withdrawn from her husband's influence, left without any sign of his existence for two years or more, subjected to the machinations of the subtle and unscrupulous Rosenblatt, the soul in her had died, the animal had lived and triumphed. The sound of her husband's voice last night had summoned into vivid life her dead soul. Her god had moved into the range of her vision, and immediately she was his again, soul and body. Hence her sudden fury at Rosenblatt; hence, too, the utter self-abandonment in her appeal to her husband. But now he had cast her off. The gates of Heaven, swinging open before her ravished eyes for a few brief moments, had closed to her forever. Small wonder that she brought a heavy heart to the righting of her disordered home, and well for her that Anka with her hearty, cheery courage stood at her side that morning.

Together they set themselves to clear away the filth and the wreckage, human and otherwise. Of the human wreckage Anka made short work. Stepping out into the frosty air, she returned with a pail of snow.

"Here, you sluggards," she cried, bestowing generous handfuls upon their sodden faces, "up with you, and out. The day is fine and dinner will soon be here."

Grunting, growling, cursing, the men rose, stretched themselves with prodigious yawning, and bundled out into the frosty air.

"Get yourselves ready for dinner," cried Anka after them. "The best is yet to come, and then the dance."

Down into the cellar they went, stiff and sore and still growling, dipped their hands and heads into icy water, and after a perfunctory toilet and a mug of beer or two all round, they were ready for a renewal of the festivities. There was no breakfast, but as the day wore on, from the shacks about came women with provisions for the renewal of the feast. For Anka, wise woman, had kept some of the more special dishes for the second day. But as for the beer, though there were still some kegs left, they were few enough to give Jacob Wassyl concern. It would be both a misfortune and a disgrace if the beer should fail before the marriage feast was over. The case was serious enough. Jacob Wassyl's own money was spent, the guests had all contributed their share, Rosenblatt would sooner surrender blood than money, and Jacob was not yet sufficiently established as a husband to appeal to his wife for further help.

It was through Simon Ketzel that deliverance came, or rather through Simon's guest, who, learning that the beer was like to fail, passed Simon a bill, saying, "It would be sad if disgrace should come to your friends. Let there be plenty of beer. Buy what is necessary and keep the rest in payment for my lodging. And of my part in this not a word to any man."

As a result, in the late afternoon a dray load of beer kegs appeared at Paulina's back door, to the unspeakable relief of Jacob and of his guests as well, who had begun to share his anxiety and to look forward to an evening of drouth and gloom.

As for Simon Ketzel, he found himself at once upon the very crest of a wave of popularity, for through the driver of the dray it became known that it was Simon that had come so splendidly to the rescue.

Relieved of anxiety, the revellers gave themselves with fresh and reckless zest to the duty of assuring beyond all shadow of doubt, the good health of the bride and the groom, and of every one in general in flowing mugs of beer. Throughout the afternoon, men and women, and even boys and girls, ate and drank, danced and sang to the limit of their ability.

As the evening darkened, and while this carouse was at its height, Paulina, with a shawl over her head, slipped out of the house and through the crowd, and so on to the outskirts of the colony, where she found her husband impatiently waiting her.

"You are late," he said harshly.

"I could not find Kalman."

"Kalman! My boy! And where would he be?" exclaimed her husband with a shade of anxiety in his voice.

"He was with me in the house. I could not keep him from the men, and they will give him beer."

"Beer to that child?" snarled her husband.

"Yes, they make him sing and dance, and they give him beer. He is wonderful," said Paulina.

Even as she spoke, a boy's voice rose clear and full in a Hungarian love song, to the wild accompaniment of the cymbal.

"Hush!" said the man holding up his hand.

At the first sound of that high, clear voice, the bacchanalian shoutings and roarings fell silent, and the wild weird song, throbbing with passion, rose and fell upon the still evening air. After each verse, the whole chorus of deep, harsh voices swelled high over the wailing violins and Arnud's clanging cymbal.

"Good," muttered the man when the song had ceased. "Now get him."

"I shall bring him to yonder house," said Paulina, pointing to the dwelling of Mrs. Fitzpatrick, whither in a few minutes she was seen half dragging, half carrying a boy of eight, who kept kicking and scratching vigorously, and pouring forth a torrent of English oaths.

"Hush, Kalman," said Paulina in Galician, vainly trying to quiet the child. "The gentleman will be ashamed of you."

"I do not care for any gentleman," screamed Kalman. "He is a black devil," glancing at the black bearded man who stood waiting them at the door of the Fitzpatrick dwelling.

"Hush, hush, you bad boy!" exclaimed Paulina, horrified, laying her hand over the boy's mouth.

The man turned his back upon them, pulled off his black beard, thrust it into his pocket, gave his mustaches a quick turn and faced about upon them. This transformation froze the boy's fury into silence. He shrank back to his mother's side.

"Is it the devil?" he whispered to his mother in Galician.

"Kalman," said the man quietly, in the Russian language, "come to me. I am your father."

The boy gazed at him fearful and perplexed.

"He does not understand," said Paulina in Russian.

"Kalman," repeated his father, using the Galician speech, "come to me. I am your father."

The boy hesitated, looking fixedly at his father. But three years had wiped out the memory of that face.

"Come, you little Cossack," said his father, smiling at him. "Come, have you forgotten all your rides?"

The boy suddenly started, as if waking from sleep. The words evidently set the grey matter moving along old brain tracks. He walked toward his father, took the hand outstretched to him, and kissed it again and again.

"Aha, my son, you remember me," said the father exultantly.

"Yes," said the boy in English, "I remember the ride on the black horse."

The man lifted the boy in his strong arms, kissed him again and again, then setting him down said to Paulina, "Let us go in."

Paulina stepped forward and knocked at the door. Mrs. Fitzpatrick answered the knock and, seeing Paulina, was about to shut the door upon her face, when Paulina put up her hand.

"Look," she cried, pointing to the man, who stood back in the shadow, "Irma fadder."

"What d'ye say?" enquired Mrs. Fitzpatrick.

"Irma fadder," repeated Paulina, pointing to Kalmar.

"Is my daughter Irma in your house?" said he, stepping forward.

"Yer daughter, is it?" said Mrs. Fitzpatrick, looking sharply into the foreigner's face. "An' if she's yer daughter it's yersilf that should be ashamed av it fer the way ye've desarted the lot o' thim."

"Is it permitted that I see my daughter Irma?" said the man quietly.

Mrs. Fitzpatrick scanned his face suspiciously, then called, "Irma darlin', come here an' tell me who this is. Give the babby to Tim there, an' come away."

A girl of between eleven and twelve, tall for her age, with pale face, two thick braids of yellow hair, and wonderful eyes "burnin' brown," as Mrs. Fitzpatrick said, came to the door and looked out upon the man. For some time they gazed steadily each into the other's face.

"Irma, my child," said Kalmar in English, "you know me?"

But the girl stood gazing in perplexity.

"Irma! Child of my soul!" cried the man, in the Russian tongue, "do you not remember your father?" He stepped from the shadow to where the light from the open door could fall upon his face and stood with arms outstretched.

At once the girl's face changed, and with a cry, "It is my fadder!" she threw herself at him.

Her father caught her and held her fast, saying not a word, but covering her face with kisses.

"Come in, come in to the warm," cried the kind-hearted Irish woman, wiping her eyes. "Come in out o' the cold." And with eager hospitality she hurried the father and children into the house.

As they passed in, Paulina turned away. Before Mrs. Fitzpatrick shut the door, Irma caught her arm and whispered in her ear.

"Paulina, is it? Let her shtop—" She paused, looking at the Russian.

"Your pardon?" he enquired with a bow.

"It's Paulina," said Mrs. Fitzpatrick, her voice carrying the full measure of her contempt for the unhappy creature who stood half turning away from the door.

"Ah, let her go. It is no difference. She is a sow. Let her go."

"Thin she's not your wife at all?" said Mrs. Fitzpatrick, her wrath rising at this discovery of further deception in Paulina.

He shrugged his shoulders. "She was once. I married her. She is wife no longer. Let her go."

His contemptuous indifference turned Mrs. Fitzpatrick's wrath upon him.

"An' it's yersilf that ought to take shame to yersilf fer the way ye've treated her, an' so ye should!"

The man waved his hand as if to brush aside a matter of quite trifling moment.

"It matters not," he repeated. "She is only a cow."

"Let her come in," whispered Irma, laying her hand again on Mrs. Fitzpatrick's arm.

"Sure she will," cried the Irish woman; "come in here, you poor, spiritless craythur."

Irma sprang down the steps, spoke a few hurried words in Galician. Poor Paulina hesitated, her eyes upon her husband's face. He made a contemptuous motion with his hand as if calling a dog to heel. Immediately, like a dog, the woman crept in and sat far away from the fire in a corner of the room.

"Ye'll pardon me," said Mrs. Fitzpatrick to Kalmar, "fer not axin' ye in at the first; but indade, an' it's more your blame than mine, fer sorra a bit o' thim takes afther ye."

"They do not resemble me, you mean?" said the father. "No, they are the likeness of their mother." As he spoke he pulled out a leather case, opened it and passed it to Mrs. Fitzpatrick.

"Aw, will ye look at that now!" she cried, gazing at the beautiful miniature. "An' the purty face av her. Sure, it's a rale queen she was, an' that's no lie. An' the girl is goin' to be the very spit av her. An' the bye, he's got her blue eyes an' her bright hair. It's aisy seen where they git their looks," she added, glancing at him.

"Mind yer manners, now thin," growled Tim, who was very considerably impressed by the military carriage and the evident "quality" of their guest.

"Yes, the children have the likeness of their mother," said the father in a voice soft and reminiscent. "It is in their behalf I am here to-night, Madam—what shall I have the honour to name you?"

"Me name, is it?" cried Mrs. Fitzpatrick. "Mishtress Timothy Fitzpatrick, Monaghan that was, the Monaghans o' Ballinghalereen, an owld family, poor as Job's turkey, but proud as the divil, an' wance the glory o' Mayo. An' this," she added, indicating her spouse with a jerk of her thumb, "is Timothy Fitzpatrick, me husband, a dacent man in his way. Timothy, where's yer manners? Shtand up an' do yer duty."

Tim struggled to his feet, embarrassed with the burden of Paulina's baby, and pulled his forelock.

"And my name," said the Russian, answering Timothy's salutation with a profound bow, "is Michael Kalmar, with respect to you and Mr. Vichpatrick."

Mrs. Fitzpatrick was evidently impressed.

"An' proud I am to see ye in me house," she said, answering his bow with a curtsey. "Tim, ye owl ye! Why don't ye hand his honour a chair? Did ye niver git the air o' a gintleman before?"

It took some minutes to get the company settled, owing to the reluctance of the Russian to seat himself while the lady was standing, and the equal reluctance of Mrs. Fitzpatrick to take her seat until she had comfortably settled her guest.

"I come to you, Mrs. Vichpatrick, on behalf of my children."

"An' fine childer they are, barrin' the lad is a bit av a limb betimes."

In courteous and carefully studied English, Kalmar told his need. His affairs called him to Europe. He might be gone a year, perhaps more. He needed some one to care for his children. Paulina, though nothing to him now, would be faithful in caring for them, as far as food, clothing and shelter were concerned. She would dismiss her boarders. There had never been need of her taking boarders, but for the fraud of a wicked man. It was at this point that he needed help. Would Mrs. Fitzpatrick permit him to send her money from time to time which should be applied to the support of Paulina and the children. He would also pay her for her trouble.

At this Mrs. Fitzpatrick, who had been listening impatiently for some moments, broke forth upon him.

"Ye can kape yer money," she cried wrathfully. "What sort av a man are ye, at all, at all, that ye sind yer helpless childer to a strange land with a scut like that?"

"Paulina was an honest woman once," he interposed.

