Northern Lights Part 28

"You have a wicked heart, Silver Ta.s.sel. You know well that one man can't handle the boat and the nets also. Is there no one of you--?"

A figure shot forward from a corner. "I will go with Oshondonto," came the voice of Wingo, the waif of the Crees.

The eye of the mikonaree flashed round in contempt on the tribe. Then suddenly it softened, and he said to the lad, "We will go together, Wingo."

Taking the boy by the hand, he ran with him through the rough wind to the sh.o.r.e, launched the canoe on the tossing lake, and paddled away through the tempest.

The bitter winds of an angry spring, the sleet and wet snow of a belated winter, the floating blocks of ice crushing against the side of the boat, the black water swishing over man and boy, the harsh, inclement world near and far.... The pa.s.sage made at last to the nets; the brave Wingo steadying the canoe--a skilful hand sufficing where the strength of a Samson would not have availed; the nets half full, and the breaking cry of joy from the lips of the waif--a cry that pierced the storm and brought back an answering cry from the crowd of Indians on the far sh.o.r.e.... The quarter-hour of danger in the tossing canoe; the nets too heavy to be dragged, and fastened to the thwarts instead; the canoe going sh.o.r.eward jerkily, a cork on the waves with an anchor behind; heavier seas and winds roaring down on them as they slowly near the sh.o.r.e; and at last, in one awful moment, the canoe upset, and the man and the boy in the water....

Then both clinging to the upturned canoe as it is driven near and nearer sh.o.r.e.... The boy washed off once, twice, and the man with his arm round clinging--clinging, as the shrieking storm answers to the calling of the Athabascas on the sh.o.r.e, and drives craft and fish and man and boy down upon the banks; no savage bold enough to plunge in to their rescue.... At last a rope thrown, a drowning man's wrists wound round it, his teeth set in it--and now, at last, a man and a heathen boy, both insensible, being carried to the mikonaree's hut and laid upon two beds, one on either side of the small room, as the red sun goes slowly down.... The two still bodies on bearskins in the hut, and a hundred superst.i.tious Indians flying from the face of death.... The two alone in the light of the flickering fire; the many gone to feast on fish, the price of lives.

But the price was not yet paid, for the man waked from insensibility--waked to see himself with the body of the boy beside him in the red light of the fires.

For a moment his heart stopped beating, he turned sick and faint. Deserted by those for whom he risked his life!... How long had he lain there? What time was it? When was it that he had fought his way to the nets and back again--hours, maybe? And the dead boy there, Wingo, who had risked his life, also dead--how long? His heart leaped--ah, not hours, only minutes, maybe. It was sundown as unconsciousness came on him--Indians would not stay with the dead after sundown. Maybe it was only ten minutes--five minutes--one minute ago since they left him!...

His watch! Shaking fingers drew it out, wild eyes scanned it. It was not stopped. Then it could have only been minutes ago. Trembling to his feet, he staggered over to Wingo, he felt the body, he held a mirror to the lips. Yes, surely there was light moisture on the gla.s.s.

Then began another fight with death--William Rufus Holly struggling to bring to life again Wingo, the waif of of the Crees.

The blood came back to his own heart with a rush as the mad desire to save this life came on him. He talked to the dumb face, he prayed in a kind of delirium, as he moved the arms up and down, as he tilted the body, as he rubbed, chafed, and strove. He forgot he was a missionary, he almost cursed himself. "For them--for cowards, I risked his life, the brave lad with no home! Oh, G.o.d! give him back to me!" he sobbed. "What right had I to risk his life for theirs? I should have shot the first man that refused to go.... Wingo, speak! Wake up! Come back!"

The sweat poured from him in his desperation and weakness. He said to himself that he had put this young life into the hazard without cause. Had he, then, saved the lad from the rapids and Silver Ta.s.sel's brutality only to have him drag fish out of the jaws of death for Silver Ta.s.sel's meal?

It seemed to him that he had been working for hours, though it was in fact only a short time, when the eyes of the lad slowly opened and closed again, and he began to breathe spasmodically. A cry of joy came from the lips of the missionary, and he worked harder still. At last the eyes opened wide, stayed open, saw the figure bent over him, and the lips whispered, "Oshondonto--my master!" as a cup of brandy was held to his lips.

