The Country Beyond Part 9

"Father, if you will leave us alone--just a minute--"

White-faced, clutching the wallet, the little gray Missioner nodded, and went to the door, and as he opened it and entered into the darkness of the other room he saw Jolly Roger McKay open wide his arms, and the girl go into them. After that the storm broke. The rain descended in a deluge upon the cabin roof. The black night was filled with the rumble and roar and the hissing lightning-flare of pent-up elements suddenly freed of bondage. And in the darkness and tumult the Missioner stood, a little gray man of tragedy, of deeply buried secrets, a man of prayer and of faith in G.o.d--his heart whispering for guidance and mercy as he waited. The minutes pa.s.sed. Five. Ten. And then there came a louder roaring of the storm, shut off quickly, and the little Missioner knew that a door was opened--and closed.

He lifted the latch, and looked out again into the lampglow. Huddled at the side of a chair on the floor, her arms and face buried in the l.u.s.trous, disheveled ma.s.s of her shining hair--lay Nada, and close beside her was Peter. He went to her. Tenderly he knelt down beside her. His thin arm went about her, and as the storm raved and shrieked above them he tried to comfort her--and spoke of G.o.d.

And through that storm, his head bowed, his heart gone, went Jolly Roger McKay--heading north.

CHAPTER VIII

Peter, thrust back from the door through which through which his master had gone, listened vainly for the sound of returning footsteps in the beat of rain and the crash of thunder outside. A strange thing had burned itself into his soul, a thing that made his flesh quiver and set hot fires running in his blood. As a dog sometimes senses the stealthy approach of death, so he began to sense the tragedy of this night that had brought with it not only a chaos of blackness and storm, but an anguish which roused an answering whimper in his throat as he turned toward Nada.

She was crumpled with her head in her arms, where she had flung herself with Jolly Roger's last kiss of worship on her lips, and she was sobbing like a child with its heart broken. And beside her knelt the old gray Missioner, man of G.o.d in the deep forest, who stroked her hair with his thin hand, whispering courage and consolation to her, with the wind and rain beating overhead and the windows rattling to the accompaniment of ghostly voices that shrieked and wailed in the tree-tops outside.

Peter trembled at the sobbing, but his heart and his desire were with the man who had gone. In his unreasoning little soul it was Jed Hawkins who was rattling the windows with his unseen hands and who was pounding at the door with the wind, and who was filling the black night with its menace and fear. He hated this man, who lay back in the trail with his lifeless face turned up to the deluge that poured out of the sky. And he was afraid of the man, even as he hated him, and he believed that Nada was afraid of him, and that because of her fear she was crying there in the middle of the floor, with Father John patting her shoulder and stroking her hair, and saying things to her which he could not understand. He wanted to go to her. He wanted to feel himself close against her, as Nada had held him so often in those hours when she had unburdened her grief and her unhappiness to him. But even stronger than this desire was the one to follow his master.

He went to the door, and thrust his nose against the crack at the bottom of it. He felt the fierceness of the wind fighting to break in, and the broken mist of it filled his nostrils. But there came no scent of Jolly Roger McKay. For a moment he struggled at the crack with his paws. Then he flopped himself down, his heart beating fast, and fixed his eyes inquiringly on Nada and the Missioner.

His four and a half months of life in the big wilderness, and his weeks of constant comradeship with Jolly Roger, had developed in him a brain that was older than his body. No process of reasoning could impinge upon him the fact that his master was an outlaw, but with the swift experiences of tragedy and hiding and never-ceasing caution had come instinctive processes which told him almost as much as reason. He knew something was wrong tonight. It was in the air. He breathed it. It thrilled in the crash of thunder, in the lightning fire, in the mighty hands of the wind rocking the cabin and straining at the windows. And vaguely the knowledge gripped him that the dead man back in the trail was responsible for it all, and that because of this something that had happened his mistress was crying and his master was gone. And he believed he should also have gone with Jolly Roger into the blackness and mystery of the storm, to fight with him against the one creature in all the world he hated--the dead man who lay back in the thickness of gloom between the forest walls.