"An' what for," she continued wrathfully, "are ye lavin' thim now among a pack o' haythen? Look at that girl now, what'll come to her in that bloody pack o' thieves an' blackguards, d'ye think? Howly Joseph! It's mesilf that kapes wakin' benights to listen fer the screams av her. Why don't ye shtay like a man by yer childer an' tell me that?"

"My affairs—" began the Russian, with a touch of hauteur in his tone.

"An' what affairs have ye needin' ye more than yer childer? Tell me that, will ye?"

And truth to tell, Mrs. Fitzpatrick's indignation blazed forth not only on behalf of the children, but on behalf of the unfortunate Paulina as well, whom, in spite of herself, she pitied.

"What sort av a heart have ye, at all, at all?"

"A heart!" cried the Russian, rising from his chair. "Madam, my heart is for my country. But you would not understand. My country calls me."

"Yer counthry!" repeated Mrs. Fitzpatrick with scorn. "An' what counthry is that?"

"Russia," said the man with dignity, "my native land."

"Rooshia! An' a bloody country it is," answered Mrs. Fitzpatrick with scorn.

"Yes, Russia," he cried, "my bloody country! You are correct. Red with the blood of my countrymen, the blood of my kindred this hundred years and more." His voice was low but vibrant with passion. "You cannot understand. Why should I tell you?"

At this juncture Timothy sprang to his feet.

"Sit ye down, dear man, sit ye down! Shut yer clapper, Nora! Sure it's mesilf that knows a paythriot whin I sees 'im. Tear-an-ages! Give me yer hand, me boy. Sit ye down an' tell us about it. We're all the same kind here. Niver fear for the woman, she's the worst o' the lot. Tell us, dear man. Be the light that shines! it's mesilf that's thirsty to hear."

The Russian gazed at the shining eyes of the little Irishman as if he had gone mad. Then, as if the light had broken upon him, he cried, "Aha, you are of Ireland. You, too, are fighting the tyrant."

"Hooray, me boy!" shouted Tim, "an' it's the thrue word ye've shpoke, an' niver a lie in the skin av it. Oireland foriver! Be the howly St. Patrick an' all the saints, I am wid ye an' agin ivery government that's iver robbed an honest man. Go on, me boy, tell us yer tale."

Timothy was undoubtedly excited. The traditions of a hundred years of fierce rebellion against the oppression of the "bloody tyrant" were beating at his brain and in his heart. The Russian caught fire from him and launched forth upon his tale. For a full hour, now sitting in his chair, now raging up and down the room, now in a voice deep, calm and terrible, now broken and hoarse with sobs, he recounted deeds of blood and fire that made Ireland's struggle and Ireland's wrongs seem nursery rhymes.

Timothy listened to the terrible story in an ecstasy of alternating joy and fury, according to the nature of the episode related. It was like living again the glorious days of the moonlighters and the rackrenters in dear old Ireland. The tale came to an abrupt end.

"An' thin what happened?" cried Timothy.

"Then," said the Russian quietly, "then it was Siberia."

"Siberia! The Hivins be about us!" said Tim in an awed voice. "But ye got away?"

"I am here," he replied simply.

"Be the sowl of Moses, ye are! An' wud ye go back agin?" cried Tim in horror.

"Wud he!" said Nora, with ineffable scorn. "Wud a herrin' swim? By coorse he'll go back. An' what's more, ye can sind the money to me an' I'll see that the childer gets the good av it, if I've to wring the neck av that black haythen, Rosenblatt, like a chicken."

"You will take the money for my children?" enquired the Russian.

"I will that."

He stretched out his hand impulsively. She placed hers in it. He raised it to his lips, bending low as if it had been the lily white hand of the fairest lady in the land, instead of the fat, rough, red hand of an old Irish washer-woman.

"Sure, it's mighty bad taste ye have," said Tim with a sly laugh. "It's not her hand I'd be kissin'."

"Bad luck to ye! Have ye no manners?" said Nora, jerking away her hand in confusion.

"I thank you with all my heart," said Kalmar, gravely bowing with his hand upon his heart. "And will you now and then look over—overlook—oversee—ah yes, oversee this little girl?"

"Listen to me now," cried Mrs. Fitzpatrick. "Can she clear out thim men from her room?" nodding her head toward Paulina.

"There will be no men in her house."

"Can she kape thim out? She's only a wake craythur anyway."

"Paulina," said her husband.

She came forward and, taking his hand, kissed it, Mrs. Fitzpatrick looking on in disgust.

"This woman asks can you keep the men out of your room," he said in Galician.

"I will keep them out," she said simply.

"Aye, but can she?" said Mrs. Fitzpatrick, to whom her answer had been translated.

"I can kill them in the night," said Paulina, in a voice of quiet but concentrated passion.

"The saints in Hivin be above us! I belave her," said Mrs. Fitzpatrick, with a new respect for Paulina. "But fer the love o' Hivin, tell her there is no killin' in this counthry, an' more's the pity when ye see some men that's left to run about."

"She will keep the children safe with her life," said Kalmar. "She had no money before, and she was told I was dead. But it matters not. She is nothing to me. But she will keep my children with her life."

His trust in her, his contempt for her, awakened in Mrs. Fitzpatrick a kind of hostility toward him, and of pity for the wretched woman whom, while he trusted, he so despised.

"Come an' take an air o' the fire, Paulina," she said not unkindly. "It's cold forninst the door."

Paulina, while she understood not the words, caught the meaning of the gesture, but especially of the tone. She drew near, caught the Irish woman's hand in hers and kissed it.

"Hut!" said Mrs. Fitzpatrick, drawing away her hand. "Sit down, will ye?"

The Russian rose to his feet.

"I must now depart. I have still a little work to accomplish. To-morrow I leave the city. Permit me now to bid my children farewell."

He turned to the girl, who held Paulina's baby asleep in her arms. "Irma," he said in Russian, "I am going to leave you."

The girl rose, placed the sleeping baby on the bed, and coming to her father's side, stood looking up into his face, her wonderful brown eyes shining with tears she was too brave to shed.

He drew her to him.

"I am going to leave you," he repeated in Russian. "In one year, if all is well, at most in two, I shall return. You know I cannot stay with you, and you know why." He took the miniature from his pocket and opening it, held it before her face. "Your mother gave her life for her country." For some moments he gazed upon the beautiful face in the miniature. "She was a lady, and feared not death. Ah! ah! such a death!" He struggled fiercely with his emotions. "She was willing to die. Should not I? You do not grudge that I should leave you, that I should die, if need be?" An anxious, almost wistful tone crept into his voice.

Bravely the little girl looked up into the dark face.

"I remember my mother," she said; "I would be like her."

"Aha!" cried her father, catching her to his breast, "I judged you rightly. You are her daughter, and you will live worthy of her. Kalman, come hither. Irma, you will care for your brother. He is young. He is a boy. He will need care. Kalman, heart of my life!"

"He does not understand Russian," said Paulina. "Speak in Galician."

"Ha," cried the man, turning sharply upon her as if he had forgotten her existence. "Kalman, my son," he proceeded in Russian, "did you not understand what I said to your sister?"

"Not well, father," said the boy; "a little."

"Alas, that you should have forgotten your mother's speech!"

"I shall learn it again from Irma," said the boy.

"Good," replied the father in Galician. "Listen then. Never forget you are a Russian. This," putting the miniature before him, "was your mother. She was a lady. For her country she gave up rank, wealth, home and at last life. For her country, too, I go back again. When my work is done I shall return."

Through the window came sounds of revelry from the house near by.

"You are not of these cattle," he said, pointing through the window. "Your mother was a lady. Be worthy of her, boy. Now farewell."

The boy stood without word, without motion, without tear, his light blue eyes fixed upon his father's face, his fair skin white but for a faint spot of red on his cheek.

"Obey your sister, Kalman, and defend her. And listen, boy." His voice deepened into a harsh snarl, his fingers sank into the boy's shoulder, but the boy winced not. "If any man does her wrong, you will kill him. Say it, boy? What will you do?"

"Kill him," said the boy with fierce promptitude, speaking in the English tongue.

"Ha! yes," replied his father in English, "you bear your mother's face, her golden hair, her eyes of blue—they are not so beautiful—but you have your father's spirit. You would soon learn to kill in Russia, but in this land you will not kill unless to defend your sister from wrong."

His mood swiftly changed. He paused, looking sadly at his children; then turning to Mrs. Fitzpatrick he said, "They should go to the public school like Simon Ketzel's little girl. They speak not such good English as she. She is very clever."

"Sure, they must go to school," said she. "An' go they will."

"My gratitude will be with you forever. Good-by."

He shook hands with Timothy, then with Mrs. Fitzpatrick, kissing her hand as well. He motioned his children toward him.

"Heart of my heart," he murmured in a broken voice, straining his daughter to his breast. "God, if God there be, and all the saints, if saints there be, have you in their keeping. Kalman, my son," throwing one arm about him, "Farewell! farewell!" He was fast losing control of himself. The stormy Slavic passions were threatening to burst all restraint. "I give you to each other. But you will remember that it was not for my sake, but for Russia's sake, I leave you. My heart, my heart belongs to you, but my heart's heart is not for me, nor for you, but for Russia, for your mother's land and ours."

By this time tears were streaming down his cheek. Sobs shook his powerful frame. Irma was clinging to him in an abandonment of weeping. Kalman stood holding tight to his father, rigid, tearless, white. At length the father tore away their hands and once more crying "Farewell!" made toward the door.

At this the boy broke forth in a loud cry, "Father! My father! Take me with you! I would not fear! I would not fear to die. Take me to Russia!" The boy ran after his father and clutched him hard.

"Ah, my lad, you are your mother's son and mine. Some day you may go back. Who knows? But—no, no. Canada is your country. Go back." The lad still clutched him. "Boy," said his father, steadying his voice with great effort and speaking quietly, "with us, in our country, we learn first, obedience."

The lad dropped his hold.

"Good!" said the father. "You are my own son. You will yet be a man. And now farewell."

He kissed them again. The boy broke into passionate sobbing. Paulina came forward and, kneeling at the father's feet, put her face to the floor.

"I will care for the son of my lord," she murmured.

But with never a look at her, the father strode to the door and passed out into the night.

"Be the howly prophet!" cried Tim, wiping his eyes, "it's harrd, it's harrd! An' it's the heart av a paythriot the lad carries inside av him! An' may Hivin be about him!"

CHAPTER VI — THE GRIP OF BRITISH LAW

It was night in Winnipeg, a night of such radiant moonlight as is seen only in northern climates and in winter time. During the early evening a light snow had fallen, not driving fiercely after the Manitoba manner, but gently, and so lay like a fleecy, shimmering mantle over all things.

Under this fleecy mantle, shimmering with myriad gems, lay Winnipeg asleep. Up from five thousand chimneys rose straight into the still frosty air five thousand columns of smoke, in token that, though frost was king outside, the good folk of Winnipeg lay snug and warm in their virtuous beds. Everywhere the white streets lay in silence except for the passing of a belated cab with creaking runners and jingling bells, and of a sleighing party returning from Silver Heights, their four-horse team smoking, their sleigh bells ringing out, carrying with them hoarse laughter and hoarser songs, for the frosty air works mischief with the vocal chords, and leaving behind them silence again.

All through Fort Rouge, lying among its snow-laden trees, across the frost-bound Assiniboine, all through the Hudson's Bay Reserve, there was no sign of life, for it was long past midnight. Even Main Street, that most splendid of all Canadian thoroughfares, lay white and spotless and, for the most part, in silence. Here and there men in furs or in frieze coats with collars turned up high, their eyes peering through frost-rimmed eyelashes and over frost-rimmed coat collars, paced comfortably along if in furs, or walked hurriedly if only in frieze, whither their business or their pleasure led.

Near the northern limits of the city the signs of life were more in evidence. At the Canadian Pacific Railway station an engine, hoary with frozen steam, puffed contentedly as if conscious of sufficient strength for the duty that lay before it, waiting to hook on to Number Two, nine hours late, and whirl it eastward in full contempt of frost and snow bank and blizzard.

