Читать книгу The Wolf Woman - Stringer Arthur - Страница 3

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Caver studied the girl at the back of the kicker-boat. She impressed him as an incredibly outlandish figure. As she lounged against the oil-stained stern-board with her khaki-clad young legs insolently crossed, she seemed both lawless and sexless. But he felt, as he continued to watch her, that there was something equally timeless about her, that she had rootage in neither the age of steel nor the age of stone. She reminded him, as she sat there oblivious of his presence, with her gaze divided between the popping gas-engine and the channel-rocks which she skirted by a crumb-toss, of a half-tamed husky that might bristle and snap at any uncertain hand about its head.

Yet she was arresting, he decided as he overlooked her soiled and grease-marked hunting-suit and let his gaze rest on her face, to which the frowning dark brows gave a hooded look that made him think of museum statuary. The cheek-bones of that face were unduly prominent, suggestive of an ancestry that might be either Celtic or Indian, or both combined. Between them, under glowering black brows, burned midnight dark eyes with an occasional animal-like glow filtering through their thickly planted lashes. Her mouth, incontestably large, seemed petulant and slightly imperious, showing itself rich in curves only when she smiled, which was seldom. But the reluctant red lips, once parted, revealed carnivorous white teeth that contrasted sharply with the Latin duskiness of her skin, a minutely pebbled skin further darkened by sun and wind. Her crow-dark hair was clipped short, like a boy's, and combined with the high-waisted muscular figure to produce an effect of masculinity which was borne out by the flat and ample feet encased in moosehide moccasins and by the scarred brown hand clamped so sinewedly about the roughly spliced tiller-stick.

She looked like an awkward and morose-minded youth stumbling into sullen manhood. But somewhere about her, Caver decided, was her inalienable touch of womanhood. It wasn't altogether in the softer curve of the brown throat or in the betrayingly rounded line of the khaki-clad bosom, or in the clouded wistfulness that lurked about the over-petulant lips. But it was there, proclaiming her as woman. It was so unmistakably there that Caver sat startled at her sudden sulphurous oath when a drift-log thumped against their quarter and stuttered threateningly along their sideboards.

"Where did you learn language like that?" he asked as he resettled himself in his seat.

He caught the flash of resentment from the dusky-lidded eyes.

"Why'n hell should it worry you?" she demanded. Her voice was casually resonant and full-throated. But her indifference to his implied reproof flowered eloquent in the preoccupied gaze which she directed across the more open water confronting them as they throbbed their way between two conical islands crowned with pointed fir. It was the same trick, he remembered, that he himself occasionally resorted to in his office, that disparaging concentration on other things which so often put the unwelcome visitor in his place.

Caver, as a man of the world and a twentieth-century father, could afford to smile at her insolence. But the thought of his own daughter brought the old heaviness about his heart and promptly tightened his lips again. He had been deluded, as he penetrated deeper and deeper into that northern quietude of loon-haunted waterways and green-shadowed woodlands, into believing that he was striking deeper and deeper into the kingdom of peace. But that, he remembered, was an illusion of setting and nothing more. The seeds of unrest were in his own soul. And the momentary peace that had come to him from those higher and paler skies, from tranquil valleys and rippling waters and balsam-scented winds, was merely the crooning overture to his own noisier opera of perplexity. For his problem still lay before him. And he had traveled seven hundred miles to solve it. The succeeding thought that any possible solution of it might lie in the hands of a morose-minded young woman with a temper like a she-wolf did not add to his peace of mind.

"So you're the new manager of Trail-End Camp," he ruminated aloud. She essayed no answer to that, however, beyond a half-contemptuous glance from the over-elaborate duffel amidship to the strangely-clad city man in the boat's bow. "And just what," he asked with his slightly ironic smile, "am I to call you?"

She recrossed her legs before answering him.

"How'd Dynamite Mary do?" she finally demanded.

"I'm afraid it wouldn't do at all," he said with a quietness that carried the menace of patience slightly over-taxed. "Do they actually call you that?"

She obviously resented both the closeness and the whimsicality of his scrutiny.

"That's what I always got up to Elk Crossin'," she sullenly averred.

"And undoubtedly deserved it?" he queried.

"You're damn' right I did," she proclaimed.

"Well," he essayed as they throbbed on through the amber-green water, "we'll have to see if we can't do a little better than that. You understand, of course, that I'm now the owner of Trail-End Camp?"

