Wolf Breed Part 5

During the week a boy from Joe's Lunch Counter brought him his meals and gave him the scant attention he demanded. The boy went away with money in his pockets and with tales to tell of a man like a wounded bull moose. Always there were eager hands to detain him, eager tongues to ask if Drennen had let anything drop. Always the same answer, a shake of the head; he had learned nothing.

The day after the affair at Pere Marquette's had seen MacLeod's Settlement empty of men. Each one following his own hope and fancy they had gone into the mountains, heading toward the north as Drennen had headed two weeks before, some following the main trail for a matter of many miles, others breaking off to right or to left at tempting cross-trails, hastening feverishly, dreaming dreams and finding rude awakenings. The snows were melting everywhere upon the slopes, the dirty waters running down the trails making an ooze at midday which sucked up and destroyed the tracks of the men who travelled over it in the crisp early mornings.

There was no sign to tell whether Drennen had gone straight on during the seven days he might have been pushing away from the camp and had made his strike at the end of them, or whether he had turned off somewhere hardly out of sight of the handful of shacks marking MacLeod's Settlement. No sign to tell that the golden vein or pocket lay within shouting distance from the Settlement or fifty, seventy-five miles removed. And Drennen, lying on his back upon his hard bunk, stared up at the blackened beams across his ceiling and smiled his hard, bitter smile as he pictured the frantic, fruitless quest.

Sefton, the man with the coppery Vand.y.k.e beard, thin-jawed and with restless eyes, had given him certain rude help at Marquette's and had been among the first the following day to offer aid. Drennen dismissed him briefly, offering to pay for what he had already done but saying he had no further need of clumsy fingers fooling with his hurt. Sefton favoured him with a keen scrutiny from the door, hesitated, shrugged his thin shoulders and went away. Drennen wondered if the girl, who seemed in the habit of ordering people around, had sent him.

At the end of the week Drennen was about again. He had kept his wound clean with the antiseptic solutions to be obtained from the store and under its bandages it was healing. He found that he was weaker than he had supposed but with a grunt drove his lax muscles to stiffen and obey his will. From the door he came back, found a broken bit of mirror and looked curiously at the face reflected in it. No beautiful sight, he told himself grimly. It was haggard, drawn and wan. A beard three weeks old, the black of it shot through here and there with white hairs, made the stern face uncouth.

"I look a savage," he told himself disgustedly, tossing the gla.s.s to the cluttered table. Then, with a grim tightening of the lips, "And why not?"

He made his way slowly, his side paining him no little, to Joe's Lunch Counter. It was late afternoon and the street was deserted. A gleam of satisfaction showed fleetingly in his eyes; he knew why the street was deserted and the knowledge pleased him.

None of the Settlement was in Joe's restaurant, but the presence of the two strangers who had come with the girl saved it from utter desertion.

They were finishing a light meal as Drennen entered and looked up at him curiously. Drennen saw a quick glance interchanged. He knew the meaning of this, too, knew that the story of his strike had gone its way to them, that because of those nuggets which even now weighted his pocket he was a marked man, a man to be reckoned with, to be watched, to be followed, to be fawned upon if possible. He frowned at Sefton's nod and took his place at the lunch counter.

Presently the younger of the two, Captain Sefton's companion, got up and came to Drennen's side, offering his hand.

"I am glad to see you around again," he said, pleasantly.

Drennen did not look toward him.

"Some more coffee, Joe," he said shortly.

The young fellow stared at him a moment, a quick retort upon his lips.

It was checked however by Sefton saying quickly:

"Come on, Lemarc. It's none of your funeral if a man wants to be left alone. Let's go find Ygerne."

Ygerne. So that was her name, Drennen thought as he stirred two heaping spoons of sugar into his coffee and out of the corner of his eye watched the two men go out. Well, what was the difference? One name would do as well as another and she was an adventuress like the rest of them in this land of hard trails. Else why should she be here at all, and with men like Lemarc and Sefton? Had he not distrusted all men by sweeping rule these two at least he would have distrusted for the craft in their eyes.

He drank his second cup of coffee, stuffed his old pipe full of coa.r.s.e tobacco and went outside. Sefton and Lemarc had pa.s.sed out of sight.

Drennen hesitated just a second, pausing at the door. He was pitifully weak. He supposed that the thing for him to do was to crawl back to his bunk for the remainder of the day and the long night to follow. He clamped his pipe stem hard between his teeth. He'd do nothing of the kind. Did strength, any more than anything else in the world, come to a man who lay on his back and waited for it? He needed exercise.

So he strolled down through the quiet Settlement, turned into the trail which leads upward along old Ironhead's flank, driving his body mercilessly to the labour of the climb. There was a spot he knew where he could sit and look down across the valley and from which far out somewhere to north or south he might see fools seeking for the gold he had found. It was a little cup set in the side of the mountain, a tiny valley at once beautiful and aloof, and he had not been here since last fall. In it he could rest unmolested, unwatched.

During the day there had been showers; now the sun was out warmly while here and there the sky was hidden by clouds and in places he could see the little mists shaken downward through the bright air. Warm rains would mean a quickened thaw, open trails and swifter travel. In a way a propitious season was making it up to him for the time he was losing in idleness with a hole in his side.