Inside the station a railway porter or two drowsed on the benches. Behind the wicket where the telegraph instruments kept up an incessant clicking, the agent and his assistant sat alert, coming forward now and then to answer, with the unwearying courtesy which is part of their equipment and of their training, the oft repeated question from impatient and sleepy travellers, "How is she now?" "An hour," "half an hour," finally "fifteen minutes," then "any time now." At which cheering report the uninitiated brightened up and passed out to listen for the rumble of the approaching train. The more experienced, however, settled down for another half hour's sleep.

It was a wearisome business, and to none more wearisome than to Interpreter Elex Murchuk, part of whose duty it is to be in attendance on the arrival of all incoming trains in case that some pilgrim from Central and Southern Europe might be in need of direction. For Murchuk, a little borderland Russian, boasts the gift of tongues to an extraordinary degree. Russian, in which he was born, and French, and German, and Italian, of course, he knows, but Polish, Ruthenian, and all varieties of Ukranian speech are alike known to him.

"I spik all European language good, jus' same Angleesh," was his testimony in regard to himself.

As the whistle of the approaching train was heard, Sergeant Cameron strolled into the station house, carrying his six feet two and his two hundred pounds of bone and muscle with the light and easy movements of the winner of many a Caledonian Society medal. Cameron, at one time a full private in the 78th Highlanders, is now Sergeant in the Winnipeg City Police, and not ashamed of his job. Big, calm, good-tempered, devoted to his duty, keen for the honour of the force as he had been for the honour of his regiment in other days, Sergeant Cameron was known to all good citizens as an officer to be trusted and to all others as a man to be feared.

Just at present he was finishing up his round of inspection. After the train had pulled in he would go on duty as patrolman, in the place of Officer Donnelly, who was down with pneumonia. The Winnipeg Police Force was woefully inadequate in point of strength, there being no spare men for emergencies, and hence Sergeant Cameron found it necessary to do double duty that night, and he was prepared to do it without grumbling, too. Long watches and weary marches were nothing new to him, and furthermore, to-night there was especial reason why he was not unwilling to take a walk through the north end. Headquarters had been kept fully informed of the progress of a wedding feast of more than ordinary hilarity in the foreign colony. This was the second night, and on second nights the general joyousness of the festivities was more than likely to become unduly exuberant. Indeed, the reports of the early evening had been somewhat disquieting, and hence, Sergeant Cameron was rather pleased than not that Officer Donnelly's beat lay in the direction of the foreign colony.

At length Number Two rolled in, a double header, one engine alive and one dead, but both swathed in snow and frozen steam from cowcatcher to tender, the first puffing its proud triumph over the opposing elements, the second silent, cold and lifeless like a warrior borne from the field of battle.

The passengers, weary and full of the mild excitement of their long struggle with storm and drift across half a continent, emerged from their snow-clad but very comfortable coaches and were eagerly taken in charge by waiting friends and watchful hotel runners.

Sergeant Cameron waited till the crowd had gone, and then turning to Murchuk, he said, "You will be coming along with me, Murchuk. I am going to look after some of your friends."

"My frients?" enquired Murchuk.

"Yes, over at the colony yonder."

"My frients!" repeated Murchuk with some indignation. "Not motch!" Murchuk was proud of his official position as Dominion Government Interpreter. "But I will go wit' you. It is my way."

Away from the noise of the puffing engines and the creaking car wheels, the ears of Sergeant Cameron and his friend were assailed by other and less cheerful sounds.

"Will you listen to that now?" said the Sergeant to his polyglot companion. "What do you think of that for a civilised city? The Indians are not in it with that bunch," continued the Sergeant, who was diligently endeavouring to shed his Highland accent and to take on the colloquialisms of the country.

From a house a block and a half away, a confused clamour rose up into the still night air.

"Oh, dat noting," cheerfully said the little Russian, shrugging his shoulders, "dey mak like dat when dey having a good time."

"They do, eh? And how do you think their neighbours will be liking that sort of thing?"

The Sergeant stood still to analyse this confused clamour. Above the thumping and the singing of the dancers could be heard the sound of breaking boards, mingled with yells and curses.

"Murchuk, there is fighting going on."

"Suppose," agreed the Interpreter, "when Galician man get married, he want much joy. He get much beer, much fight."

"I will just be taking a walk round there," said the Sergeant. "These people have got to learn to get married with less fuss about it. I am not going to stand this much longer. What do they want to fight for anyway?"

"Oh," replied Murchuk lightly, "Polak not like Slovak, Slovak not like Galician. Dey drink plenty beer, tink of someting in Old Country, get mad, make noise, fight some."

"Come along with me," replied the Sergeant, and he squared his big shoulders and set off down the street with the quick, light stride that suggested the springing step of his Highland ancestors on the heather hills of Scotland.

Just as they arrived at the house of feasting, a cry, wild, weird and horrible, pierced through the uproar. The Interpreter stopped as if struck with a bullet.

"My God!" he cried in an undertone, clutching the Sergeant by the arm, "My God! Dat terrible!"

"What is it? What is the matter with you, Murchuk?"

"You know not dat cry? No?" He was all trembling. "Dat cry I hear long ago in Russland. Russian man mak dat cry when he kill. Dat Nihilist cry."

"Go back and get Dr. Wright. He will be needed, sure. You know where he lives, second corner down on Main Street. Get a move on! Quick!"

Meantime, while respectable Winnipeg lay snugly asleep under snow-covered roofs and smoking chimneys, while belated revellers and travellers were making their way through white, silent streets and under avenues of snow-laden trees to homes where reigned love and peace and virtue, in the north end and in the foreign colony the festivities in connection with Anka's wedding were drawing to a close in sordid drunken dance and song and in sanguinary fighting.

In the main room dance and song reeled on in uproarious hilarity. In the basement below, foul and fetid, men stood packed close, drinking while they could. It was for the foreigner an hour of rare opportunity. The beer kegs stood open and there were plenty of tin mugs about. In the dim light of a smoky lantern, the swaying crowd, here singing in maudlin chorus, there fighting savagely to pay off old scores or to avenge new insults, presented a nauseating spectacle.

In the farthest corner of the room, unmoved by all this din, about a table consisting of a plank laid across two beer kegs, one empty, the other for the convenience of the players half full, sat four men deep in a game of cards. Rosenblatt with a big Dalmatian sailor as partner, against a little Polak and a dark-bearded man. This man was apparently very drunk, as was evident by his reckless playing and his jibing, jeering manner. He was losing money, but with perfect good cheer. Not so his partner, the Polak. Every loss made him more savage and quarrelsome. With great difficulty Rosenblatt was able to keep the game going and preserve peace. The singing, swaying, yelling, cursing crowd beside them also gave him concern, and over and again he would shout, "Keep quiet, you fools. The police will be on us, and that will be the end of your beer, for they will put you in prison!"

"Yes," jeered the black-bearded man, who seemed to be set on making a row, "all fools, Russian fools, Polak fools, Galician fools, Slovak fools, all fools together."

Angry voices replied from all sides, and the noise rose higher.

"Keep quiet!" cried Rosenblatt, rising to his feet, "the police will surely be here!"

"That is true," cried the black-bearded man, "keep them quiet or the police will herd them in like sheep, like little sheep, baa, baa, baa, baa!"

"The police!" shouted a voice in reply, "who cares for the police?"

A yell of derisive assent rose in response.

"Be quiet!" besought Rosenblatt again. He was at his wits' end. The police might at any time appear and that would end what was for him a very profitable game, and besides might involve him in serious trouble. "Here you, Joseph!" he cried, addressing a man near him, "another keg of beer!"

Between them they hoisted up a keg of beer on an empty cask, knocked in the head, and set them drinking with renewed eagerness.

"Swine!" he said, seating himself again at the table. "Come, let us play."

But the very devil of strife seemed to be in the black-bearded man. He gibed at the good-natured Dalmatian, setting the Polak at him, suggested crooked dealing, playing recklessly and losing his own and his partner's money. At length the inevitable clash came. As the Dalmatian reached for a trick, the Polak cried out, "Hold! It is mine!"

"Yes, certainly it is his!" shouted the black-bearded man.

"Liar! It is mine," said the Dalmatian, with perfect good temper, and held on to his cards.

"Liar yourself!" hissed the little Polak, thrusting his face toward the Dalmatian.

"Go away," said the Dalmatian. His huge open hand appeared to rest a moment on the Polak's grinning face, and somehow the little man was swept from his seat to the floor.

"Ho, ho," laughed the Dalmatian, "so I brush away a fly."

With a face like a demon's, the Polak sprang at his big antagonist, an open knife in his hand, and jabbed him in the arm. For a moment the big man sat looking at his assailant as if amazed at his audacity. Then as he saw the blood running down his fingers he went mad, seized the Polak by the hair, lifted him clear out of his seat, carrying the plank table with him, and thereupon taking him by the back of the neck, proceeded to shake him till his teeth rattled in his head.

At almost the same instant the black-bearded man leaped across the fallen table like a tiger, at Rosenblatt's throat, and bore him down to the earthen floor in the dark corner. Sitting astride his chest, his knees on Rosenblatt's arms, and gripping him by the throat, he held him voiceless and helpless. Soon his victim lay still, looking up into his assailant's face in surprise, fear and rage unspeakable.

"Rosenblatt," said the bearded man in a soft voice, "you know me—me?"

"No," gasped Rosenblatt in terrible fury, "what do you—"

"Look," said the man. With his free hand he swept off the black beard which he stuffed into his pocket.

Rosenblatt looked. "Kalmar!" he gasped, terror in his eyes.

"Yes, Kalmar," replied the man.

"Help!—" The cry died at his teeth.

"No, no," said Kalmar, shutting his fingers upon his windpipe. "No noise. We are to have a quiet moment here. They are all too busy to notice us. Listen." He leaned far down over the ghastly face of the wretched man beneath him. "Shall I tell you why I am here? Shall I remind you of your crimes? No, I need not. You remember them well, and in a few minutes you will be in hell for them. Five years I froze and burned in Siberia, through you." As he said the word "you" he leaned a little closer. His voice remained low and soft, but his eyes were blazing with a light as of madness. "For this moment," he continued gently, "I have hungered, thirsted, panted. Now it has come. I regret I must hurry a little. I should like to drink this sweet cup slowly, oh so slowly, drop by drop. But—ah, do not struggle, nor cry. It will only add to your pain. Do you see this?" He drew from his pocket what seemed a knife handle, pressed a spring, and from this handle there shot out a blade, long, thin, murderous looking. "It has a sharp point, oh, a very sharp point." He pricked Rosenblatt in the cheek, and as Rosenblatt squirmed, laughed a laugh of singular sweetness. "With this beautiful instrument I mean to pick out your eyes, and then I shall drive it down through your heart, and you will be dead. It will not hurt so very much," he continued in a tone of regret. "No no, not so very much; not so much as when you put out the light of my life, when you murdered my wife; not so much as when you pierced my heart in betraying my cause. See, it will not hurt so very much." He put the sharp blade against Rosenblatt's breast high up above the heart, and drove it slowly down through the soft flesh till he came to bone. Like a mad thing, his unhappy victim threw himself wildly about in a furious struggle. But he was like a babe in the hands that gripped him. Kalmar laughed gleefully. "Aha! Aha! Good! Good! You give me much joy. Alas! it is so short-lived, and I must hurry. Now for your right eye. Or would you prefer the left first?"

As he released the pressure upon Rosenblatt's throat, the wretched man gurgled forth, "Mercy! Mercy! God's name, mercy!"

Piteous abject terror showed in his staring eyes. His voice was to Kalmar like blood to a tiger.