The eyes under the glowering brows studied him with a new intentness.

"Like hell you are!" she murmured, incredulous.

It gave him an appeasing sense of power, to watch her color deepen before his quietly authoritative laugh. He was still smiling as he opened his gold-monogrammed wallet and held out to her, across the duffel-pile, the documentary evidence of his proprietorship. But the blankness of her eyes as she stared down at the fluttering sheet of paper prompted him to put a question that caused a still richer flood of color to sweep up over the brown throat and face.

"Can you read?"

"O' course I can read," was the somewhat too belligerent retort.

"Big words and all?" he exacted, smiling at the haughtily back-flung head. He noticed the grimness that came about the rich red mouth.

"I can do plain readin'," she sullenly maintained. But a little of the hauteur had ebbed from the Indian-brown face.

"Then you'll understand that we may be more or less intimately associated during the next month or two."

"But ol' Colonel Bloodgood wrote up an' said he'd——"

That protest, however, died away as the estimative dark eyes studied the impressively immaculate figure in the boat's bow. He came from the mysterious Big City, beyond the Line, the city of millionaires who traveled half a thousand miles to shoot a deer or catch a string of fish, the city of stately homes and paved streets and motor-cars and music and books and the uncomprehended splendor of life. He had the finished and unweathered look of the elect. His unrumpled tweeds and his pallid high-templed face and his thin hand, on which a seal-ring flashed, proclaimed him as of that other world where women dressed in silk and sat under lawn parasols and bathed in marble bathtubs filled from a silver-plated tap in the wall. She had seen pictures of it all in the Sunday papers they brought up to camp and so prodigally tossed aside, pictures that had been salvaged and smoothed out and assembled along the bare walls of her winter idleness.

"But it's what I say, from now on," John Caver was explaining. "And I am sure we'll get along nicely."

The girl's gaze, as they threaded a flotilla of rocky islands, was once more intent on her course.

"Then it was you that sent up them layin' hens an' that crated milch-cow that it took Indian Joe an' seven 'breeds to git over the portage?" she challenged.

"I was guilty of that innovation," acknowledged Caver. "And I regard fresh milk and eggs as worth both the initial outlay and the up-keep." His face sobered as he reached for his cigarette-case. "By the way, who does the milking?"

"I do," was the morose answer. "An' I had a hell of a time learnin' how."

"Haven't you adequate help at the camp?"

"I've Indian Joe an' ol' Kippewa Kate an' two half-time 'breed bean-eaters who ain't worth powder to blow 'em to hell. They went out on their traplines instead o' puttin' up ice for summer use, an' I had to rustle four tons o' frozen lake-slabs with me own hands."

Caver looked at the relaxed athletic figure and the sinewed brown forearms, looked at them with a quietly approving eye.

"You'd do it, all right!" And that unexpected note of commendation brought another wayward surge of color up into her face. She was, Caver concluded, much more used to opposition than praise. And in that, he felt, lay a hint for the future. Three pounds of chocolate creams, he conjectured, might even take that thunder-cloud out of her eyes for a week.

"I really don't want to call you Dynamite Mary," he explained as he lifted his feet out of the oily bilge-water that slapped about between the boat-ribs. "Couldn't we possibly improve on that?"

"How about Rorie?" asked the girl in the stern seat, frowning over an all but empty oil-cup.

"Where does the 'Rorie' come from?" inquired her puzzled passenger.

"That's short for Aurora. I was christened Aurora Mary Moyne."

"Moyne?" repeated Caver. "That has rather an Irish ring to it."

"Me father was Irish," explained the girl at the tiller, not without a touch of pride in her voice.

"Tell me about him," suggested the man from the city. And he tried to make his quiet smile a companionable one.

"What damn' good'd that do?" demanded his pilot, nosing the craft into a six-mile current that boiled between dark-shadowed walls of rock.

Caver did not speak until they were in quieter and wider waters.

"We ought to know more about each other," he reminded her. "And when we understand our families, we're a little nearer to understanding ourselves."

Her morose eyes searched his face, as though she remained in doubt as to his meaning.

"I guess the Moynes ain't got much to be proud of," she said with an upthrust of the shoulder that seemed to contradict the words of her mouth.

"That's no reason I shouldn't know about them," persisted Caver. He spoke without harshness; but his words, for some reason, brought a flare of anger into her face.

"Is it me or me ancestors you're hirin'?" she demanded. And Caver had to wait a moment or two for the fire to cool down.

