Читать книгу Spawn of the North - Barrett Willoughby - Страница 4

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The girl, slender, blonde, in a jersey of silver green, seemed a part of the radiant Alaska morning. She stood alone at the wheel in the pilot-house of the small cabined cruiser, Golden Hind, and with a sureness that lent a lean, daring grace to her movements, swung the speeding craft down the channel between spruce-green islands.

The air flowing in through the open windows had an exhilarating crispness born of distant snows, and she poised a moment with lifted chin to draw it deep into her lungs. The thick fair hair that blew back from her face was parted on the side and drawn loosely to the nape of her neck in a way that displayed her little ears and the gallant modeling of her head. Against the matt-ivory of her skin the tiny v in the middle of her upper lip was exquisitely defined. Her straight-gazing eyes were grey and green like the sea, and as she brought her boat about on a change of course, she half-closed them so that the long black lashes might temper the brilliance of sunlight flashing on the water.

Dian Turlon, after an absence of two years in the States, was back on the waterways of her own Alaskan Archipelago. She had returned to Ketchikan only the night before; yet now, though the edge of a June dawn had barely faded from clouds that streaked the blue, she was already rounding a buoy ten miles from town. The dip of the vermilion top in the wave from her bow, the smooth vibration of the engine under her feet, the speed of her cruiser with the swift-running tide—all these were familiar salt-water things dear to her since childhood.

In a pliant contralto she began one of the fishermen's songs her father loved to roar, when, as her younger brother Ivor put it, he was three sheets in the wind as a result of celebrating a successful salmon run:

Wire out to mine the Northern sea! Yo ho! My bully boys, ho! Out where the wind is wild and free; Yo ho! My bully boys, ho! We don't give a damn for cold or heat, For heaving decks or slippery feet, We're a crew the Devil himself can't beat! Yo ho! My bully boys, ho!

The rhythm of it stirred the latent lawlessness that came to her from her father's blood. What a fellow he must have been when he began his career! she thought. A youthful gill-netter on Bering Sea. A fisherman of wild vitality, shoulders like a grizzly, flanks like a lean, swift wolf. Roistering, singing, fighting his way to dominance. She was proud of her father; proud to be the daughter of a pioneer who had made himself one of the most powerful fish barons in the salmon-packing industry. And though she had been educated in the States, and would soon be going back there to live, she was glad she was Alaska-born.

It was like the satisfaction of a long hunger to feel the country about her again: salt air, pure and cool with the breath of forests that came down on each side of the channel. Dustless green of spruce and hemlock sweeping up slopes that notched themselves against the sky. Flight of seagulls in the sun. Warbling of hermit thrushes nesting in the elderberry bushes that flowered white along the shore.

Alaska was the loveliest summer playground in the world; yet a week ago she had been in drowsy, golden California, in Berkeley, packing her trunks for a gay season at Santa Barbara. She marveled now at the strength of that impulse which had caused her to brush aside every obstacle, every personal obligation, to return to the land of her birth.

All her life she had been aware of the North's magnetic pull, its mysterious promise. But it was only this year, when she had every reason to remain in the States, that she had found herself unable to resist that indefinable beckoning. It was almost as if she were a part of the mighty tide of life that moves northward each spring.

She thought of that perennial migration—argosies of sea and air surging up from the South in response to the mystic call of Nature. By wing and fin they came in countless millions: ducks, geese, small birds, seals, and silver salmon; valiant creatures braving the dangers of tremendous distances to mate and bring forth their young in Alaska's green solitudes.... Alaska! Land for the consummation of clean, wild loves that insured the perpetuation of sturdy species!

Everywhere now in the vast country about her pulsed the stir of procreation. In the forests, in the sea, on the tundras, in every broad river and mountain stream that threaded the wilderness. She felt it, the quick passion of the North, strong, productive; and feeling it, knew a brief, rapturous inebriation, a keen awareness of life and the power for life in herself.

She dwelt with new appreciation on the intense loveliness with which the short season moved swiftly to fulfillment. The sun shone long hours, forcing vegetation to vigorous life, to the crisp perfection of things grown in an unsullied atmosphere. Flowers bursting from buds in pellucid blues, crimsons, and the paling yellow of flames were of a texture so exquisite they looked like blossoms begotten of sunsets and ice. Beauty, youth, growth were everywhere—and a vague, delightful promise.

But what could Alaska be promising her? Already she had everything life could offer a girl.

She held out a slim tanned hand to admire the splendor of a square-cut emerald in etched platinum that gleamed on her third finger. Engaged to Alan Bronson—and their wedding set for December! She felt a glow of tenderness for him back there in San Francisco; Alan, brown of hair and eyes and skin, his becoming tan acquired at golf and polo. He had not understood her sudden mad impulse to come North any more than she, yet he had been endearingly considerate about it, even when she insisted on flying to Seattle to catch the earliest steamer for Ketchikan. Because of this she had limited her stay to two weeks. At the end of that time Alan was coming to fetch her South.

Perhaps because of her slim blondeness, he had always treated her as something fragile and delicate; she was eager that he should see her against the background of her own wilderness. Alan himself was such a satisfying product of civilization that there was a delightful piquancy in the thought of his being with her in Alaska. They'd be alluring in a new way, each to the other. And for a little while they'd enjoy together this land Dian loved so well; this land to which she was saying good-bye because of him.

Her musings were shattered by a sudden swerve and a violent pitching of her cruiser. With an exclamation of annoyance she steadied the wheel and noted the cause of the disturbance. A speedy gasoline seine-boat of battleship grey had overtaken and was passing her so close on the port side that the Golden Hind was leaping like a wild thing in the wash.

Dian frowned at the craft gliding on ahead of her.

The name Who Cares flung itself in insolent black letters from the stern—and the helmsman standing in the door of the pilot-house was coolly staring at her. Across a dozen feet of water she got a swift impression of him: tall, black-haired, leanly masculine, a maroon-colored kerchief knotted jauntily about his throat. Then her eyes met his squarely and an incredible, outrageous thing happened.

She caught her breath while something in her and something in the dark young man rushed forward, met, and merged in a warm, velvet flood of light. It was over in an instant, leaving Dian seething with indignation and resentment. The effrontery! The impudence! A fisherman daring to go by like that to look her over! She felt unaccountable impulses toward retaliation. Then she nearly laughed aloud at herself, recognizing them as the same, probably, that motivated little gamines she had seen on the boulevards of Paris countering the flirtatious impertinences of young drivers, with one hip cocked, arms akimbo, and darting outthrust tongue.

She raised her eyes across the rapidly widening distance between her and the Who Cares. The man was inside now attending to his steering; but she saw something that filled her with malicious delight: a loose rope-end hanging over the after side of his craft was snaking along in the wake that boiled from beneath the stern.

Dian's mouth went up at the corners in a smile that lent a pixie touch to her narrow face. 'Who Cares, indeed!' she mocked the seiner now disappearing around the point ahead. 'You'll care, dark one, if you happen to reverse your engine and get that rope tangled in your propeller!'