"Mercy!" he hissed, thrusting his face still nearer, his smile now all gone. "Mercy? God's name! Hear him! I, too, cried for mercy for father, brother, wife, but found none. Now though God Himself should plead, you will have only such mercy from me." He seemed to lose hold of himself. His breath came in thick sharp sobs, foam fell from his lips. "Ha," he gasped. "I cannot wait even to pick your eyes. There is some one at the door. I must drink your heart's blood now! Now! A-h-h-h!" His voice rose in a wild cry, weird and terrible. He raised his knife high, but as it fell the Dalmatian, who had been amusing himself battering the Polak about during these moments, suddenly heaved the little man at Kalmar, and knocked him into the corner. The knife fell, buried not in the heart of Rosenblatt, but in the Polak's neck.

There was no time to strike again. There was a loud battering, then a crash as the door was kicked open.

"Hello! What is all this row here?"

It was Sergeant Cameron, pushing his big body through the crowd as a man bursts through a thicket. An awed silence had fallen upon all, arrested, sobered by that weird cry. Some of them knew that cry of old. They had heard it in the Old Land in circumstances of heart-chilling terror, but never in this land till this moment.

"What is all this?" cried the Sergeant again. His glance swept the room and rested upon the huddled heap of men in the furthest corner. He seized the topmost and hauled him roughly from the heap.

"Hello! What's this? Why, God bless my soul! The man is dying!"

From a wound in the neck the blood was still spouting. Quickly the Sergeant was on his knees beside the wounded man, his thumb pressed hard upon the gaping wound. But still the blood continued to bubble up and squirt from under his thumb. All around, the earthen floor was muddy with blood.

"Run, some of you," commanded the Sergeant, "and hurry up that Dr. Wright, Main Street, two corners down!"

Jacob Wassyl, who had come in from the room above, understood, and sent a man off with all speed.

"Good Lord! What a pig sticking!" said the Sergeant. "There is a barrel of blood around here. And here is another man! Here you!" addressing Jacob, "put your thumb here and press so. It is not much good, but we cannot do anything else just now." The Sergeant straightened himself up. Evidently this was no ordinary "scrap." "Let no man leave this room," he cried aloud. "Tell them," he said, addressing Jacob, "you speak English; and two of you, you and you, stand by the door and let no man out except as I give the word."

The two men took their places.

"Now then, let us see what else there is here. Do you know these men?" he enquired of Jacob.

"Dis man," replied Jacob, "I not know. Him Polak man."

The men standing about began to jabber.

"What do they say?"

"Him Polak. Kravicz his name. He no bad man. He fight quick, but not a bad man."

"Well, he won't fight much more, I am thinking," replied the Sergeant.

A second man lay on his back in a pool of blood, insensible. His face showed ghastly beneath its horrible smear of blood and filth.

"Bring me that lantern," commanded the Sergeant.

"My God!" cried Jacob, "it is Rosenblatt!"

"Rosenblatt? Who is he?"

"De man dat live here, dis house. He run store. Lots mon'. My God! He dead!"

"Looks like it," said the Sergeant, opening his coat. "He's got a bad hole in him here," he continued, pointing to a wound in the chest. "Looks deep, and he is bleeding, too."

There was a knocking at the door.

"Let him in," cried the Sergeant, "it is the doctor. Hello, Doctor! Here is something for you all right."

The doctor, a tall, athletic young fellow with a keen, intellectual face, pushed his way through the crowd to the corner and dropped on his knees beside the Polak.

"Why, the man is dead!" said the doctor, putting his hand over the Polak's heart.

Even as he spoke, a shudder passed through the man's frame, and he lay still. The doctor examined the hole in his neck.

"Yes, he's dead, sure enough. The jugular vein is severed."

"Well, here is another, Doctor, who will be dead in a few minutes, if I am not mistaken," said the Sergeant.

"Let me see," said the doctor, turning to Rosenblatt. "Heavens above!" he cried, as his knees sank in the bloody mud, "it's blood!"

He passed round the other side of the unconscious man, got out his syringe and gave him a hypodermic. In a few minutes Rosenblatt showed signs of life. He began to breathe heavily, then to cough and spit mouthfuls of blood.

"Ha, lung, I guess," said the doctor, examining a small clean wound high up in the left breast. "Better send for an ambulance, Sergeant, and hurry them up. The sooner we get him to the hospital, the better. And here is another man. What's wrong with him?"

Beyond Rosenblatt lay a black-bearded man upon his face, breathing heavily. The doctor turned him over.

"He's alive anyway, and," after examination, "I can't find any wound. Heart all right, nothing wrong with him, I guess, except that he's got a bad jag on."

A cursory examination of the crowd revealed wounds in plenty, but nothing serious enough to demand the doctor's attention.

"Now then," said the Sergeant briskly, "I want to get your names and addresses. You can let me have them?" he continued, turning to Jacob.

"Me not know all mens."

"Go on," said the Sergeant curtly.

"Dis man Rosenblatt. Dis man Polak, Kravicz. Not know where he live."

"It would be difficult, I am thinking, for any one to tell where he lives now," said the Sergeant grimly, "and it does not much matter for my purpose."

"Poor chap," said the doctor, "it's too bad."

"What?" said the Sergeant, glancing at him, "well, it is too bad, that is true. But they are a bad lot, these Galicians."

"Poor chap," continued the doctor, looking down upon him, "perhaps he has got a wife and children."

A murmur rose among the men.

"No, he got no wife," said Jacob.

"Thank goodness for that!" said the doctor. "These fellows are a bit rough," he continued, "but they have never had a chance, nor even half a chance. A beastly tyrannical government at home has put the fear of death on them for this world, and an ignorant and superstitious Church has kept them in fear of purgatory and hell fire for the next. They have never had a chance in their own land, and so far, they have got no better chance here, except that they do not live in the fear of Siberia." The doctor had his own views upon the foreign peoples in the West.

"That is all right, Doctor," said the Sergeant, despite the Calvinism of generations beating in his heart, "it is hard on them, but there is nobody compelling them here to drink and fight like a lot of brutes."

"But who is to teach them any better?" said the doctor.

"Come on," said the Sergeant, "who is this?" pointing to the dark-bearded man lying in the corner.

"Dis man," said Jacob, "strange man."

"Any of you know him here?" asked the Sergeant.

There was a murmur of voices.

"What do they say?"

"No one know him. He drink much beer. He very drunk. He play cards wit' Rosenblatt," said Jacob.

"Playing cards, eh? I think we will be finding something now. Who else was in the card game?"

Again a murmur of voices arose.

"Dis Polak man," said Jacob, "and Rosenblatt, and dat man dere, and—"

Half a dozen voices rose in explanation, and half a dozen hands eagerly pointed out the big Dalmatian, who stood back among the crowd pale with terror.

"Come up here, you," said the Sergeant to him.

Instead of responding, with one bound the Dalmatian was at the door, and hurled the two men aside as if they were wooden pegs. But before he could tear open the door, the Sergeant was on him. At once the Dalmatian grappled with him in a fierce struggle. There was a quick angry growl from the crowd. They all felt themselves to be in an awkward position. Once out of the room, it would be difficult for any police officer to associate them in any way with the crime. The odds were forty to one. Why not make a break for liberty? A rush was made for the struggling pair at the door.

"Get back there!" roared the Sergeant, swinging his baton and holding off his man with the other hand.

At the same instant the doctor, springing up from his patient, and taking in the situation, put down his head and bored through the crowd in the manner which at one time had been the admiration and envy of his fellow-students in Manitoba College, till he found himself side by side with the Sergeant.

"Well done!" cried the Sergeant in cheerful approval, "you are the lad! We will just be teaching these chaps a fery good lesson, whateffer," continued the Sergeant, lapsing in his excitement into his native dialect. "Here you," he cried to the big Dalmatian who was struggling and kicking in a frenzy of fear and rage, "will you not keep quiet? Take that then." And he laid no gentle tap with his baton across the head of his captive.

The Dalmatian staggered to the wall and collapsed. There was a flash of steel and a click, and he lay handcuffed and senseless at the Sergeant's side.

"I hate to do that," said the Sergeant apologetically, "but on this occasion it cannot be helped. That was a good one, Doctor," he continued, as the doctor planted his left upon an opposing Galician chin, thereby causing a sudden subsidence of its owner. "These men have not got used to us yet, and we will just have to be patient with them," said the Sergeant, laying about with his baton as opportunity offered, not in any slashing wholesale manner, but making selection, and delivering his blows with the eye and hand of an artist. He was handling the situation gently and with discretion. Still the crowd kept pressing hard upon the two men at the door.

"We must put a stop to this," said the Sergeant seriously. "Here you!" he called to Jacob above the uproar.

Jacob pushed nearer to him.

"Tell these fellows that I am not wanting to hurt any of them, but if they do not get quiet soon, I will attack them and will not spare them, and that if they quit their fighting, none of them will be hurt except the guilty party."

At once Jacob sprang upon a beer keg and waving his arms wildly, he secured a partial silence, and translated for them the Sergeant's words.

"And tell them, too," said the doctor in a high, clear voice, "there is a man dying over there that I have got to attend to right now, and I haven't time for this foolishness."

As he spoke, he once more bored his way through the crowd to the side of Rosenblatt, who was continuing to gasp painfully and spit blood. The moment of danger was past. The excited crowd settled down again into an appearance of stupid anxiety, awaiting they knew not what.

"Now then," said the Sergeant, turning to the Dalmatian who had recovered consciousness and was standing sullen and passive. He had made his attempt for liberty, he had failed, and now he was ready to accept his fate. "Ask him what is his name," said the Sergeant.

"He say his name John Jarema."

"And what has he got to say for himself?"

At this the Dalmatian began to speak with eager gesticulation.

"What is he saying?" enquired the Sergeant.

"Dis man say he no hurt no man. Dis man," pointing to the dead Polak, "play cards, fight, stab knife into his arm," said Jacob, pulling up the Dalmatian's coat sleeve to show an ugly gash in the forearm. "Jarema hit him on head, shake him bad, and trow him in corner on noder man."

Again the Dalmatian broke forth.

"He say he got no knife at all. He cannot make hole like dat wit' his finger."

"Well, we shall see about that," said the Sergeant. "Now where is that other man?" He turned toward the corner. The corner was empty. "Where has he gone?" said the Sergeant, peering through the crowd for a black-whiskered face.

The man was nowhere to be seen. The Sergeant was puzzled and angered. He lined the men up around the walls, but the man was not to be found. As each man uttered his name, there were always some to recognize and to corroborate the information. One man alone seemed a stranger to all in the company. He was clean shaven, but for a moustache with ends turned up in military manner, and with an appearance of higher intelligence than the average Galician.

"Ask him his name," said the Sergeant.

The man replied volubly, and Jacob interpreted.

"His name, Rudolph Polkoff, Polak man. Stranger, come to dis town soon. Know no man here. Some man bring him here to dance."

The Sergeant kept his keen eye fastened on the man while he talked.

"Well, he looks like a smart one. Come here," he said, beckoning the stranger forward into the better light.

The man came and stood with his back to Rosenblatt.

"Hold up your hands."

The man stared blankly. Jacob interpreted. He hesitated a moment, then held up his hands above his head. The Sergeant turned him about.

"You will not be having any weepons on you?" said the Sergeant, searching his pockets. "Hello! What's this?" He pulled out the false beard.

The same instant there was a gasping cry from Rosenblatt. All turned in his direction. Into his dim eyes and pallid face suddenly sprang life; fear and hate struggling to find expression in the look he fixed upon the stranger. With a tremendous effort he raised his hand, and pointing to the stranger with a long, dirty finger, he gasped, "Arrest—he murder—" and fell back again unconscious.

Even as he spoke there was a quick movement. The lantern was dashed to the ground, the room plunged into darkness and before the Sergeant knew what had happened, the stranger had shaken himself free from his grasp, torn open the door and fled.

With a mighty oath, the Sergeant was after him, but the darkness and the crowd interfered with his progress, and by the time he had reached the door, the man had completely vanished. At the door stood Murchuk with the ambulance.

"See a man run out here?" demanded the Sergeant.

"You bet! He run like buck deer."

"Why didn't you stop him?" cried the Sergeant.

"Stop him!" replied the astonished Murchuk, "would you stop a mad crazy bull? No, no, not me."

