Читать книгу The Wolf Woman - Stringer Arthur - Страница 6

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Aurora Mary's face was grim as she went putt-putt along the quiet shores of the Pakishan. The sunlight fell warm across that winding valley, but the girl in the gas-boat felt that summer was over. For already the September-end frosts had turned the hardwood hills into a riot of color, flaming with crimson and gold and garnet. The days were growing shorter; the birds were stealing away; and a sense of completion, vaguely saddening, was taking possession of the pearl-misted northern world.

Much had happened, she remembered, since she had last threaded those low-shadowed waterways. Some imprint of it, indeed, seemed to have attached itself to her, for her face was thinner and more thoughtful, and the once rebellious mouth seemed set in lines more resolute. Yet the brooding face softened as she shut off her engine, and leaning forward, bent inquiringly over a hammocklike contraption of plaited babiche edged with narrow bands of wolf-skin, swung by rawhide thongs from wale to wale of the open boat.

She had fashioned that papoose-cradle with her own hands, and she was proud of it. But she gave it scant thought as she turned back the edges of a slate-gray blanket, peered intently into the little cavern of security between the wolf-skin edgings, and dropped, satisfied, back to her tiller-seat. The earlier look of preoccupation returned to her eyes as she studied the shore-line and picked up the familiar landmarks above Duck Landing. She nursed a sense, as she rounded the river-bend and came in sight of the lonely boat-dock, of history repeating itself. For on that timber-crib, as she drew closer, she could once more discern the mackintoshed figure of John Caver. He was waiting for her, as he had waited for her over four long months before. But time, she could see, had also put its imprint on him, for the pallid face seemed grayer and more deeply lined. She could detect the anxiety in his eyes as she swung in to the untidy tamarack wharf-crib, just as she could decipher the unworded apprehension in his glance as he stood studying her own silent face.

He did not speak, however, until he had passed his hand-bags down to her and clambered none too steadily into the bow of the boat.

"Everything all right?" he asked. He tried to speak casually, but there was an unexpected quaver in his voice.

"Everything's all right," she assured him in her quiet contralto. She even forced a smile, to make his assurance doubly sure, for she still nursed, in spite of everything, a stubborn liking for the man. She even felt a little sorry for him. But he impressed her as less opulent-looking than ever before.

"And Joan?" he asked, dropping his eyes.

"She couldn't be doin' better," was Aurora Mary's mercifully mendacious answer. "She's sittin' up now, eatin' hearty an' takin' sunbaths in a camp-chair."

Caver took a deep breath and looked off along the shadowed shore-line.

"She had rather an awful time of it?" he half questioned and half proclaimed.

"It was pretty awful," acknowledged the grim-eyed Aurora Mary.

Her passenger winced and looked away again.

"It—it must have been equally awful for you," he finally ventured.

"I had Kippewa Kate to help me," casually announced the girl in the boat-stern.

"A squaw!" gasped Caver, shivering in spite of himself.

He found himself darkly assessed by Aurora Mary's dark eye.

"Those redskin women know more'n you'd sometimes imagine," she loyally protested.

Caver, with his lids drooping, pictured a low-walled lodge with strange Indian herbs simmering over a fire and outlandish charms being chanted beside a bed of sleep turned into a battle-ground. And still again he shivered.

"I should have been up here, of course," he resumed, finding it none too easy to go on. "But that appendix of mine went on strike and had to come out."

"I know," proclaimed the girl in khaki.

"I was on my back in that hospital for three solid weeks. And there was no one to send."

"I know," repeated the girl in the boat-stern. "I got your diff'rent messages."

"And the other things?" he inquired, able to meet her eyes once more.

"Everything came through all right," she listlessly acknowledged.

He apparently wanted to put other questions to her, but found it no easy matter to articulate them. He looked at her, frowning heavily, as she leaned forward and stared into the papoose-frame of oddly plaited deerskin thongs.