An odd incident occurred that afternoon. Drennen, hard man as he was, Inured to the heavy shocks of a life full of them, felt this little thing strangely. He was resting, sitting upon a great boulder under a pine tree. The cup-like valley, or depressed plateau, lay at his left, himself upon an extreme rim of it. As he brooded he noted idly how the sunshine was busied with the vapour filled air, building of it a triumphant arch, gloriously coloured. His mood was not for brightness and yet, albeit with but half consciousness, he watched. Did a man who has followed the beck of hope of gold ever see a rainbow without wondering what treasure lay at the far end of the radiant promise? So, idly, Dave Drennen now.

At first just broken bits of colour. Then slowly the bits merged into one and the arc completed, the far end seeming to rest upon the further rim of the level open s.p.a.ce. It seemed a tangible thing, not a visioned nothing born of nothingness and to perish utterly in a twinkling.

"A promise that is a lie," he said to himself bitterly. "Like the promises of men."

And then . . . to his startled fancies she had come into being like the rainbow, from nothingness . . . where the foot of the arch had appeared to rest stood the girl, Ygerne. A quarter of a mile between Drennen sitting here and her standing there, a stretch of boulder strewn mountain side separating them, G.o.d's covenant joining them.

Drennen stiffened, started to his feet as though he had looked upon magic. At the foot of the rainbow not just gold . . . gold he had in plenty now . . . but a woman . . .

He laughed his old ugly laugh and settled back upon his rock, his eyes jerked away from her, sent back down the slope of the mountain to the green fringe of the Little MacLeod. He knew that his senses had tricked him as one's senses are so p.r.o.ne to do; that she had merely stepped into sight from behind a shoulder of blackened cliff; that the most brilliantly coloured rainbow is just so much sunlight and water.

And he knew, too, that she would have to pa.s.s close to him on her way back to the Settlement unless she went to considerable effort to avoid him.

He saw her shadow upon a patch of snow in the trail where the rock protected it. He did not turn his head. He heard her step, knew when it had stopped and her shadow had grown motionless. She was not ten paces from him.

Stubbornly he ignored the silent challenge of her pausing. With slope shoulders he sat motionless upon his rock, his face turned toward the Little MacLeod, his freshly relighted pipe going calmly. Yet he was aware, both from the faint sound of her tread upon the soft ground and from her shadow, cast athwart the path, that she had come on another couple of steps, that she had stopped again, that her gaze was now no doubt concerned with his profile. He did not seek to make it the less harsh, to soften the expression of bitterness and uncouth hardness which his bit of a mirror had shown him in the dugout. He found that without turning to see he could remember just what her eyes looked like. And he had seen them only once and that when his chief concern was a bullet hole in his side.

While Drennen drew five or six slow puffs at his pipe neither he nor the girl moved. Then again she drew a pace nearer, again stopped. He sent his eyes stubbornly up and down the willow fringed banks of the Little MacLeod. His thought, used to obeying that thing apart, his will, concerned itself with the question of just where the gold seekers were driving their fools' search for his gold.

Stubbornness in the man had met a stubbornness no less in the girl.

Though his att.i.tude might not be misread she refused to heed it. He had half expected her to go on, and was idly looking for a shrug of the shadow's shoulders and then a straightening of them as she went past; he half expected her to address him with some commonplace remark. He had not thought to have her stand there and laugh at him.

CHAPTER VII

"A PRINCESS SENT TO PACK WITH WOLVES!"

But laugh she did, softly, unaffectedly and with plainly unsimulated amus.e.m.e.nt. She laughed as she might have done had he been a little child indulging in a fit of pouting, she the child's mother. Her laughter irritated him but did not affect a muscle of his rigid aloofness. Then she moved again, drawing no nearer but making a little half circle so that she stood just in front of him breaking his view of the river. The hard grey of his eyes met the soft greyness of hers.

"Why are the interesting men always rude?" she asked him out of a short silence.

He stared at her coolly a moment, of half a mind to reply to the foolishness of her question with the answer which it deserved, mere silence.

"I don't know," he retorted bluntly.

"Yes, they are," she told him with deep gravity of tone, just as though he had done the logical thing, been communicative and said, "Are they?"

The gravity in her voice, however, was notably in contrast with the crinkling merriment about the corners of her eyes. "Perhaps," she went on, "that is one of the very reasons why they _are_ interesting."

He made no answer. His regard, sweeping her critically, went its way back down the mountain side. Not, however, until the glorious lines of her young figure had registered themselves in his mind.

"Perhaps," she ran on, her head a little to one side as she studied him frankly, "you didn't realise just how interesting a type you are? In feminine eyes, of course."

"I know about things feminine just as much as I care to know," he said with all of the rudeness with which she had credited him. "Namely, nothing whatever."

Without looking to see how she had taken his words he felt that he knew. She was still laughing at him, silently now, but none the less genuinely.

"You are not afraid of me, are you?" she queried quite innocently.

"I think not," he told her shortly. "Since your s.e.x does not come into the sphere of my existence, Miss Ygerne, there is no reason why I should be afraid of it."

"Oh!" was her rejoinder. "So you know my name, Mr. Drennen?"

"I learned it quite accidentally, young lady. Please don't think that the knowledge came from a premeditated prying into your affairs."

She ignored the sneer as utterly negligible and said,

"And you used to be a gentleman, once upon a time, like the prince in the fairy tale before the witches got him. _Cherchez la femme_. Was it a woman who literally drove you wild, Mr. Drennen?"

"No," he told her in his harshly emphatic way.