The Country Beyond Part 8

A thrill of nervousness swept through Jolly Roger. He waited half an hour, three-quarters, an hour--after the moon had risen. And Nada did not come. The nervousness grew in him, and he moved out into the moon-glow, and slowly and watchfully followed the edge of the rock-shadows until he came to the fringe of cedars and spruce behind the cabin. Peter, careful not to snap a twig under his paws, followed closely. They came to the cabin, and there--very distinctly--Jolly Roger McKay heard the low moaning of a voice.

He edged his way to the window, and looked in.

Crouched beside a chair in the middle of the floor was Jed Hawkins's woman. She was moaning, and her thin body was rocking back and forth, and with her hands clasped at her bony breast she was staring at the open door. With a shock Jolly Roger saw that except for the strangely crying old woman the cabin was empty. Sudden fear chilled his blood--a fear that scarcely took form before he was at the door, and in the cabin. The woman's eyes were red and wild as she stared at him, and she stopped her moaning, and her hands unclasped. Jolly Roger went nearer and bent over her and shivered at the half-mad terror he saw in her face.

"Where is Nada?" he demanded. "Tell me--where is she?"

"Gone, gone, gone," crooned the woman, clutching her hands at her breast again. "Jed has taken her--taken her to Mooney's shack, over near the railroad. Oh, my G.o.d!--I tried to keep her, but I couldn't. He dragged her away, and tonight he's sellin' her to Mooney--the devil--the black brute--the tie-cutter--"

She choked, and began rocking herself back and forth, and the moaning came again from her thin lips. Fiercely McKay gripped her by the shoulder.

"Mooney's shack--where?" he cried. "Quick! Tell me!"

"A thousand--a thousand--he's givin' a thousand dollars to git her in the shack--alone," she cried in a dull, sing-song voice. "The road out there leads straight to it. Near the railroad. A mile. Two miles. I tried to keep him from doin' it, but I couldn't--I couldn't--"

Jolly Roger heard no more. He was out of the door, and running across the open, with Peter racing close behind him. They struck the road, and Jolly Roger swung into it, and continued to run until the breath was out of his lungs. And all that time the things Nada had told him about Jed Hawkins and the tie-cutter were rushing madly through his brain. An hour or two ago, when the words had come from her lips in the jackpine thicket, he had believed that Nada was frightened, that a distorted fear possessed her, that such a thing as she had half confessed to him was too monstrous to happen. And now he cried out aloud, a groaning, terrible cry as he went on. Hawkins and Nada had reached Mooney's shack long before this, a shack buried deep in the wilderness, a shack from which no cries could be heard--

Peter, trotting behind, whined at what he heard in Jolly Roger McKay's panting voice. And the moon shone on them as they staggered and ran, and here and there dark clouds were racing past the face of it, and the slumberous whisper of storm grew nearer in the air. And then came the time when one of the dark clouds rode under the moon and the two ran on in darkness. The cloud pa.s.sed, and the moon flooded the road again with light--and suddenly Jolly Roger stopped in his tracks, and his heart almost broke in the strain of that moment.

Ahead of them, staggering toward them, sobbing as she came, was Nada.

Jolly Roger's blazing eyes saw everything in that vivid light of the moon. Her hair was tangled and twisted about her shoulders and over her breast. One arm was bare where the sleeve had been torn away, and her girlish breast gleamed white where her waist had been stripped half from her body. And then she saw Jolly Roger in the trail, with wide-open, reaching arms, and with a cry such as Peter had never heard come from her lips before she ran into them, and held up her face to him in the yellow moon-light. In her eyes--great, tearless, burning pools--he saw the tragedy and yet it was only that, and not horror, not despair, _not_ the other thing. His arms closed crushingly about her. Her slim body seemed to become a part of him. Her hot lips reached up and clung to his.

And then,

"Did--he get you--to--Mooney's shack--" He felt her body stiffen against him.

"No," she panted. "I fought--every inch. He dragged me, and hit me, and tore my clothes--but I fought. And up there--in the trail--he turned his back for a moment, when he thought I was done, and I hit him with a club. And he's there, now, on his back--"

She did not finish. Jolly Roger thrust her out from him, arm's length.