Billy Rufus the cricketer had won the game, and somehow the Reverend William Rufus Holly the missionary never repented the strong language he used against the Athabascas as he was bringing Wingo back to life, though it was not what is called "strictly canonical."

He had conquered the Athabascas forever. Even Silver Ta.s.sel acknowledged his power, and he as industriously spread abroad the report that the mikonaree had raised Wingo from the dead, as he had sown dissension during the famine. But the result was that the missionary had power in the land, and the belief in him was so great that, when Knife-in-the-Wind died, the tribe came to him to raise their chief from the dead. They never quite believed that he could not--not even Silver Ta.s.sel, who now rules the Athabascas and is ruled in turn by William Rufus Holly: which is a very good thing for the Athabascas.

THE HEALING SPRINGS AND THE PIONEERS

He came out of the mysterious South one summer day, driving before him a few sheep, a cow, and a long-eared mule which carried his tent and other necessaries, and camped outside the town on a knoll, at the base of which was a thicket of close shrub. During the first day no one in Jansen thought anything of it, for it was a land of pilgrimage, and hundreds came and went on their journeys in search of free homesteads and good water and pasturage. But when, after three days, he was still there, Nicolle Tera.s.se, who had little to do and an insatiable curiosity, went out to see him. He found a new sensation for Jansen. This is what he said when he came back:

"You want know 'bout him, _bagosh_! Dat is somet'ing to see, dat man--Ingles is his name. Sooch hair--mooch long an' brown, and a leetla beard not so brown, an' a leather sole onto his feet, and a gray coat to his ankles--_oui_, so like dat. An' his voice--_voila_, it is like water in a cave. He is a great man--I dunno not; but he spik at me like dis, 'Is dere sick, and cripple, and stay-in-bed people here dat can't get up?' he say. An' I say, 'Not plenty, but some--_bagosh_! Dere is dat Miss Greet, an' ole Ma'am Drouchy, an' dat young Pete Hayes--an' so on.' 'Well, if they have faith I will heal them,' he spik at me. 'From de Healing Springs dey shall rise to walk,' he say. _Bagosh_, you not t'ink dat true? Den you go see."

So Jansen turned out to see, and besides the man they found a curious thing. At the foot of the knoll, in a s.p.a.ce which he had cleared, was a hot spring that bubbled and rose and sank, and drained away into the thirsty ground. Luck had been with Ingles the Faith Healer. Whether he knew of the existence of this spring, or whether he chanced upon it, he did not say; but while he held Jansen in the palm of his hand, in the feverish days that followed, there were many who attached mysterious significance to it, who claimed for it supernatural origin. In any case, the one man who had known of the existence of this spring was far away from Jansen, and he did not return till a day of reckoning came for the Faith Healer.

Meanwhile, Jansen made pilgrimage to the Springs of Healing, and at unexpected times Ingles suddenly appeared in the town, and stood at street corners; and in his "Patmian voice," as Flood Rawley the lawyer called it, warned the people to flee their sins, and, purifying their hearts, learn to cure all ills of mind and body, the weaknesses of the sinful flesh and the "ancient evil" in their souls, by faith that saves.

"'_Is not the life more than meat?_'" he asked them. "And if, peradventure, there be those among you who have true belief in hearts all purged of evil, and yet are maimed, or sick of body, come to me, and I will lay my hands upon you, and I will heal you." Thus he cried.

There were those so wrought upon by his strange eloquence and spiritual pa.s.sion, so hypnotized by his physical and mental exaltation, that they rose up from the hand-laying and the prayer eased of their ailments.

Others he called upon to lie in the hot spring at the foot of the hill for varying periods, before the laying-on of hands, and these also, crippled or rigid with troubles of the bone, announced that they were healed.

People flocked from other towns, and though, to some who had been cured, their pains and sickness returned, there were a few who bore perfect evidence to his teaching and healing, and followed him, "converted and consecrated," as though he were a new Messiah. In this corner of the West was such a revival as none could remember--not even those who had been to camp-meetings in the East in their youth, and had seen the Spirit descend upon hundreds and draw them to the anxious seat.

Then came the great sensation--the Faith Healer converted Laura Sloly.