"Get that man inside to the hospital then. He won't hurt you," exclaimed the Sergeant in wrathful contempt. "I'll catch that man if I have to arrest every Galician in this city!"

It was an unspeakable humiliation to the Sergeant, but with such vigour did he act, that before the morning dawned, he had every exit from the city by rail and by trail under surveillance, and before a week was past, by adopting the very simple policy of arresting every foreigner who attempted to leave the town, he had secured his man.

It was a notable arrest. From all the evidence, it seemed that the prisoner was a most dangerous criminal. The principal source of evidence, however, was Rosenblatt, whose deposition was taken down by the Sergeant and the doctor.

The man, it appeared, was known by many names, Koval, Kolowski, Polkoff and others, but his real name was Michael Kalmar. He was a determined and desperate Nihilist, was wanted for many crimes by the Russian police, and had spent some years as a convict in Siberia where, if justice had its due, he would be at the present time. He had cast off his wife and children, whom he had shipped to Canada. Incidentally it came out that it was only Rosenblatt's generosity that had intervened between them and starvation. Balked in one of his desperate Nihilist schemes by Rosenblatt, who held a position of trust under the Russian Government, he had sworn vengeance, and escaping from Siberia, he had come to Canada to make good his oath. And but for the timely appearance of the police, he would have succeeded.

Meantime, Sergeant Cameron was receiving congratulations on all hands for his cleverness in making the arrest of a man who had escaped the vigilance of the Russian Police and Secret Service, said to be the finest in all Europe. In his cell, the man, as good as condemned, waited his trial, a stranger far from help and kindred, an object of terror and of horror to many, of compassion to a few. But however men thought of him, he had sinned against British civilisation, and would now have to taste of British justice.

CHAPTER VII — CONDEMNED

The two months preceding the trial were months of restless agony to the prisoner, Kalmar. Day and night he paced his cell like a tiger in a cage, taking little food and sleeping only when overcome with exhaustion. It was not the confinement that fretted him. The Winnipeg jail, with all its defects and limitations, was a palace to some that he had known. It was not the fear of the issue to his trial that drove sleep and hunger from him. Death, exile, imprisonment, had been too long at his heels to be strangers to him or to cause him fear. In his heart a fire burned. Rosenblatt still lived, and vengeance had halted in its pursuit.

But deep as was the passion in his heart for vengeance, that for his country and his cause burned deeper. He had been able to establish lines of communication between his fatherland and the new world by means of which the oppressed, the hunted, might reach freedom and safety. The final touches to his plans were still to be given. Furthermore, it was necessary that he should make his report in person, else much of his labour would be fruitless. It was this that brought him "white nights" and black days.

Every day Paulina called at the jail and waited long hours with uncomplaining patience in the winter cold, till she could be admitted. Her husband showed no sign of interest, much less of gratitude. One question alone, he asked day by day.

"The children are well?"

"They are well," Paulina would answer. "They ask to see you every day."

"They may not see me here," he would reply, after which she would turn away, her dull face full of patient suffering.

One item of news she brought him that gave him a moment's cheer.

"Kalman," she said, one day, "will speak nothing but Russian."

"Ha!" he exclaimed. "He is my son indeed. But," he added gloomily, "of what use now?"

Others sought admission,—visitors from the Jail Mission, philanthropic ladies, a priest from St. Boniface, a Methodist minister,—but all were alike denied. Simon Ketzel he sent for, and with him held long converse, with the result that he was able to secure for his defence the services of O'Hara, the leading criminal lawyer of Western Canada. There appeared to be no lack of money, and all that money could do was done.

The case began to excite considerable interest, not only in the city, but throughout the whole country. Public opinion was strongly against the prisoner. Never in the history of the new country had a crime been committed of such horrible and bloodthirsty deliberation. It is true that this opinion was based largely upon Rosenblatt's deposition, taken by Sergeant Cameron and Dr. Wright when he was supposed to be in extremis, and upon various newspaper interviews with him that appeared from time to time. The Morning News in a trenchant leader pointed out the danger to which Western Canada was exposed from the presence of these semibarbarous peoples from Central and Southern Europe, and expressed the hope that the authorities would deal with the present case in such a manner as would give a severe but necessary lesson to the lawless among our foreign population.

There was, indeed, from the first, no hope of acquittal. Staunton, who was acting for the Crown, was convinced that the prisoner would receive the maximum sentence allowed by law. And even O'Hara acknowledged privately to his solicitor that the best he could hope for was a life sentence. "And, by gad! he ought to get it! It is the most damnable case of bloody murder that I have come across in all my practice!" But this was before Mr. O'Hara had interviewed Mrs. Fitzpatrick.

In his hunt for evidence Mr. O'Hara had come upon his fellow countrywoman in the foreign colony. At first from sheer delight in her rich brogue and her shrewd native wit, and afterward from the conviction that her testimony might be turned to good account on behalf of his client, Mr. O'Hara diligently cultivated Mrs. Fitzpatrick's acquaintance. It helped their mutual admiration and their friendship not a little to discover their common devotion to "the cause o' the paythriot in dear owld Ireland," and their mutual interest in the prisoner Kalmar, as a fellow "paythriot."

Immediately upon his discovery of the rich possibilities in Mrs. Fitzpatrick Mr. O'Hara got himself invited to drink a "cup o' tay," which, being made in the little black teapot brought all the way from Ireland, he pronounced to be the finest he had had since coming to Canada fifteen years ago. Indeed, he declared that he had serious doubts as to the possibilities of producing on this side of the water and by people of this country just such tea as he had been accustomed to drink in the dear old land. It was over this cup of tea, and as he drew from Mrs. Fitzpatrick the description of the scene between the Nihilist and his children, that Mr. O'Hara came to realise the vast productivity of the mine he had uncovered. He determined that Mrs. Fitzpatrick should tell this tale in court.

"We'll bate that divil yet!" he exclaimed to his new-found friend, his brogue taking a richer flavour from his environment. "They would be having the life of the poor man for letting a little of the black blood out of the black heart of that traitor and blackguard, and may the divil fly away with him! But we'll bate them yet, and it's yersilf is the one to do it!" he exclaimed in growing excitement and admiration.

At first Mrs. Fitzpatrick was most reluctant to appear in court.

"Sure, what would I do or say in the face av His 'Anner an' the joorymin, with niver a word on the tongue av me?"

"And would you let the poor man go to his death?" cried O'Hara, proceeding to draw a lurid picture of the deadly machinations of the lawyer for the Crown, Rosenblatt and their associates against this unfortunate patriot who, for love of his country and for the honour of his name, had sought to wreak a well-merited vengeance upon the abject traitor.

Under his vehement eloquence Mrs. Fitzpatrick's Celtic nature kindled into flame. She would go to the court, and in the face of Judge and jury and all the rest of them, she would tell them the kind of man they were about to do to death. Over and over again O'Hara had her repeat her story, emphasising with adjurations, oaths and even tears, those passages that his experience told him would be most effective for his purpose, till he felt sure she would do full credit to her part.

During the trial the court room was crowded, not only with the ordinary morbid sensation seekers, but with some of Winnipeg's most respectable citizens. In one corner of the court room there was grouped day after day a small company of foreigners. Every man of Russian blood in the city who could attend, was there. It was against the prisoner's will and desire, but in accordance with O'Hara's plan of defence that Paulina and the children should be present at every session of the court. The proceedings were conducted through an interpreter where it was necessary, Kalmar pleading ignorance of the niceties of the English language.

The prisoner was arraigned on the double charge of attempted murder in the case of Rosenblatt, and of manslaughter in that of the dead Polak. The evidence of Dr. Wright and of Sergeant Cameron, corroborated by that of many eyewitnesses, established beyond a doubt that the wound in Rosenblatt's breast and in the dead Polak's neck was done by the same instrument, and that instrument the spring knife discovered in the basement of Paulina's house.

Kalmar, arrayed in his false black beard, was identified by the Dalmatian and by others as the Polak's partner in the fatal game of cards. Staunton had little difficulty in establishing the identity of the black-bearded man who had appeared here and there during the wedding festivities with Kalmar himself. From the stupid Paulina he skilfully drew evidence substantiating this fact, and though this evidence was ruled out on the ground that she was the prisoner's wife, the effect upon the jury was not lost.

The most damaging testimony was, of course, that offered by Rosenblatt himself, and this evidence Staunton was clever enough to use with dramatic effect. Pale, wasted, and still weak, Rosenblatt told his story to the court in a manner that held the crowd breathless with horror. Never had such a tale been told to Canadian ears. The only man unmoved was the prisoner. Throughout the narrative he maintained an attitude of bored indifference.

It was not in vain, however, that O'Hara sought to weaken the effect of Rosenblatt's testimony by turning the light upon some shady spots in his career. In his ruthless "sweating" of the witness, the lawyer forced the admission that he had once been the friend of the prisoner; that he had been the unsuccessful suitor of the prisoner's first wife; that he had been a member of the same Secret Society in Russia; that he had joined the Secret Service of the Russian Government and had given evidence leading to the breaking up of that Society; that he had furnished the information that led to the prisoner's transportation to Siberia. At this point O'Hara swiftly changed his ground.

"You have befriended this woman, Paulina Koval?"

"Yes."

"You have, in fact, acted as her financial agent?"

"I have assisted her in her financial arrangements. She cannot speak English."

"Whose house does she live in?"

Rosenblatt hesitated. "I am not sure."

"Whose house does she live in?" roared O'Hara, stepping toward him.

"Her own, I think."

"You think!" shouted the lawyer. "You know, don't you? You bought it for her. You made the first payment upon it, did you not?"

"Yes, I did."

"And since that time you have cashed money orders for her that have come month by month?"

Again Rosenblatt hesitated. "I have sometimes—"

"Tell the truth!" shouted O'Hara again; "a lie here can be easily traced. I have the evidence. Did you not cash the money orders that came month by month addressed to Paulina Koval?"

"I did, with her permission. She made her mark."

"Where did the money go?"

"I gave it to her."

"And what did she do with it?"

"I don't know."

"Did she not give you money from time to time to make payments upon the house?"

"No."

"Be careful. Let me remind you that there is a law against perjury. I give you another chance. Did you not receive certain money to make payments on this house?" O'Hara spoke with terrible and deliberate emphasis.

"I did, some."

"And did you make these payments?"

"Yes."

"Would you be surprised to know, as I now tell the court, that since the first payment, made soon after the arrival in the country, not a dollar further had been paid?"

Rosenblatt was silent.

"Answer me!" roared the lawyer. "Would you be surprised to know this?"

"Yes."

"This surprise is waiting you. Now then, who runs this house?"

"Paulina Koval."

"Tell me the truth. Who lets the rooms in this house, and who is responsible for the domestic arrangements of the house? Tell me," said O'Hara, bearing down upon the wretched Rosenblatt.

"I—assist—her—sometimes."

"Then you are responsible for the conditions under which Paulina Koval has been forced to live during these three years?"

Rosenblatt was silent.

"That will do," said O'Hara with contempt unspeakable.

He could easily have made more out of his sweating process had not the prisoner resolutely forbidden any reference to Rosenblatt's treatment of and relation to the unfortunate Paulina or the domestic arrangements that he had introduced into that unfortunate woman's household. Kalmar was rigid in his determination that no stain should come to his honour in this regard.

With the testimony of each succeeding witness the cloud overhanging the prisoner grew steadily blacker. The first ray of light came from an unexpected quarter. It was during the examination of Mrs. Fitzpatrick that O'Hara got his first opening. It was a master stroke of strategy on his part that Mrs. Fitzpatrick was made to appear as a witness for the Crown, for the purpose of establishing the deplorable and culpable indifference to and neglect of his family on the part of the prisoner.

Day after day Mrs. Fitzpatrick had appeared in the court, following the evidence with rising wrath against the Crown, its witnesses, and all the machinery of prosecution. All unwitting of this surging tide of indignation in the heart of his witness the Crown Counsel summoned her to the stand. Mr. Staunton's manner was exceedingly affable.