"I like to know about the people who work for me," he quietly enough explained, "whether it's on Fifth Avenue or in the forest primeval."

The thunder-cloud in the boat-stern lightened, at that, for she was smiling again, though a bit grimly.

"You'll git your money's worth," she proclaimed, "when you git my private hist'ry."

"Is it so extensive?"

"Both extensive an' frost-bitten," was her subacid retort.

"Then let's have it," he commanded, remembering that the Malemute of the North, after all, could not invariably be faced with kindness.

She penalized him, however, by leisurely uncrossing her legs and blinking abstractedly over her engine.

"Me father was a bush-rat, if you know what that means," she finally said out of the silence that had lengthened between them. "He married a Quebec girl named Lacasse, an' when the Cobalt country was openin' up, he ran a road-house at the Gold Pan Portage."

"And he did well at that?" prompted the other.

"He sold redeye on the side, an' when an Indian called Gray Blanket came down one winter with enough gold nuggets to buy a week o' fire-water, Dad fed him through his tremers an' bought the secret o' the Big Squaw Mine for three quarts o' hard liquor."

"You mean he bought a gold mine?"

"There was damn' little mine there when Dad struck it," retorted the khaki-clad girl. "But he mushed through there on a home-made sleigh. He came back a year later with a wild eye an' a frozen foot, an' told me mother he'd made a strike an' we'd all die millionaires. I was eight years ol' then, runnin' wild an' leadin' round a bear cub for a pet. But I could pack a gun an' crack over enough rabbit an' water-fowl to keep us goin' through a winter's tie-up. Father Dumond wanted to put me in a convent, but when Dad got outfitted a year later I was set on goin' with him. So we all went. It was forty below, most o' the time, an' me mother got sick. I helped pull her on one o' the sleighs. When she died, we had to burn three cord o' wood to thaw out enough ground to bury her. But Dad went on, even after the last dog died. It was hard goin', all right. An' we et light. But we made it."

"And the mine?" prompted Caver.

But the ruminative girl was not to be hurried.

"We built a shack on the side-hill an' fished through the ice an' shot game an' got pretty comfort'ble. But Dad couldn't begin strippin' until open weather. An' even when he got his showin' o' metal, he was so scared some prowlin' sour dough'd ferret out his strike, he used to sleep on a rifle an' shoot at every bobcat that moved a chin-whisker in the moonlight. I helped him git out the gold. I made the rawhide sacks we tied it up in. He used to sit up nights heftin' it, bag by bag, figgerin' out what it was worth in ready money. He used to tell me I'd never need to dress in moosehide no more, but would be ridin' round in me silks an' satins an' livin' on stuffed dates an' navel oranges for the rest o' me days."

"But what happened to that gold?" demanded Caver, with a movement of obvious impatience.

"It was blamed near three years before Dad had that drift picked an' shoveled out complete," she resumed in her sonorous quiet voice. "But when his mine was worked out, he seemed more worried'n ever about gittin' down with his clean-up. He was fidgety an' afraid o' thieves. He had to have a canoe, an' he wasn't clever enough to build one. But he got his birch-bark, all right. He got it when a wanderin' redskin tried to steal a calf moose I'd shot. I was fightin' for me camp-meat, an' that Indian had me up over his head, to throw me in the river, when Dad put a bullet through his heart an' threw him where he'd intended me to go. So we loaded up an' started back by waterway. Dad went with a rifle across the thwarts, watchin' both banks an' shootin' wild when even a red fox showed its nose through the underbrush. But we didn't bump into any trouble until we came to what was called the Long Portage."

The girl fell silent; the man in the boat-bow was prompted to exclaim: "Go on!"

"It was the Long Portage, all right," she solemnly resumed. "Dad didn't like that crossin'. He was so afraid o' that wood-trail that he sat with his gold an' sent me scoutin' in through the bush, to see if ev'rything was clear. It was mighty quiet there b'tween the pine an' tamarack. I c'd hear me own heart thumpin'. But I was used to the woods, an' I was in sight o' water again b'fore I heard a rifle-shot, an' then another. An' then I heard a whole spatter o' shots. So I went back. It wasn't much over a half-mile, I guess, but it seemed like a good ten miles to me. I went back, cryin' b'cause I didn't have a rifle of me own. But there was nothin' to go back to. Dad was gone. An' his gold was gone. All that was left was the ol' birch-bark, pretty well tore to pieces with rifle-bullets an' one side of it red with blood."

