The Triumph of John Kars Part 21

CHAPTER XIV

ARRIVALS IN THE NIGHT

Murray McTavish was standing before the glowing wood stove when Alec entered the room. The factor was gazing down at the iron box of it with his fat, strong hands outspread to the warmth. He was not cold.

He had no desire for the warmth. He was thinking.

He was not a prepossessing figure. His clothing bulged in almost every direction. In age this loses its ugliness. In a young man there is no more painful disadvantage. His dark hair was smoothly brushed, almost to sleekness. His clothing was good, and by no means characteristic of the country. He was the epitome of a business man of civilization, given, perhaps, to indulgence in the luxuries of the table. Nature had acted unkindly by him. He knew it, and resented it with pa.s.sionate bitterness.

Alec Mowbray displayed no hesitation. He entered the room quickly, and in a truculent way, and closed the door with some sharpness behind him.

The action displayed his mood. And something of his character, too.

Murray took him in from head to foot without appearing to observe him.

Nor was his regard untinged with envy. The youngster was over six feet in height. In his way he was as handsome as his mother had been.

There was much of his dead father about him, too. But his eyes had none of the steadiness of either of his parents. His mouth was soft, and his chin was too pointed, and without the thrust of power. But for all these things his looks were beyond question. His fair, crisply curling hair, his handsome eyes, must have given him an appeal to almost any woman. Murray felt that this was so. He envied him and---- He looked definitely in the boy's direction in response to a rough challenge.

"Well--what is it?"

Murray's shining eyes gazed steadily at him. The smile so usual to him had been carefully set aside. It left his face almost expressionless as he replied.

"I want to tell you I'm sorry for--this afternoon. Darn sorry. I was on the jump with work, and didn't pause to think. I hadn't the right to act the way I did. And--well, I guess I'm real sorry. Will you shake?"

The boy was all impulse, and his impulses were untainted by anything more serious than hot-headed resentment and momentary intolerance.

Much of his dislike of Murray was irresponsible instinct. He knew, in his calmer moments, he had neither desire nor reason to dislike Murray.

Somehow the dislike had grown up with him, as sometimes a boy's dislike of some one in authority over him grows up--without reason or understanding.

But Murray's amends were too deliberate and definite to fail to appeal to all that was most generous and impulsive in Alec. It was impossible for him to listen to a man like Murray, generously apologizing to him, without going more than half-way to meet him. His face cleared of its shadow. His hot eyes smiled, as many times Murray had seen his mother smile. He came towards the stove with outstretched hand. A hand that could crush like a vice.

"Why, you just don't need to say another word, Murray," he exclaimed.

"And, anyway, I guess you were right. I'd slacked on those pelts and knew it, and--and that's what made me mad--you lighting on it."

The two men shook hands, and Alec, as he withdrew his, pa.s.sed it across his forehead and ran his fingers through his hair.

"But say, Murray," he went on, in a tone of friendliness that rarely existed between them. "I'm sick. Sick to death with it all--and that's about the whole of the trouble. It's no sort of good. I can't even keep my mind on the work, let alone do it right. I hate the old store. Guess I must get out. I need to feel I can breathe. I need to live. Say, I feel like some darn cabbage setting around in the middle of a patch. Jess doesn't understand. Mother doesn't. Sometimes I kind of fancy Father Jose understands. But you know. You've lived in the world. You've seen it all, and know it. Well, say, am I to be kept around this forgotten land till my whiskers freeze into sloppy icicles? I just can't do it. I've tried. Maybe you'll never know how I've tried--because of mother, and Jess, and the old dad. Well, I've quit now. I've got to get out a while, or--or things are going to bust. Do you know how I feel? Do you get me? I'll be crazy with six months more of this Fort, and these rotten neches. Gee! When I think how John Kars has lived, and where he's lived, it gets me beat seeing him hunting the long trail in these back lands."

Murray's smile had returned. But it was encouraging and friendly, and lacked all fixity.

"Maybe the other life set him crazy, same as this is fixing you," he said, with perfect amiability.

The boy laughed incredulously. He flung himself into his mother's chair, and looked up at Murray's face above the stove.

"I don't believe that life could set folk crazy. There's too much to it," he laughed. He went on a moment later with a warmth of enthusiasm that must have been heart-breaking to those of greater experience.

"Think of a city," he cried, almost ecstatically. "A big, live city.