"Your name, Madam?" he enquired.

"Me name is it?" replied the witness. "An' don't ye know me name as well as I do mesilf?"

Mr. Staunton smiled pleasantly. "But the court desires to share that privilege with me, so perhaps you will be good enough to inform the court of your name."

"If the court wants me name let the court ask it. An' if you want to tell the court me name ye can plaze yersilf, fer it's little I think av a man that'll sit in me house by the hour forninst mesilf an' me husband there, and then let on before the court that he doesn't know the name av me."

"Why, my dear Madam," said the lawyer soothingly, "it is a mere matter of form that you should tell the court your name."

"A matter o' form, is it? Indade, an' it's mighty poor form it is, if ye ask my opinion, which ye don't, an' it's mighty poor manners."

At this point the judge interposed.

"Come, come," he said, "what is your name? I suppose you are not ashamed of it?"

"Ashamed av it, Yer 'Anner!" said Mrs. Fitzpatrick, with an elaborate bow to the judge, "ashamed av it! There's niver a shame goes with the name av Fitzpatrick!"

"Your name is Fitzpatrick?"

"It is, Yer 'Anner. Mistress Timothy Fitzpatrick, Monaghan that was, the Monaghans o' Ballinghalereen, which I'm sure Yer 'Anner'll have heard of, fer the intilligent man ye are."

"Mrs. Timothy Fitzpatrick," said the judge, with the suspicion of a smile, writing the name down. "And your first name?"

"Me Christian name is it? Ah, thin, Judge dear, wud ye be wantin' that too?" smiling at him in quite a coquettish manner. "Sure, if ye had had the good taste an' good fortune to be born in the County Mayo ye wudn't nade to be askin' the name av Nora Monaghan o' Ballinghalereen."

The judge's face was now in a broad smile.

"Nora Fitzpatrick," he said, writing the name down. "Let us proceed."

"Well, Mrs. Fitzpatrick," said the counsel for the Crown, "will you kindly look at the prisoner?"

Mrs. Fitzpatrick turned square about and let her eyes rest upon the prisoner's pale face.

"I will that," said she, "an' there's many another I'd like to see in his place."

"Do you know him?"

"I do that. An' a finer gintleman I niver saw, savin' Yer 'Anner's prisence," bowing to the judge.

"Oh, indeed! A fine gentleman? And how do you know that, Mrs. Fitzpatrick?"

"How do I know a gintleman, is it? Sure, it's by the way he trates a lady."

"Ah," said the lawyer with a most courteous bow, "that is a most excellent test. And what do you know of this—ah—this gentleman's manners with ladies?"

"An' don't I know how he trates mesilf? He's not wan to fergit a lady's name, you may lay to that."

"Oh, indeed, he has treated you in a gentlemanly manner?"

"He has."

"And do you think this is his usual manner with ladies?"

"I do," said Mrs. Fitzpatrick with great emphasis. "A gintleman, a rale gintleman, is the same to a lady wheriver he mates her, an' the same to ladies whativer they be."

"Mrs. Fitzpatrick," said Mr. Staunton, "you have evidently a most excellent taste in gentlemen."

"I have that same," she replied. "An' I know thim that are no gintlemen," she continued with meaning emphasis, "whativer their clothes may be."

A titter ran through the court room.

"Silence in the court!" shouted the crier.

"Now, Mrs. Fitzpatrick," proceeded Mr. Staunton, taking a firmer tone, "you say the prisoner is a gentleman."

"I do. An' I can tell ye—"

"Wait, Mrs. Fitzpatrick. Wait a moment. Do you happen to know his wife?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know his wife?"

"Perhaps I do if you say so."

"But, my good woman, I don't say so. Do you know his wife, or do you not know his wife?"

"I don't know."

"What do you mean?" said Mr. Staunton impatiently. "Do you mean that you have no acquaintance with the wife of the prisoner?"

"I might."

"What do you mean by might?"

"Aw now," remonstrated Mrs. Fitzpatrick, "sure, ye wouldn't be askin' a poor woman like me the manin' av a word like that."

"Now, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, let us get done with this fooling. Tell me whether you know the prisoner's wife or not."

"Indade, an' the sooner yer done the better I'd like it."

"Well, then, tell me. You either know the prisoner's wife or you don't know her?"

"That's as may be," said Mrs. Fitzpatrick.

"Then tell me," thundered Staunton, losing all patience, "do you know this woman or not?" pointing to Paulina.

"That woman is it?" said Mrs. Fitzpatrick. "An' why didn't ye save yer breath an' His 'Anner's time, not to shpake av me own that has to work fer me daily bread, by askin' me long ago if I know this woman?"

"Well, do you know her?"

"I do."

"Then why did you not say so before when I asked you?" said the exasperated lawyer.

"I did," said Mrs. Fitzpatrick calmly.

"Did you not say that you did not know the wife of the prisoner?"

"I did not," said Mrs. Fitzpatrick.

By this time the whole audience, including the judge, were indulging themselves in a wide open smile.

"Well, Mrs. Fitzpatrick," at length said the lawyer, "I must be decidedly stupid, for I fail to understand you."

"Indade, I'll not be contradictin' ye, fer it's yersilf ought to know best about that," replied Mrs. Fitzpatrick pleasantly.

A roar of laughter filled the court room.

"Silence in the court! We must have order," said the judge, recovering his gravity with such celerity as he could. "Go on, Mr. Staunton."

"Well, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, I understand that you know this woman, Paulina Koval."

"It's mesilf that's plazed to hear it."

"And I suppose you know that she is the prisoner's wife?"

"An' why wud ye be afther supposin' such a thing?"

"Well! well! Do you know it?"

"Do I know what?"

"Do you know that this woman, Paulina Koval, is the wife of the prisoner?"

"She might be."

"Oh, come now, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, we are not splitting hairs. You know perfectly well that this woman is the prisoner's wife."

"Indade, an' it's the cliver man ye are to know what I know better than I know mesilf."

"Well, well," said Mr. Staunton impatiently, "will you say that you do not consider this woman the prisoner's wife?"

"I will not," replied Mrs. Fitzpatrick emphatically, "any more than I won't say she's yer own."

"Well, well, let us get on. Let us suppose that this woman is his wife. How did the prisoner treat this woman?"

"An' how should he trate her?"

"Did he support her?"

"An' why should he, with her havin' two hands av her own?"

"Well now, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, surely you will say that it was a case of cruel neglect on the part of the prisoner that he should leave her to care for herself and her children, a stranger in a strange land."

"Indade, it's not fer me to be runnin' down the counthry," exclaimed Mrs. Fitzpatrick. "Sure, it's a good land, an' a foine counthry it is to make a livin' in," she continued with a glow of enthusiasm, "an' it's mesilf that knows it."

"Oh, the country is all right," said Mr. Staunton impatiently; "but did not this man abandon his wife?"

"An' if he's the man ye think he is wudn't she be the better quit av him?"

The lawyer had reached the limit of his patience.

"Well, well, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, we will leave the wife alone. But what of his treatment of the children?"

"The childer?" exclaimed Mrs. Fitzpatrick,—"the childer, is it? Man dear, but he's the thrue gintleman an' the tinder-hearted father fer his childer, an' so he is."

"Oh, indeed, Mrs. Fitzpatrick. I am sure we shall all be delighted to hear this. But you certainly have strange views of a father's duty toward his children. Now will you tell the court upon what ground you would extol his parental virtues?"

"Faix, it's niver a word I've said about his parental virtues, or any other kind o' virtues. I was talkin' about his childer."

"Well, then, perhaps you would be kind enough to tell the court what reason you have for approving his treatment of his children?"

Mrs. Fitzpatrick's opportunity had arrived. She heaved a great sigh, and with some deliberation began.

"Och! thin, an' it's just terrible heart-rendin' an' so it is. An' it's mesilf that can shpake, havin' tin av me own, forby three that's dead an' gone, God rest their sowls! an' four that's married, an' the rest all doin' well fer thimsilves. Indade, it's mesilf that has the harrt fer the childer. You will be havin' childer av yer own," she added confidentially to the lawyer.

A shout of laughter filled the court room, for Staunton was a confirmed and notorious old bachelor.

"I have the bad fortune, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, to be a bachelor," he replied, red to the ears.

"Man dear, but it's hard upon yez, but it's Hivin's mercy fer yer wife."

The laughter that followed could with difficulty be suppressed by the court crier.

"Go on, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, go on with your tale," said Staunton, who had frankly joined in the laugh against himself.

"I will that," said Mrs. Fitzpatrick with emphasis. "Where was I? The man an' his childer. Sure, I'll tell Yer 'Anner." Here she turned to the judge. "Fer he," with a jerk of her thumb towards the lawyer, "knows nothin' about the business at all, at all. It was wan night he came to me house askin' to see his childer. The night o' the dance, Yer 'Anner. As I was sayin', he came to me house where the childer was, askin' to see thim, an' him without a look o' thim fer years. An' did they know him?" Mrs. Fitzpatrick's voice took a tragic tone. "Not a hair av thim. Not at the first. Ah, but it was the harrt-rendin' scene, with not a house nor a home fer him to come till, an' him sendin' the money ivery month to pay fer it. But where it's gone, it's not fer me to say. There's some in this room" (here she regarded Rosenblatt with a steady eye) "might know more about that money an' what happened till it, than they know about Hivin. Ah, but as I was sayin', it wud melt the harrt av a Kerry steer, that's first cousin to the goats on the hills fer wildness, to see the way he tuk thim an' held thim, an' wailed over thim, the tinder harrt av him! Fer only wan small hour or two could he shtay wid thim, an' then aff to that haythen counthry agin that gave him birth. An' the way he suffered fer that same, poor dear! An' the beautiful wife he lost! Hivin be kind to her! Not her," following the judge's glance toward Paulina, "but an angel that need niver feel shame to shtand befure the blissid Payther himsilf, wid the blue eyes an' the golden hair in the picter he carries nixt his harrt, the saints have pity on him! An' how he suffered fer the good cause! Och hone! it breaks me harrt!" Here Mrs. Fitzpatrick paused to wipe away her tears.

"But, Mrs. Fitzpatrick," interrupted Mr. Staunton, "this is all very fine, but what has this to do—"

"Tut! man, isn't it that same I'm tellin' ye?" And on she went, going back to the scene she had witnessed in her own room between Kalmar and his children, and describing the various dramatis personae and the torrential emotions that had swept their hearts in that scene of final parting between father and children.

Again and again Staunton sought to stay her eloquence, but with a majestic wave of her hand she swept him aside, and with a wealth of metaphor and an unbroken flow of passionate, tear-bedewed rhetoric that Staunton himself might well envy, she held the court under her sway. Many of the women present were overcome with emotion. O'Hara openly wiped away his tears, keeping an anxious eye the while upon the witness and waiting the psychological moment for the arresting of her tale.

The moment came when Mrs. Fitzpatrick's emotions rendered her speechless. With a great show of sympathy, Mr. O'Hara approached the witness, and offering her a glass of water, found opportunity to whisper, "Not another word, on your soul."

"Surely," he said, appealing to the judge in a voice trembling with indignant feeling, "my learned friend will not further harass this witness."

"Let her go, in Heaven's name," said Staunton testily; "we want no more of her."

"So I should suppose," replied O'Hara drily.

With Mrs. Fitzpatrick, the case for the Crown was closed. To the surprise of all, and especially of the Counsel for the Crown, O'Hara called no witnesses and offered no evidence in rebuttal of that before the court. This made it necessary for Staunton to go on at once with his final address to the jury.

Seldom in all his experience had he appeared to such poor advantage as on that day. The court was still breathing the atmosphere of Mrs. Fitzpatrick's rude and impassioned appeal. The lawyer was still feeling the sting of his humiliating failure with his star witness, and O'Hara's unexpected move surprised and flustered him, old hand as he was. With halting words and without his usual assurance, he reviewed the evidence and asked for a conviction on both charges.