A cloud under the moon hid his face. But his voice was low, and terrible.

"Nada, go to the Missioner's as fast as you can," he said, fighting to speak coolly. "Take Peter--and go. You will make it before the storm breaks. I am going back to have a few words with Jed Hawkins--alone.

Then I will join you, and the Missioner will marry us--"

The cloud was gone, and he saw joy and radiance in her face. Fear had disappeared. Her eyes were luminous with the golden glow of the night.

Her red lips were parted, entreating him with the lure of their purity and love, and for a moment he held her close in his arms again, kissing her as he might have kissed an angel, while her little hands stroked his face, and she laughed softly and strangely in her happiness--the wonder of a woman's soul rising swiftly out of the sweetness of her girlhood.

And then Jolly Roger set her firmly in the direction she was to go.

"Hurry, little girl," he said. "Hurry--before the storm breaks!"

She went, calling Peter softly, and Jolly Roger strode down the trail, not once looking back, and bent only upon the vengeance he would this night wreak upon the two lowest brutes in creation. Never before had he felt the desire to kill. But he felt that desire now. Before the night was much older he would do unto Hawkins and Mooney as Hawkins had done unto Peter. He would leave them alive, but broken and crippled and forever punished.

And then he stumbled over something in another darkening of the moon.

He stopped, and the light came again, and he looked down into the upturned face of Jed Hawkins. It was a distorted and twisted face, and its one eye was closed. The body did not move. And close to the head was the club which Nada had used.

Jolly Roger laughed grimly. Fate was kind to him in making a half of his work so easy. But he wanted Hawkins to rouse himself first. Roughly he stirred him with the toe of his boot.

"Wake up, you fiend," he said. "I'm going to break your bones, your arms, your legs, just as you broke Peter--and that poor old woman back in the cabin. Wake up!"

Jed Hawkins made no stir. He was strangely limp. For many seconds Jolly Roger stood looking down at him, his eyes growing wider, more staring.

Darkness came again. It was an inky blackness this time, like a blotter over the world. Low thunder came out of the west. The tree-tops whispered in a frightened sort of way. And Jolly Roger could hear his heart beating. He dropped upon his knees, and his hands moved over Jed Hawkins. For a s.p.a.ce not even Peter could have heard his movement or his breath.

In the ebon darkness he rose to his feet, and the night--lifelessly still for a moment--heard the one choking word that came from his lips.

"Dead!"

And there he stood, the heat of his rage changing to an icy chill, his heart dragging within him like a chunk of lead, his breath choking in his throat. Jed Hawkins was dead! He was growing stiff there in the black trail. He had ceased to breathe. He had ceased to be a part of life. And the wind, rising a little with the coming of storm, seemed to whisper and chortle over the horrible thing, and the lone wolf in Indian Tom's swamp howled weirdly, as if he smelled death.

Jolly Roger McKay's finger-nails dug into the flesh of his palms. If he had killed the human viper at his feet, if his own hands had meted out his punishment, he would not have felt the clammy terror that wrapped itself about him in the darkness. But he had come too late. It was Nada who had killed Jed Hawkins. Nada, with her woman's soul just born in all its glory, had taken the life of her foster-father. And Canadian law knew no excuse for killing.

The chill crept to his finger-tips, and unconsciously, in a childish sort of way, he sobbed between his clenched teeth. The thunder was rolling nearer, and it was like a threatening voice, a deep-toned booming of a thing inevitable and terrible. He felt the air shivering about him, and suddenly something moved softly against his foot, and he heard a questioning whine. It was Peter--come back to him in this hour when he needed a living thing to give him courage. With a groan he dropped on his knees again, and clutched his hands about Peter.