And the Missioner was saying to Nada, in a quiet, calm voice out of which the tragedies of years had burned all excitement and pa.s.sion:

"G.o.d will forgive him, my child. In His mercy He will forgive Roger McKay, because he killed Jed Hawkins to save YOU. But man will not forgive. The law has been hunting him because he is an outlaw, and to outlawry he has added what the law will call murder. But G.o.d will not look at it in that way. He will look into the heart of the man, the man who sacrificed himself--"

And then, fiercely, Nada struck up the Missioner's comforting hand, and Peter saw her young face white as star-dust in the lampglow.

"I don't care what G.o.d thinks," she cried pa.s.sionately. "G.o.d didn't do right today. Mister Roger told me everything, that he was an outlaw, an' I oughtn't to marry him. But I didn't care. I loved him. I could hide with him. An' we were coming to have you marry us tonight when G.o.d let Jed Hawkins drag me away, to sell me to a man over on the railroad--an' it was G.o.d who let Mister Roger go back and kill him. I tell you He didn't do right! He didn't--he didn't--because Mister Roger brought me the first happiness I ever knew, an' I loved him, an' he loved me--an' G.o.d was wicked to let him kill Jed Hawkins--"

Her voice cried out, a woman's soul broken in a girl's body, and Peter whimpered and watched the Missioner as he raised Nada to her feet and went with her into his bedroom, where a few minutes before he had lighted a lamp. And Peter crept in quietly after them, and when the Missioner had gone and closed the door, leaving them alone in their tragedy, Nada seemed to see him for the first time and slowly she reached out her arms.

"Peter!" she whispered. "Peter--Peter--"

In the minutes that followed, Peter could feel her heart beating.

Clutched against her breast he looked up at the white, beautiful face, the trembling throat, the wide-open blue eyes staring at the one black window between them and the outside night. A lull had come in the storm. It was quiet and ominous stillness, and the ticking of a clock, old and gray like the Missioner himself, filled the room. And Nada, seated on the edge of Father John's bed, no longer looked like the young girl of "seventeen goin' on eighteen." That afternoon, in the hidden jackpine open, with its sweet-scented jasmines, its violets and its crimson strawberries under their feet, the soul of a woman had taken possession of her body. In that hour the first happiness of her life had come to her. She had heard Jolly Roger McKay tell her those things which she already knew--that he was an outlaw, and that he was hiding down on the near-edge of civilization because the Royal Mounted were after him farther north--and that he was not fit to love her, and that it was a crime to let her love him. It was then the soul of the woman had come to her in all its triumph. She had made her choice, definitely and decisively, without hesitation and without fear. And now, as she stared unseeingly at the window against which the rain was beating, the woman in her girlish body rose in her mightier than in the hour of her happiness, fighting to find a way--crying out for the man she loved.

Her mind swept back in a single flash through all the years she had lived, through her years of unhappiness and torment as the foster-girl of Jed Hawkins and his broken, beaten wife; through summers and winters that had seemed ages to her, eternities of desolation, of heartache, of loneliness, with the big wilderness her one friend on earth. As the window rattled in a fresh blast of storm, she thought of the day months ago when she had accidentally stumbled upon the hiding-place of Roger McKay. Since that day he had been her G.o.d, and she had lived in a paradise. He had been father, mother, brother, and at last--what she most yearned for--a lover to her. And this day, when for the first time he had held her in his arms, when the happiness of all the earth had reached out to them, G.o.d had put it into Jed Hawkins' heart to destroy her--and Jolly Roger had killed him!

With a sharp little cry she sprang to her feet, so suddenly that Peter fell with a thump to the floor. He looked up at her, puzzled, his jaws half agape. She was breathing quickly. Her slender body was quivering.

Suddenly Peter saw the fire in her eyes and the flame that was rushing into her white cheeks. Then she turned to him, and panted in a wild little whisper, so low that the Missioner could not hear:

"Peter, I was wrong. G.o.d wasn't wicked to let Mister Roger kill Jed Hawkins. He oughta been killed. An' G.o.d meant him to be killed.

Peter--Peter--we don't care if he's an outlaw! We're goin' with him.