With O'Hara it was quite otherwise. It was in just such a desperate situation that he was at his best. The plight of the prisoner, lonely, beaten and defenceless, appealed to his chivalry. Then, too, O'Hara, by blood and tradition, was a revolutionist. In every "rising" during the last two hundred years of Ireland's struggles, some of his ancestors had carried a pike or trailed a musket, and the rebel blood in him cried sympathy with the Nihilist in his devotion to a hopeless cause. And hence the passion and the almost tearful vehemence that he threw into his final address were something more than professional.

With great skill he took his cue from the evidence of the last witness. He drew a picture of the Russian Nihilist hunted like "a partridge on the mountains," seeking for himself and his compatriots a home and safety in this land of liberty. With vehement scorn he told the story of the base treachery of Rosenblatt, "a Government spy, a thief, a debaucher of women, and were I permitted, gentlemen, I could unfold a tale in this connection such as would wring your hearts with grief and indignation. But my client will not permit that the veil be drawn from scenes that would bring shame to the honoured name he wears."

With consummate art the lawyer turned the minds of the jury from the element of personal vengeance in the crime committed to that of retribution for political infidelity, till under his manipulation the prisoner was made to appear in the role of patriot and martyr doomed to suffer for his devotion to his cause.

"But, gentlemen, though I might appeal to your passions, I scorn to do so. I urge you to weigh calmly, deliberately, as cool, level-headed Canadians, the evidence produced by the prosecution. A crime has been committed, a most revolting crime,—one man killed, another seriously wounded. But what is the nature of this crime? Has it been shown either to be murder or attempted murder? You must have noticed, gentlemen, how utterly the prosecution has failed to establish any such charge. The suggestion of murder comes solely from the man who has so deeply wronged and has pursued with such deadly venom the unfortunate prisoner at the bar. This man, after betraying the cause of freedom, after wrecking the prisoner's home and family, after proving traitor to every trust imposed in him, now seeks to fasten upon his victim this horrid crime of murder. His is the sole evidence. What sort of man is this upon whose unsupported testimony you are asked to send a fellow human being to the scaffold? Think calmly, gentlemen, is he such a man as you can readily believe? Is his highly coloured story credible? Are you so gullible as to be taken in with this melodrama? Gentlemen, I know you, I know my fellow citizens too well to think that you will be so deceived.

"Now what are the facts, the bare facts, the cold facts, gentlemen? And we are here to deal with facts. Here they are. There is a wedding. My learned friend is not interested in weddings, not perhaps as much interested as he should be, and as such, apparently, he excites the pity of his friends."

This sally turned all eyes towards Mrs. Fitzpatrick, and a broad smile spread over the court.

"There is a wedding, as I was saying. Unhappily the wedding feast, as is too often the case with our foreign citizens, degenerates into a drunken brawl. It is a convenient occasion for paying off old scores. There is general melee, a scrap, in short. Suddenly these two men come face to face, their passions inflamed. On the one hand there is a burning sense of wrong, on the other an unquenchable hate. For, gentlemen, remember, the man that hates you most venomously is the man who has wronged you most deeply. These two meet. There is a fight. When all is over, one man is found dead, another with a wound in his breast. But who struck the first blow? None can tell. We are absolutely without evidence upon this point. In regard to the Polak, all that can be said is this, that it was a most unfortunate occurrence. The attempt to connect the prisoner with this man's death has utterly failed. In regard to the man Rosenblatt, dismissing his absurdly tragic story, what evidence has been brought before this court that there was any deliberate attempt at murder? A blow was struck, but by whom? No one knows. What was the motive? Was it in self-defence warding off some murderous attack? No one can say. I have as much right to believe that this was the case, as any man to believe the contrary. Indeed, from what we know of the character of this wretched traitor and thief, it is not hard to believe that the attack upon this stranger would come from him."

And so O'Hara proceeded with his most extraordinary defence. Theory after theory he advanced, quoting instance after instance of extraordinary killings that were discovered to be accidental or in self-defence, till with the bewildered jury no theory explanatory of the crime committed in the basement of Paulina's house was too fantastic to be considered possible.

In his closing appeal O'Hara carried the jury back to the point from which he had set out. With tears in his voice he recounted the scene of the parting between the prisoner and his children. He drew a harrowing picture of the unhappy fate of wife and children left defenceless and in poverty to become the prey of such men as Rosenblatt. He drew a vivid picture of that age-long struggle for freedom carried on by the down-trodden peasantry of Russia, and closed with a tremendous appeal to them as fathers, as lovers of liberty, as fair-minded, reasonable men to allow the prisoner the full benefit of the many doubts gathering round the case for the prosecution, and set him free.

It was a magnificent effort. Never in all his career as a criminal lawyer had O'Hara made so brilliant an attempt to lift a desperate case from the region of despair into that of hope. The effect of his address was plainly visible upon the jury and, indeed, upon the whole audience in the court room.

The judge's charge did much to clear the atmosphere, and to bring the jury back to the cold, calm air of Canadian life and feeling; but in the jury room the emotions and passions aroused by O'Hara's address were kindled again, and the result reflected in no small degree their influence.

The verdict acquitted the prisoner of the charge of manslaughter, but found him guilty on the count of attempted murder. The verdict, however, was tempered with a strong recommendation to mercy.

"Have you anything to say?" asked the judge before pronouncing sentence.

Kalmar, who had been deeply impressed by the judge's manner during his charge to the jury, searched his face a moment and then, as if abandoning all hope of mercy, drew himself erect and in his stilted English said: "Your Excellency, I make no petition for mercy. Let the criminal make such a plea. I stand convicted of crime, but I am no criminal. The traitor, the thief, the liar, the murderer, the criminal, sits there." As he spoke the word, he swung sharply about and stood with outstretched arm and finger pointing to Rosenblatt. "I stand here the officer of vengeance. I have failed. Vengeance will not fail. The day is coming when it will strike." Then turning his face toward the group of foreigners at the back of the room he raised his voice and in a high monotone chanted a few sentences in the Russian tongue.

The effect was tremendous. Every Russian could be picked out by his staring eyes and pallid face. There was a moment's silence, then a hissing sound as of the breath drawn sharply inward, followed by a murmur hoarse and inhuman, not good to hear. Rosenblatt trembled, started to his feet, vainly tried to speak. His lips refused to frame words, and he sank back speechless.

"What the deuce was he saying?" enquired O'Hara of the Interpreter after the judge had pronounced his solemn sentence.

"He was putting to them," said the Interpreter in an awed whisper, "the Nihilist oath of death."

"By Jove! Good thing the judge didn't understand. The bloody fool would have spoiled all my fine work. He would have got a life term instead of fourteen years. He's got enough, though, poor chap. I wish to Heaven the other fellow had got it."

As the prisoner turned with the officer to leave the dock, a wild sobbing fell upon his ear. It was Paulina. Kalmar turned to the judge.

"Is it permitted that I see my children before—before I depart?"

"Certainly," said the judge quickly. "Your wife and children and your friends may visit you at a convenient hour to-morrow."

Kalmar bowed with grave courtesy and walked away.

Beside the sobbing Paulina sat the children, pale and bewildered.

"Where is my father going?" asked the boy in Russian.

"Alas! alas! We shall see him no more!" sobbed Paulina.

Quickly the boy's voice rang out, shrill with grief and terror, "Father! father! Come back!"

The prisoner, who was just disappearing through the door, stopped, turned about, his pale face convulsed with a sudden agony. He took a step toward his son, who had run toward the bar after him.

"My son, be brave," he said in a voice audible throughout the room. "Be brave. I shall see you to-morrow."

He waved his hand toward his son, turned again and passed out with the officer.

Through the staring crowd came a little lady with white hair and a face pale and chastened into sweetness.

"Let me come with you," she said to Paulina, while the tears coursed down her cheeks.

The Galician woman understood not a word, but the touch upon her arm, the tone in the voice, the flowing tears were a language she could understand. Paulina raised her dull, tear-dimmed eyes, and for a brief moment gazed into the pale face above her, then without further word rose and, followed by her children, accompanied the little lady from the room, the crowd making respectful way before the pathetic group.

"Say, O'Hara, there are still angels going about," said young Dr. Wright, following the group with his eyes.

"Be Hivin!" replied the tender-hearted Irishman, his eyes suddenly dim, "there's wan annyway, and Margaret French is the first two letters of her name."

CHAPTER VIII — THE PRICE OF VENGEANCE

Dr. Wright's telephone rang early next morning. The doctor was prompt to respond. His practice had not yet reached the stage that rendered the telephone a burden. His young wife stood beside him, listening with eager hope in her wide-open brown eyes.

"Yes," said the doctor. "Oh, it's you. Delighted to hear your ring." "No, not so terribly. The rush doesn't begin till later in the day." "Not at all. What can I do for you?" "Certainly, delighted." "What? Right away?" "Well, say within an hour."

"Who is it?" asked his wife, as the doctor hung up the phone. "A new family?"

"No such luck," replied the doctor. "This has been a frightfully healthy season. But the spring promises a very satisfactory typhoid epidemic."

"Who is it?" said his wife again, impatiently.

"Your friend Mrs. French, inviting me to an expedition into the foreign colony."

"Oh!" She could not keep the disappointment out of her tone. "I think Mrs. French might call some of the other doctors."

"So she does, lots of them. And most of them stand ready to obey her call."

"Well," said the little woman at his side, "I think you are going too much among those awful people."

"Awful people?" exclaimed the doctor. "It's awfully good practice, I know. That is, in certain lines. I can't say there is very much variety. When a really good thing occurs, it is whisked off to the hospital and the big guns get it."

"Well, I don't like your going so much," persisted his wife. "Some day you will get hurt."

"Hurt?" exclaimed the doctor. "Me?"

"Oh, I know you think nothing can hurt you. But a bullet or a knife can do for you as well as for any one else. Supposing that terrible man—what's his name?—Kalmar—had struck you instead of the Polak, where would you be?"

"The question is, where would he be?" said the doctor with a smile. "As for Kalmar, he's not too bad a sort; at least there are others a little worse. I shouldn't be surprised if that fellow Rosenblatt got only a little less than he deserved. Certainly O'Hara let in some light upon his moral ulcers."

"Well, I wish you would drop them, anyway," continued his wife.

"No, you don't," said the doctor. "You know quite well that you would root me out of bed any hour of the night to see any of their kiddies that happened to have a pain in their little tumtums. Between you and Mrs. French I haven't a moment to devote to my large and growing practice."

"What does she want now?" It must be confessed that her tone was slightly impatient.

"Mrs. French has succeeded in getting the excellent Mrs. Blazowski to promise for the tenth time, I believe, to allow some one, preferably myself, to take her eczematic children to the hospital."

"Well, she won't."

"I think it is altogether likely. But why do you think so?"

"Because you have tried before."

"Never."

"Well, Mrs. French has, and you were with her."

"That is correct. But to-day I shall adopt new tactics. Mrs. French's flank movements have broken down. I shall carry the position with a straight frontal attack. And I shall succeed. If not, my dear, that little fur tippet thing which you have so resolutely refused to let your eyes rest upon as we pass the Hudson's Bay, is yours."

"I don't want it a bit," said his wife. "And you know we can't afford it."

"Don't you worry, little girl," said the doctor cheerfully, "practice is looking up. My name is getting into the papers. A few more foreign weddings with attendant killings and I shall be famous."

At the Blazowski shack Mrs. French was waiting the doctor, and in despair. A crowd of children appeared to fill the shack and overflow through the door into the sunny space outside, on the sheltered side of the house.

The doctor made his way through them and passed into the evil-smelling, filthy room. For Mrs. Blazowski found it a task beyond her ability to perform the domestic duties attaching to the care of seven children and a like number of boarders in her single room. Mrs. French was seated on a stool with a little child of three years upon her knee.

"Doctor, don't you think that these children ought to go to the hospital to-day?" she said, as the doctor entered.