"My G.o.d," he breathed huskily. "Peter, she's killed him. And she mustn't know. We mustn't let anyone know--"

And there he stopped, and Peter felt him growing rigid as stone, and for many moments Jolly Roger's body seemed as lifeless as that of the man who lay with up-turned face in the trail. Then he fumbled in a pocket and found a pencil and an old envelope. And on the envelope, with the darkness so thick he could not see his hand, he scribbled, "I killed Jed Hawkins," and after that he signed his name firmly and fully--"Jolly Roger McKay."

Then he tucked the envelope under Jed Hawkins' body, where the rain could not get at it. And after that, to make the evidence complete, he covered the dead man's face with his coat.

"We've got to do it, Peter," he said, and there was a new note in his voice as he stood up on his feet again. "We've got to do it--for her.

We'll--tell her we caught Jed Hawkins in the trail and killed him."

Caution, cleverness, his old mental skill returned to him. He dragged the boot-legger's body to a new spot, turned it face down, threw the club away, and kicked up the earth with his boots to give signs of a struggle.

The note in his voice was triumph--triumph in spite of its heartbreak--as he turned back over the trail after he had finished, and spoke to Peter.

"We may have done some things we oughtn't to, _Pied-Bot_," he said, "but tonight I sort o' think we've tried to make--rest.i.tution. And if they hang us, which they probably will some time, I sort o' think it'll make us happy to know we've done it--for her. Eh, _Pied-Bot_?"

And the moon sailed out for a s.p.a.ce, and shone on the dead whiteness of Jolly Roger's face. And on the lips of that face was a strange, cold smile, a smile of mastery, of exaltation, and the eyes were looking straight ahead--the eyes of a man who had made his sacrifice for a thing more precious to him than his G.o.d.

Only now and then did the moon gleam through the slow-moving ma.s.ses of black cloud when he came to the edge of the Indian settlement clearing three miles away, where stood the cabin of the Missioner. The storm had not broken, but seemed holding back its forces for one mighty onslaught upon the world. The thunder was repressed, and the lightning held in leash, with escaping flashes of it occasionally betraying the impending ambuscades of the sky.

The clearing itself was a blot of stygian darkness, with a yellow patch of light in the center of it--the window of the Missioner's cabin. And Jolly Roger stood looking at it for a s.p.a.ce, as a carven thing of rock might have stared. His heart was dead. His soul crushed. His dream broken. There remained only his brain, his mind made up, his worship for the girl--a love that had changed from a thing of joy to a fire of agony within him. Straight ahead he looked, knowing there was only one thing for him to do. And only one. There was no alternative. No hope.

No change of fortune that even the power of G.o.d might bring about. What lay ahead of him was inevitable.

After all, there is something unspeakable in the might and glory of dying for one's country--or for a great love. And Jolly Roger McKay felt that strength as he strode through the blackness, and knocked at the door, and went in to face Nada and the little old gray-haired Missioner in the lampglow.

Swift as one of the flashes of lightning in the sky the anxiety and fear had gone out of Nada's face, and in an instant it was flooded with the joy of his coming. She did not mark the strange change in him, but went to him as she had gone to him in the trail, and Jolly Roger's arms closed about her, but gently this time, and very tenderly, as he might have held a little child he was afraid of hurting. Then she felt the chill of his lips as she pressed her own to them. Startled, she looked up into his eyes. And as he had done in the trail, so now Jolly Roger stood her away from him, and faced the Missioner. In a cold, hard voice he told what had happened to Nada that evening, and of the barbarous effort Jed Hawkins had made to sell her to Mooney. Then, from a pocket inside his shirt, he drew out a small, flat leather wallet, and thrust it in the little Missioner's hand.

"There's close to a thousand dollars in that," he said. "It's mine. And I'm giving it to you--for Nada. I want you to keep her, and care for her, and mebby some day--"

With both her hands Nada clutched his arm. Her eyes had widened. Swift pallor had driven the color from her face, and a broken cry was in her voice.

"I'm goin' with you," she protested. "I'm goin' with you--and Peter!"

"You can't--now," he said. "I've got to go alone, Nada. I went back--and I killed Jed Hawkins."

Over the roof of the cabin rolled a crash of thunder. As the explosion of it rocked the floor under their feet, Jolly Roger pointed to a door, and said,