We're goin'--goin'--"

She sprang to the window, and Peter was at her heels as she strained at it with all her strength, and he could hear her sobbing:

"We're goin' with him, Peter. We're goin'--if we die for it!"

An inch at a time she pried the window up. The storm beat in. A gust of wind blew out the light, but in the last flare of it Nada saw a knife in an Eskimo sheath hanging on the wall. She groped for it, and clutched it in her hand as she climbed through the window and dropped to the soggy ground beneath. In a single leap Peter followed her.

Blackness swallowed them as they turned toward the trail leading north--the only trail which Jolly Roger could travel on a night like this. They heard the voice of the Missioner calling from the window behind them. Then a crash of thunder set the earth rolling under their feet, and the lull in the storm came to an end. The sky split open with the vivid fire of lightning. The trees wailed and whined, the rain fell again in a smothering deluge, and through it Nada ran, gripping the knife as her one defense against the demons of darkness--and always close at her side ran Peter.

He could not see her in that pitchy blackness, except when the lightning flashes came. Then she was like a ghostly wraith, with drenched clothes clinging to her until she seemed scarcely dressed, her wet hair streaming and her wide, staring eyes looking straight ahead.

After the lightning flashes, when the world was darkest, he could hear the stumbling tread of her feet and the panting of her breath, and now and then the swish of brush as it struck across her face and breast.

The rain had washed away the scent of his master's feet but he knew they were following Jolly Roger, and that the girl was running to overtake him. In him was the desire to rush ahead, to travel faster through the night, but Nada's stumbling feet and her panting breath and the strange white pictures he saw of her when the sky split open with fire held him back. Something told him that Nada must reach Jolly Roger. And he was afraid she would stop. He wanted to bark to give her encouragement, as he had often barked in their playful races in the green plain-lands on the farther side of Cragg's Ridge. But the rain choked him. It beat down upon him with the weight of heavy hands, it slushed up into his face from pools in the trail and drove the breath from him when he attempted to open his jaws. So he ran close--so close that at times Nada felt the touch of his body against her.

In these first minutes of her fight to overtake the man she loved Nada heard but one voice--a voice crying out from her heart and brain and soul, a voice rising above the tumult of thunder and wind, urging her on, whipping the strength from her frail body in pitiless exhortation.

Jolly Roger was less than half an hour ahead of her. And she must overtake him--quickly--before the forests swallowed him, before he was gone from her life forever.

The wall of blackness against which she ran did not frighten her. When the brush tore at her face and hair she swung free of it, and stumbled on. Twice she ran blindly into broken trees that lay across her path, and dragged her bruised body through their twisted tops, moaning to Peter and clutching tightly to the sheathed knife in her hand. And the wild spirits that possessed the night seemed to gather about her, and over her, exulting in the helplessness of their victim, shrieking in weird and savage joy at the discovery of this human plaything struggling against their might. Never had Peter heard thunder as he heard it now. It rocked the earth under his feet. It filled the world with a ceaseless rumble, and the lightning came like flashes from swift-loading guns, and with it all a terrific a.s.sault of wind and rain that at last drove Nada down in a crumpled heap, panting for breath, with hands groping out wildly for him.

Peter came to them, sodden and shivering. His warm tongue found the palm of her hand, and for a s.p.a.ce Nada hugged him close to her, while she bowed her head until her drenched curls became a part of the mud and water of the trail. Peter could hear her sobbing for breath. And then suddenly, there came a change. The thunder was sweeping eastward.

The lightning was going with it. The wind died out in wailing sobs among the treetops, and the rain fell straight down. Swiftly as its fury had come, the July storm was pa.s.sing. And Nada staggered to her feet again and went on.

Her mind began to react with the lessening of the storm, dragging itself out quickly from under the oppression of fear and shock. She began to reason, and with that reason the beginning of faith and confidence gave her new strength. She knew that Jolly Roger would take this trail, for it was the one trail leading from the Missioner's cabin through the thick forest country north. And in half an hour he would not travel far. The thrilling thought came to her that possibly he had sought shelter in the lee of a big tree trunk during the fury of the storm. If he had done that he would be near, very near. She paused in the trail and gathered her breath, and cried out his name. Three times she called it, and only the low whine in Peter's throat came in answer.