Caver's eyes widened. He moved restlessly.

"But it doesn't sound credible, stuff like that in the twentieth century. D'you mean to say your father was robbed and murdered there?"

The girl's face remained impassive.

"I thought they'd put him in the river," she continued in her almost monotonously full-throated voice. "So I stripped, an' swam an' dived around the portage landin' until me legs got numb. Then I tried to patch up the canoe, but I couldn't make it float. So I headed southwest on foot, livin' on berries an' roots an' tryin' to make bark-fiber twitch-ups that'd catch a rabbit. But they didn't work. An' when ol' Kippewa Carson picked me up along the shore o' the Little Winiska, I was mostly bone an' rags. They used to say around Elk Crossin' that ol' Kippewa found me growlin' in a wolf den. But that's a damn' lie. I was eatin' bulrush-roots an' thinkin' about makin' a raft to float down the Little Winiska."

"How old were you then?" Caver asked out of the second silence that had fallen between them.

"Somewhere b'tween twelve an' thirteen."

"And you're sure all this happened, that things didn't get twisted up a bit in your child's mind?"

"I damn' well know it happened," was the listless-noted reply.

"Then what occurred after this Kippewa person found you?"

"The La Tourettes took me in f'r a winter, but I ran away, an' a 'breed's wife taught me how to make ax-handles an' weave baskets. Then the Post priest tried to put me into some kind o' mission-school down to Mattawa an' I ran away again. Then I worked for the factor's wife an' got fired f'r goin' deer-huntin' instead o' washin' dishes, an' then f'r two winters I was second grub-rustler in a mill-camp."

"Mostly men, I suppose?"

"All men—an' with the bark on! It took mighty plain talk to make 'em keep their distance. But they learned to do it."

He smiled at her solemnity, and sobered again as he studied the intent brown face.

"They'd plague you quite a bit, I imagine."

She was prompt to resent that suggestion.

"Like hell they would! I'd cut the heart out o' any bohunk who got flip with me. An' they knew what would be comin' their way if I wasn't treated respectful."

He knew better than to smile, this time, but he wondered how a figure so rough and vital could hold about it some thin persistent aura of pathos.

"Then when did you first come to Trail-End Camp?" he asked with what casualness he could command.

"I used to sell 'em baskets o' wild strawberries an' Chippewa archery sets. Then ol' Colonel Bloodgood found out I could paddle a canoe an' put his city pie-faces over the proper fishin' holes, so he gave me a job that was half guide an' half under-cook. That was three years ago. Last year when they fired Lem Haines for stealin' most o' the camp outfit, they put me in charge. They put me over Indian Joe an' ol' Mike Faubert an' gave me Number Four Cabin to winter in."

She was, obviously, proud of her position. But to Caver it presented certain equally obvious perplexities.

"And you stay up here winter and summer?"

He could see the cloud that crept over the dusky face.

"I'm savin' up to go down to the city," she said with her first show of embarrassment.

He breathed deep of the balsam-scented air that seemed to be bringing peace to his harried soul.

"Why down to the city?" he finally inquired.

Still again he detected the vague abashment of a spirit not used to hesitation.

"I was hopin' to better myself," she said with a wistfulness that made him think of her, not as a woman, but as an uncouth and groping girl. She reminded him, in fact, of something wild, something that would be always foolishly averse to the bars and chains of communal life.

"I think you're superb, just as you are," he found it easy enough to proclaim. And he was rewarded, once she had assured herself of his sincerity, by the answering surge of color that once more flowed up the butternut-brown neck and crept over the sun-darkened cheeks.

"I want to learn things," she averred, disconcertingly earnest.

"What things?" he parried.

"The other things," she said gropingly. "The things you don't learn in lumber-camps."

He stopped short at that, absorbing the shock of a transforming new thought. He had not the courage to articulate that thought, even to himself. But he felt, with a fresh surge of hope, that this lawless and loose-limbed woman of the woods might yet be made to fit into his own personal designs.

"I suppose," he quietly ventured, "you'd make a pretty big sacrifice to get down to some civilized town and learn to live and dress and talk the way city people do?"

Her sonorous laugh was slightly bitter. "You're damned well right I would," she asserted, promptly solemn again.

"I think it could be done," he murmured aloud as that absurd new hope once more tugged at his heart.

She sat up, at that, and fixed him with her disconcertingly direct gaze. "How?" she demanded.