Upon which Jansen drew its breath painfully; for, while it was willing to bend to the inspiration of the moment, and to be swept on a tide of excitement into that enchanted field called Imagination, it wanted to preserve its inst.i.tutions--and Laura Sloly had come to be an inst.i.tution.

Jansen had always plumed itself, and smiled, when she pa.s.sed; and even now the most sentimentally religious of them inwardly antic.i.p.ated the time when the town would return to its normal condition; and that condition would not be normal if there were any change in Laura Sloly. It mattered little whether most people were changed or not, because one state of their minds could not be less or more interesting than another; but a change in Laura Sloly could not be for the better.

Her father had come to the West in the early days, and had prospered by degrees until a town grew up beside his ranch; and though he did not acquire as much permanent wealth from this golden chance as might have been expected, and lost much he did make by speculation, still he had his rich ranch left, and it and he and Laura were part of the history of Jansen. Laura had been born at Jansen before even it had a name. Next to her father she was the oldest inhabitant, and she had a prestige which was given to no one else.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FAITH HEALER]

Everything had conspired to make her a figure of moment and interest. She was handsome in almost a mannish sort of way, being of such height and straightness, and her brown eyes had a depth and fire in which more than a few men had drowned themselves. Also, once she had saved a settlement by riding ahead of a marauding Indian band to warn their intended victims, and had averted another tragedy of pioneer life. Pioneers proudly told strangers to Jansen of the girl of thirteen who rode a hundred and twenty miles without food, and sank inside the palisade of the Hudson Bay Company's fort, as the gates closed upon the settlers taking refuge, the victim of brain fever at last. _Cerebro-spinal meningitis_, the doctor from Winnipeg called it, and the memory of that time when men and women would not sleep till her crisis was past was still fresh on the tongues of all.

Then she had married at seventeen, and, within a year, had lost both her husband and her baby, a child bereaved of her Playmates--for her husband had been but twenty years old and was younger far than she in everything.

And since then, twelve years before, she had seen generations of lovers pa.s.s into the land they thought delectable; and their children flocked to her, hung about her, were carried off by her to the ranch, and kept for days, against the laughing protests of their parents. Flood Rawley called her the Pied Piper of Jansen, and, indeed, she had a voice that fluted and piped, and yet had so whimsical a note that the hardest faces softened at the sound of it; and she did not keep its best notes for the few. She was impartial, almost impersonal; no woman was her enemy, and every man was her friend--and nothing more. She had never had an accepted lover since the day her Playmates left her. Every man except one had given up hope that he might win her; and though he had been gone from Jansen for two years, and had loved her since the days before the Playmates came and went, he never gave up hope, and was now to return and say again what he had mutely said for years--what she understood, and he knew she understood.

Tim Denton had been a wild sort in his brief day. He was a rough diamond, but he was a diamond, and was typical of the West--its heart, its courage, its freedom, and its force; capable of exquisite gentleness strenuous to exaggeration, with a very primitive religion, and the only religion Tim knew was that of human nature. Jansen did not think Tim good enough--not within a comet shot--for Laura Sloly; but they thought him better than any one else.

But now Laura was a convert to the prophet of the Healing Springs, and those people who still retained their heads in the eddy of religious emotion were in despair. They dreaded to meet Laura; they kept away from the "protracted meetings," but were eager to hear about her and what she said and did. What they heard allayed their worst fears. She still smiled, and seemed as cheerful as before, they heard, and she neither spoke nor prayed in public, but she led the singing always. Now the anxious and the sceptical and the reactionary ventured out to see and hear; and seeing and hearing gave them a satisfaction they hardly dared express. She was more handsome than ever, and if her eyes glistened with a light they had never seen before, and awed them, her lips still smiled, and the old laugh came when she spoke to them. Their awe increased. This was "getting religion"

with a difference.

But presently they received a shock. A whisper grew that Laura was in love with the Faith Healer. Some woman's instinct drove straight to the centre of a disconcerting possibility, and in consternation she told her husband; and Jansen husbands had a freemasonry of gossip. An hour, and all Jansen knew, or thought they knew; and the "saved" rejoiced; and the rest of the population, represented by Nicolle Tera.s.se at one end and Flood Rawley at the other, flew to arms. No vigilance committee was ever more determined and secret and organized than the unconverted civic patriots who were determined to restore Jansen to its old-time condition. They pointed out cold-bloodedly that the Faith Healer had failed three times where he had succeeded once; and that, admitting the successes, there was no proof that his religion was their cause. There were such things as hypnotism and magnetism and will-power, and abnormal mental stimulus on the part of the healed--to say nothing of the Healing Springs.