Twice again during the next ten minutes she cried out as loudly as she could into the darkness. And still no answer came back to her through the gloom ahead.

The trail had dipped, and she felt the deepening slush of swamp-mire under her feet. She sank in it to her shoe-tops, and stumbled into pools knee-deep, and Peter wallowed in it to his belly. A quarter of an hour they fought through it to the rising ground beyond. And by that time the last of the black storm clouds had pa.s.sed overhead. The rain had ceased. The rumble of thunder came more faintly. There was no lightning, and the tree-tops began to whisper softly, as if rejoicing in the pa.s.sing of the wind. About them--everywhere--they could hear the run and drip of water, the weeping of the drenched trees, the gurgle of flooded pools, and the trickle of tiny rivulets that splashed about their feet. Through a rift in the breaking clouds overhead came a pa.s.sing flash of the moon.

"We'll find him now, Peter," moaned the girl. "We'll find him--now. He can't be very far ahead--"

And Peter waited, holding his breath, listening for an answer to the cry that went out for Jolly Roger McKay.

The glory of July midnight, with a round, full moon straight overhead, followed the stress of storm. The world had been lashed and inundated, every tree whipped of its rot and slag, every blade of gra.s.s and flower washed clean. Out of the earth rose sweet smells of growing life, the musky fragrance of deep moss and needle-mold, and through the clean air drifted faintly the aroma of cedar and balsam and the subtle tang of unending canopies and glistening tapestries of evergreen breathing into the night. The deep forest seemed to tremble with the presence of an invisible and mysterious life--life that was still, yet wide-awake, breathing, watchful, drinking in the rejuvenating tonic of the air which had so quietly followed thunder and lightning and the roar of wind and rain. And the moon, like a queen who had so ordered these things, looked down in a mighty triumph. Her radiance, without dust or fog or forest-smoke to impede its way, was like the mellow glow of half-day. It streamed through the treetops in paths of gold and silver, throwing dark shadows where it failed to penetrate, and gathering in wide pools where its floods poured through broad rifts in the roofs of the forest. And the trail, leading north, was like a river of shimmering silver, splitting the wilderness from earth to sky.

In this trail, clearly made in the wet soil, were Jolly Roger's foot-prints, and in a wider s.p.a.ce, where at some time a trapper had cleared himself a spot for his tepee or shack, Jolly Roger had paused to rest after his fight through the storm--and had then continued on his way. And into this clearing, three hours after they left the Missioner's cabin, came Nada and Peter.

They came slowly, the girl a slim wraith in the moon-light; in the open they stood for a moment, and Peter's heart weighed heavily within him as his mistress cried out once more for Jolly Roger. Her voice rose only in a sob, and ended in a sob. The last of her strength was gone.

Her little figure swayed, and her face was white and haggard, and in her drawn lips and staring eyes was the agony of despair. She had lost, and she knew that she had lost as she crumpled down in the trail, crying out sobbingly to the footprints which led so clearly ahead of her.

"Peter, I can't go on," she moaned. "I can't--go on--"

Her hands clutched at her breast. Peter saw the glint of the moonlight on the ivory sheath of the Eskimo knife, and he saw her white face turned up to the sky--and also that her lips were moving, but he did not hear his name come from them, or any other sound. He whined, and foot by foot began to nose along the trail on the scent left by Jolly Roger. It was very clear to his nostrils, and it thrilled him. He looked back, and again he whined his encouragement to the girl.

"Peter!" she called. "Peter!"

He returned to her. She had drawn the knife out of its scabbard, and the cold steel glistened in her hand. Her eyes were shining, and she reached out and clutched Peter close up against her, so that he could hear the choke and throb of her heart.

"Oh, Peter, Peter," she panted. "If you could only talk! If you could run and catch Mister Roger, an' tell him I'm here, an' that he must come back--"

She hugged him closer. He sensed the sudden thrill that leapt through her body.

"Peter," she whispered, "will you do it?"

For a few moments she did not seem to breathe. Then he heard a quick little cry, a sob of inspiration and hope, and her arms came from about him, and he saw the knife flashing in the yellow moonlight.