He could not answer that question, as yet, but he felt the expediency of keeping open any promised avenue of escape.

"We can talk that over in a couple of days when my daughter Joan comes up," he said with a purely achieved casualness of voice.

"You bringin' a girl o' yours up here?" asked the woman in the boat-stern.

"Yes," he said, looking studiously ahead, "for several months."

The woman at the tiller sat thoughtful a moment.

"Why's she comin' to a camp like this?"

Caver was quick to resent that question. But he could not afford, all things considered, to show his resentment.

"She has a spot on her lungs," he said, ill at ease under the appraising cool glance of the other.

"Does that mean she's sick?"

"Yes, in a way," acknowledged the unhappy Caver. "But she's able to be around all right. She's not bedridden. And we thought a few months in this northern air would fix her up."

"Was she ever up to Trail-End b'fore?"

"Yes, for three weeks, as a girl of fourteen."

"That," asserted Aurora Mary, "must've been before my time."

"Considerably," acknowledged Caver.

"How old is she now?"

The father of the girl in question had to give this some thought.

"She'll be twenty, I believe, on her next birthday."

"Jeeze! She's a woman!"

"In some ways, yes," was the slightly acrimonious acknowledgment.

Caver was conscious of the perplexity in the slumberously intent eyes.

"Is she married?" asked the girl at the tiller.

Her passenger, she could see, resented that question. He shrank back like a turtle in its shell, as city folks had the habit of doing when you tried to handle them too freely.

"And what if she is?" he countered almost testily.

"It's nothin' in my young life," announced Aurora Mary with her smoldering frontier frankness. And she gave emphasis to her words by hitching, sailorwise, at her oil-stained khaki trousers.

Caver could afford to smile at her. She was merely the big toad of her own particularly small puddle.

"My Joe liked it very much up here," he proceeded to explain with an achieved note of patience. "And it will make everything considerably easier for her, having a woman of about her own age around."

"Y' mean me?" was the quick demand.

"Of course!"

"She may think I'm too much of a mossback f'r a millionaire's daughter!"

"She's not in a position to be unduly toplofty," averred Joan's gray-cheeked father. And again some latent bitterness broke through his voice.

The girl at the tiller swung her boat about a pine-clad point and into a windless bay where a group of glinting log huts clustered about a bigger lodge, like snowy chicks about a mother-hen. "It's a damned good thing I got them shacks all whitewashed an' fixed up proper! How'd you like 'em?"

Caver, as he sat staring at the sepulchral-white log walls that stood out so startlingly from the cool blue shadows of the towering pines, felt that they would have been infinitely more pleasing to the eye if they had been left in the sober hues of the natural wood. They made him think of a frontier police-barracks, and, a moment later, of isolation-huts in a hospital zone. They almost made his eyes ache, with the afternoon sun shining against their blank and albified surfaces. They even suggested, as he continued to stare at them, irregular white teeth set in a sardonically grinning mouth. But he could see the look of pride on Aurora Mary's face; and he had no intention of hurting her feelings.

"They look very neat and clean," he acknowledged.

That seemed to please her. But her reluctant wide smile was lost, a moment later, in one of her habitual quick frowns.

"They're clean, all right," she asserted in her unpleasantly booming voice. "An' everything round here is goin' to stay that way while I'm runnin' this camp!"

"Oh!" said Caver. He made that monosyllable non-committal, for as the boat circled up to the bone-white timbers of the boat-landing and the unspotted pale sand of the beach, he harvested the impression that everything about him was altogether too uncomfortably ordered and clean. There was a sense of cleanness in the water under their keel, in the recurring ridges of blue-green pinelands overhung by their austere northern sky, in the very air that he was breathing. He even wished, as they nosed up to the wharf, that he was coming to it with a heart as clean as it deserved.

But he forgot that regret, a moment later, as he watched a square-shouldered old husky-dog come tumbling down between the white-walled cabins, croaking a welcome to his mistress as he came.

The girl, who had clambered up on the bleached timbers, held the wolf-like black nose between her two brown hands and gazed affectionately down into the dog's uplifted face.

"Pancake," she cried with throaty rapture, "you pie-eyed ol' son of a biscuit-box, you're sure glad to see me, ain't you?"

And Pancake answered that question by licking the outstretched brown hand and the broken-beaded moccasins stained with bilge-water. But Caver stood surprised to find any such possibilities of emotion in a figure so wolfish.