All lights at night, and all rushing in daylight. Men eager and striving in compet.i.tion. Meeting, and doing, and living. Women, beautiful, and dressed like pictures, with never a thought but the joy of life, and the luxury of it all. And these folk without a smell of the dollars we possess. Folk without a difference from us. Think of the houses, the shows, the railroads. The street cars. The sleighs.

The automobiles. The hotels. The dance halls. The--the--oh, gee, it makes me sick to think of all I've missed and you've seen. I can't--I just can't stand for it much longer."

Murray nodded.

"Guess I--understand." Then, in a moment, his eyes became serious, as though some feeling stirred them that prompted a warning he was powerless to withhold. "It's an elegant picture, the way you see it.

But it's not the only picture. The other picture comes later in life, and if I tried to paint it for you I don't reckon you'd be able to see it--till later in life. Anyway, a man needs to make his own experience. Guess the world's all you see in it, sure. But there's a whole heap in it you don't see--now. Say, and those things you don't see are darn ugly. So ugly the time'll come you can't stand for 'em any more than you can stand for the dozy life around here now. Those folk you see in your dandy picture are wage slaves worshiping the G.o.ds of this darned wilderness just as we are right here. Just as are all the folks who come around this country, and I'd say there's many folks hating all the things you fancy, as bad as you hate the life you've been raised to right here. Still, I guess it's up to you."

"I'd give a heap to have mother think that way," Alec responded with a shade of moodiness.

"She does think that way."

The youngster sprang from his chair. His eyes were shining, and a joyous flush mounted to his handsome brow. There was no mistaking the reckless youth in him.

"She does? Then--say, it's you who've persuaded her. There hasn't been a day she hasn't tried to keep me right here, like--like some darn kid. She figgers it's up to me to choose what I'll do?" he cried incredulously.

Murray nodded. His eyes were studying the youth closely.

"Then I'll tell her right away." Alec laughed a whole-hearted, care-free laugh. "I'll ask her for a stake, and then for Leaping Horse. Maybe Seattle, and 'Frisco--New York! Murray, if you've done this for me, I'm your slave for life. Say, I'd come near washing your clothes for you, and I can't think of a thing lower. You'll back me when I put it to her?"

"There's no need. She'll do just as you say."

Murray's moment of serious regard had pa.s.sed. He was smiling his inscrutable smile again.

"When? When?"

The eagerness of it. It was almost tragic.

"Best go down with me," Murray said. "I'm making Leaping Horse early this fall on the winter trail. I'm needing stocks. I'm needing arms and stuff. How'd that fix you?"

"Bully!" Then the boy laughed out of the joy of his heart. "But fix it early. Fix it good and early."

The exclamation came in such a tone that pity seemed the only emotion for it to inspire.

But Murray had finished. Whatever he felt there was no display of any emotion in him. And pity the least of all. He crossed to the door which opened into the kitchen. He opened it. In response to his call Ailsa Mowbray appeared, followed by Jessie.

Murray indicated Alec with a nod.

"We're good friends again," he said. "We've acted like two school kids, eh, Alec?" he added. "And now we've made it up. Alec figgers he'd like to go down with me this fall to Leaping Horse, Seattle, 'Frisco, and maybe even New York. I told him I guessed you'd stake him."

The widowed mother did not reply at once. The aging face was turned in the direction of the son who meant so much to her. Her eyes, so handsome and steady, were wistful. They gazed into the joy-lit face of her boy. She could not deny him.

"Sure, Alec, dear. Just ask me what you need--if you must go."

Jessie gazed from one to the other of the three people her life seemed bound up with. Alec she loved but feared for, in her girlish wisdom.

Murray she did not understand. Her mother she loved with a devotion redoubled since her father's murder. Moreover, she regarded her with perfect trust in her wisdom.

The change wrought by Murray in a few minutes, however, was too startling for her. Their destinies almost seemed to be swayed by him.

It seemed to her alarming, and not without a vague suggestion of terror.

Father Jose was lounging over his own wood stove in the comfort of a pair of felt slippers, his feet propped up on the seat of another chair.

He was a quaint little figure in his black, unclerical suit, and the warm cloth cap of a like hue drawn carefully over a wide expanse of baldness which Nature had imposed upon him. His alert face, with its eyes whose keenness was remarkable and whose color nearly matched the fringe of gray hair still left to him, gave him an interest which gained nothing from his surroundings in the simple life he lived. It was a face of intellect, and gentle-heartedness. It was a face of purpose, too. The purpose which urges the humbler devotee to a charity which takes the form of human rather than mere spiritual help.