"Why, sure thing; they must go. Let's look at them."

He tried to take the little child from Mrs. French's knee, but the little one vehemently objected.

"Well, let's look at you, anyway," said the doctor, proceeding to unwind some filthy rags from the little one's head. "Great Scott!" he exclaimed in a low voice, "this is truly awful!"

The hair was matted with festering scabs. The ears, the eyes, the fingers were full of running sores.

"I had no idea this thing had gone so far," he said in a horrified voice.

"What is it?" said Mrs. French. "Is it—"

"No, not itch. It is the industrious and persevering eczema pusculosum, known to the laity as salt rheum of the domestic variety."

"It has certainly got worse this last week," said Mrs. French.

"Well, this can't go on another day, and I can't treat her here. She must go. Tell your mother," said the doctor in a decided tone to a little girl of thirteen who stood near.

Mrs. Blazowski threw up her hands with voluble protestation. "She says they will not go. She put grease on and make them all right."

"Grease!" exclaimed the doctor. "I should say so, and a good many other things too! Why, the girl's head is alive with them! Heavens above!" said the doctor, turning to Mrs. French, "she's running over with vermin! Let's see the other."

He turned to a girl of five, whose head and face were even more seriously affected with the dread disease.

"Why, bless my soul! This girl will lose her eyesight! Now look here, these children must go to the hospital, and must go now. Tell your mother what I say."

Again the little girl translated, and again the mother made emphatic reply.

"What does she say?"

"She say she not let them go. She fix them herself. Fix them all right."

"Perhaps we better wait, Doctor," interposed Mrs. French. "I'll talk to her and we'll try another day."

"No," said the doctor, catching up a shawl and wrapping it around the little girl, "she's going with me now. There will be a scrap, and you will have to get in. I'll back you up."

As the doctor caught up the little child, the mother shouted, "No, no! Not go!"

"I say yes," said the doctor; "I'll get a policeman and put you all in prison. Tell her."

The threat made no impression upon the mother. On the contrary, as the doctor moved toward the door she seized a large carving-knife and threw herself before him. For a moment or two they stood facing each other, the doctor uncertain what his next move should be, but determined that his plan should not fail this time. It was Mrs. French who interposed. With a smile she laid her hand upon the mother's arm.

"Tell her," she said to the little girl, "that I will go with the children, and I promise that no hurt shall come to them. And I will bring them back again safe. Your mother can come and see them to-morrow—to-day. The hospital is a lovely place. They will have nice toys, dolls, and nice things to eat, and we'll make them better."

Rapidly, almost breathlessly, and with an eager smile on her sweet face, Mrs. French went on to describe the advantages and attractions of the hospital, pausing only to allow the little girl to translate.

At length the mother relented, her face softened. She stepped from the door, laying down her knife upon the table, moved not by the glowing picture of Mrs. French's words, but by the touch upon her arm and the face that smiled into hers. Once more the mother spoke.

"Will you go too?" interpreted the little girl.

"Yes, surely. I go too," she replied.

This brought the mother's final surrender. She seized Mrs. French's hand, and bursting into loud weeping, kissed it again and again. Mrs. French put her arms around the weeping woman, and unshrinking, kissed the tear-stained, dirty face. Dr. Wright looked on in admiring silence.

"You are a dead sport," he said. "I can't play up to that; but you excite my ambition. Get a shawl around the other kiddie and come along, or I'll find myself kissing the bunch."

Once more he started toward the door, but the mother was before him, talking and gesticulating.

"What's the row now?" said the doctor, turning to the little interpreter.

"She says she must dress them, make them clean."

"It's a big order," said the doctor, "but I submit."

With great energy Mrs. Blazowski proceeded to prepare her children for their momentous venture into the world. The washing process was simple enough. From the dish-pan which stood upon the hearth half full of dirty water and some of the breakfast dishes, she took a greasy dish-cloth, wrung it out carefully, and with it proceeded to wash, not untenderly, the festering heads, faces and fingers of her children, resorting from time to time to the dish-pan for a fresh supply of water. This done, she carefully dried the parts thus diligently washed with the handkerchief which she usually wore about her head. Then pinning shawls about their heads, she had her children ready for their departure, and gave them into Mrs. French's charge, sobbing aloud as if she might never see them more.

"Well," said the doctor, as he drove rapidly away, "we're well out of that. I was just figuring what sort of hold would be most fatal to the old lady when you interposed."

"Poor thing!" said Mrs. French. "They're very fond of their children, these Galicians, and they're so suspicious of us. They don't know any better."

As they passed Paulina's house, the little girl Irma ran out from the door.

"My mother want you very bad," she said to Mrs. French.

"Tell her I'll come in this afternoon," said Mrs. French.

"She want you now," replied Irma, with such a look of anxiety upon her face that Mrs. French was constrained to say, "Wait one moment, Doctor. I'll see what it is. I shall not keep you."

She ran into the house, followed by the little girl. The room was full of men who stood about in stolid but not unsympathetic silence, gazing upon Paulina, who appeared to be prostrated with grief. Beside her stood the lad Kalman, the picture of desolation.

"What is it?" cried Mrs. French, running to her. "Tell me what is the matter."

Irma told the story. Early that morning they had gone to the jail, but after waiting for hours they were refused admission by the guard.

"A very cross man send us away," said the girl. "He say he put us in jail too. We can see our fadder no more."

Her words were followed by a new outburst of grief on the part of Paulina and the two children.

"But the Judge said you were to see him," said Mrs. French in surprise. "Wait for me," she added.

She ran out and told the doctor in indignant words what had taken place, a red spot glowing in each white cheek.

"Isn't it a shame?" she cried when she had finished her story.

"Oh, it's something about prison rules and regulations, I guess," said the doctor.

"Prison rules!" exclaimed Mrs. French with wrath rare in her. "I'll go straight to the Judge myself."

"Get in," said the doctor, taking up the lines.

"Where are you going? We can't leave these poor things in this way," the tears gathering in her eyes and her voice beginning to break.

"Not much," said the doctor briskly; "we are evidently in for another scrap. I don't know where you will land me finally, but I'm game to follow your lead. We'll go to the jail."

Mrs. French considered a moment. "Let us first take these children to the hospital and then we shall meet Paulina at the jail."

"All right," said the doctor, "tell them so. I am at your service."

"You are awfully good, Doctor," said the little lady, her sweet smile once more finding its way to her pale face.

"Ain't I, though?" said the doctor. "If the spring were a little further advanced you'd see my wings sprouting. I enjoy this. I haven't had such fun since my last football match. I see the finish of that jail guard. Come on."

Within an hour the doctor and Mrs. French drove up to the jail. There, at the bleak north door, swept by the chill March wind, and away from the genial light of the shining sun, they found Paulina and her children, a shivering, timid, shrinking group, looking pathetically strange and forlorn in their quaint Galician garb.

The pathos of the picture appeared to strike both the doctor and his friend at the same time.

"Brute!" said the doctor, "it's some beast of an understrapper. He might have let them in, anyway. I'll see the head turnkey."

"Isn't it terribly sad?" replied Mrs. French.

The doctor rang the bell at the jail door, prepared for battle.

"I want to see Mr. Cowan."

The guard glanced past the doctor, saw the shrinking group behind him and gruffly announced, "This is not the hour for visitors."

"I want to see Mr. Cowan," repeated the doctor slowly, looking the guard steadily in the eye. "Is he in?"

"Come in," said the guard sullenly, allowing the doctor and his friend to enter, and shutting the door in the faces of the Galicians.

In a few moments Mr. Cowan appeared, a tall athletic man, kindly of face and of manner. He greeted Mrs. French and the doctor warmly.

"Come into the office," he said; "come in."

"Mr. Cowan," said Mrs. French, "there is a poor Galician woman and her children outside the door, the wife and children of the man who was condemned yesterday. The Judge told them they could see the prisoner to-day."

"The hour for visitors," said Mr. Cowan, "is three in the afternoon."

"Could you not let her in now? She has already waited for hours at the door this morning, and on being refused went home broken-hearted. She does not understand our ways and is very timid. I wish you could let her in now while I am here."

Mr. Cowan hesitated. "I should greatly like to oblige you, Mrs. French. You know that. Sit down, and I will see. Let that woman and her children in," he said to the guard.

The guard went sullenly to the door, followed by Mrs. French.

"Come in here," he said in a gruff voice.

Mrs. French hurried past him, took Paulina by the arm, and saying, "Come in and sit down," led her to a bench and sat beside her. "It's all right," she whispered. "I am sure you can see your husband. Tell her," she said to Irma.

In a short time Mr. Cowan came back.

"They may see him," he said. "It is against all discipline, but it is pretty hard to resist Mrs. French," he continued, turning to the doctor.

"It is quite useless trying," said the doctor; "I have long ago discovered that."

"Come," said that little lady, leading Paulina to the door of the cell.

The guard turned the lock, shot back the bolts, opened the door and motioning with his hand, said gruffly to Paulina, "Go in."

The woman looked into the cell in shrinking fear.

"Go on," said Mrs. French in an encouraging voice, patting her on the shoulder, "I will wait here."

Clinging to one another, the woman and children passed in through the door which the guard closed behind them with a reverberating clang. Mrs. French sat on the bench outside, her face cast down, her eyes closed. Now and then through the grating of the door rose and fell a sound of voices mingled with that of sobs and weeping, hearing which, Mrs. French covered her face with her hands, while the tears trickled down through her fingers.

As she sat there, the door-bell rang and two Galician men appeared, seeking admission.

"We come to see Kalmar," said one of them.

Mrs. French came eagerly forward. "Oh, let them come in, please. They are friends of the prisoner. I know them."

Without a word the guard turned from her, strode to the office where Mr. Cowan sat in conversation with the doctor, and in a few moments returned with permission for the men to enter.

"Sit down there," he said, pointing to a bench on the opposite side of the door from that on which Mrs. French was sitting.

Before many minutes had elapsed, the prisoner appeared at the door of his cell with Paulina and his children.

"Would you kindly open the door?" he said in a courteous tone to the guard. "They wish to depart."

The guard went toward the door, followed by Mrs. French, who stood waiting with hands outstretched toward the weeping Paulina. As the door swung open, the children came forth, but upon the threshold Paulina paused, glanced into the cell, ran back and throwing herself at the prisoner's feet, seized his hand and kissed it again and again with loud weeping.

For a single instant the man yielded her his hand, and then in a voice stern but not unkind, he said, "Go. My children are in your keeping. Be faithful."

At once the woman rose and came back to the door where Mrs. French stood waiting for her.

As they passed on, the guard turned to the men and said briefly, "Come."

As they were about to enter the cell, the boy suddenly left Paulina's side, ran to Simon Ketzel and clutching firm hold of his hand said, "Let me go with you."

"Go back," said the guard, but the boy still clung to Ketzel's hand.

"Oh, let him go," said Mrs. French. "He will do no harm." And the guard gave grudging permission.

With a respectful, almost reverential mien, the men entered the cell, knelt before the prisoner and kissed his hand. The moments were precious and there was much to say and do, so Kalmar lost no time.

"I have sent for you," he said, "first to give you my report which you will send back to headquarters."

Over and over again he repeated the words of his report, till he was certain that they had it in sure possession.

"This must go at once," he said.

"At once," replied Simon.

"In a few weeks or months," continued the prisoner in a low voice, "I expect to be free. Siberia could not hold me, and do you think that any prison in this country can? But this report must go immediately."

"Immediately," said Simon again.

"Now," said Kalmar solemnly, "there is one thing more. Our cause fails chiefly because of traitors. In this city is a traitor. My oath demands his death or mine. If I fail, I must pass the work on to another. It is for this I have called you here. You are members of our Brotherhood. What do you say?"

The men stood silent.

"Speak!" said Kalmar in a low stern voice. "Have you no words?"

But still they stood silent and distressed, looking at each other.

"Tell me," said Kalmar, "do you refuse the oath?"