Carefully laying their plans, they quietly spread the rumor that Ingles had promised to restore to health old Mary Jewell, who had been bedridden ten years, and had sent word and prayed to have him lay his hands upon her--Catholic though she was. The Faith Healer, face to face with this supreme and definite test, would have retreated from it but for Laura Sloly. She expected him to do it, believed that he could, said that he would, herself arranged the day and the hour, and sang so much exaltation into him that at last a spurious power seemed to possess him. He felt that there had entered into him something that could be depended on, not the mere flow of natural magnetism fed by an out-door life and a temperament of great emotional force and chance and suggestion--and other things. If, at first, he had influenced Laura, some ill-controlled, latent idealism in him, working on a latent poetry and spirituality in her, somehow bringing her into nearer touch with her lost Playmates than she had been in the long years that had pa.s.sed; she, in turn, had made his unrationalized brain reel; had caught him up into a higher air, on no wings of his own; had added another lover to her company of lovers--and the first impostor she had ever had. She who had known only honest men as friends, in one blind moment lost her perspicuous sense; her instinct seemed asleep. She believed in the man and in his healing. Was there anything more than that?

The day of the great test came, hot, brilliant, vivid. The air was of a delicate sharpness, and, as it came toward evening, the glamour of an August when the reapers reap was upon Jansen; and its people gathered round the house of Mary Jewell to await the miracle of faith. Apart from the emotional many who sang hymns and spiritual songs were a few determined men, bent on doing justice to Jansen though the heavens might fall. Whether or no Laura Sloly was in love with the Faith Healer, Jansen must look to its own honor--and hers. In any case, this peripatetic saint at Sloly's Ranch--the idea was intolerable; women must be saved in spite of themselves.

Laura was now in the house by the side of the bedridden Mary Jewell, waiting, confident, smiling, as she held the wasted hand on the coverlet.

With her was a minister of the Baptist persuasion, who was swimming with the tide, and who approved of the Faith Healer's immersions in the hot Healing Springs; also a medical student who had pretended belief in Ingles, and two women weeping with unnecessary remorse for human failings of no dire kind. The windows were open, and those outside could see.

Presently, in a lull of the singing, there was a stir in the crowd, and then sudden loud greetings--

"My, if it ain't Tim Denton! Jerusalem! You back, Tim!"

These and other phrases caught the ear of Laura Sloly in the sick-room. A strange look flashed across her face, and the depth of her eyes was troubled for a moment, as to the face of the old comes a tremor at the note of some long-forgotten song. Then she steadied herself and waited, catching bits of the loud talk which still floated toward her from without.

"What's up? Some one getting married--or a legacy, or a saw-off? Why, what a lot of Sunday-go-to-meeting folks _to_ be sure!" Tim laughed loudly.

After which the quick tongue of Nicolle Tera.s.se: "You want know? _Tiens_, be quiet; here he come. He cure you body and soul, ver' queeck--yes."

The crowd swayed and parted, and slowly, bare head uplifted, face looking to neither right nor left, the Faith Healer made his way to the door of the little house. The crowd hushed. Some were awed, some were overpoweringly interested, some were cruelly patient. Nicolle Tera.s.se and others were whispering loudly to Tim Denton. That was the only sound, until the Healer got to the door. Then, on the steps, he turned to the mult.i.tude.

"Peace be to you all, and upon this house," he said, and stepped through the doorway.

Tim Denton, who had been staring at the face of the Healer, stood for an instant like one with all his senses arrested. Then he gasped and exclaimed, "Well, I'm eternally--!" and broke off with a low laugh, which was at first mirthful, and then became ominous and hard.

"Oh, magnificent!--magnificent!--jerickety!" he said into the sky above him.

His friends who were not "saved" closed in on him to find the meaning of his words, but he pulled himself together, looked blankly at them, and asked them questions. They told him so much more than he cared to hear that his face flushed a deep red--the bronze of it most like the color of Laura Sloly's hair; then he turned pale. Men saw that he was roused beyond any feeling in themselves.