She thought, for a moment, that he would move toward her and share in that inspection. She assumed, when he failed to do this, that he would in some way refer to the small passenger swinging between them. But he avoided the subject, almost timorously. The light in his eyes was even a stricken one. He was, in fact, pointedly studying her own rough figure. She wore, over her old hunting-suit, an incredibly worn and ragged rain-coat that hung about her in a pauperizing shroud of tatters. And he seemed to resent her raggedness.

"You say those things came up all right?" he repeated.

She nodded assent, intent on picking her course through the channel.

"You don't seem to have made much use of them."

She frowned over that, apparently not following his line of thought.

"There wasn't anybody round here could set up the radio," she explained. "An' Joe said the phonograph made her kind o' homesick for the Silver Slipper. She asked me to call her Joe."

Caver moved, almost impatiently.

"I mean the things I sent up for you," he amended.

"I couldn't use 'em," said the girl in the ragged rain-coat.

"Why not?"

"I hadn't earned 'em."

His smile was both wearied and listless.

"I guess the Cavers," he said with an unpremeditated head-nod toward the babiche hammock amidships, "would still be owing you something."

That prompted her to lean forward again, and bend low over the wolf-fringed cradle-swing. Her face, from stooping, took on an almost Indian bronze-red tone.

"He's a great little kid," she proclaimed. "Not one whimper out o' him from Trail-End to Duck Landin'!"

The note of pride in her voice nettled Caver. His gaze, for the time being, was even absorbed in the blue-misted hills that rolled tier by tier into the pallid sky-line. But his eyes, in the end, went back to the girl in the boat-stern.

"You're—er—looking after him?" he guardedly inquired, with a vague gesture toward the papoose-frame.

"I sure am!" was the unabashedly prompt reply. Yet he knew, even before she spoke, that the heart of a mother beat in her body.

"And you're not unwilling to?" he pursued.

"I love 'im!" was her full-throated answer, not without a note of fierceness.

"But his mother—surely——"

Caver let the sentence go unfinished. He sat depressed by a sense of inadequacy, of blunderings and hesitations where he should have been open and honest.

"Joe had a hard time of it. She had such a hard time of it she didn't want to see him. As I said, there was only ol' Kippewa Kate an' me there, an' I couldn't help much. An' when Joe got over wantin' to die, she seemed too weak to show much interest."

Caver closed his eyes.

"It must have been hell," he muttered aloud.

"It was," acknowledged Aurora Mary.

And little more was said until they swung in to Trail-End Camp, where Caver caught sight of a thin-faced figure sitting in the slanting autumnal sunlight. She was wrapped in rugs, and she reminded him of a passenger on a liner's deck. It was only the black-faced husky, lying at her feet, that moved as they approached.

Aurora Mary, for reasons of her own, left father and daughter together. She was quietly sterilizing a row of round-bottomed bottles when, an hour later, Caver somewhat irresolutely joined her.

"Joan tells me you've been taking care of this child as though it were your own," he began, discomfited by her over-direct gaze. But she ventured no reply to that statement.

"She says," pursued Caver, "that you'd rather like to keep him."

He was, for the second time, depressed by a sense of inadequacy, of too closely bargaining with destiny.

"I'd like 'im," asserted Aurora Mary. There was something elemental, he felt, in her singleness of purpose uncomplicated by the tugs and counter-tugs of civilization. And he wondered, as he stared down at her moccasined feet, at the wolf-skin on the floor, at the abraded old bellows-accordion that lay beside a tattered mail-order catalogue, just what this thing called civilization would do to her. But he was remembering, the next moment, how much he himself would have to do for her.

"You said once," he reminded her, "that you'd like to go to the city, to learn city ways and have what other women have."

She stood silent and shadowy-eyed before him. She had no intention, apparently, of helping him along.

"You'll forgive me for telling you, I take it," he laboriously pursued, "that I've a million or two that doesn't seem to have made me any happier than other men. Money, once you've got it, doesn't appear to count much. But what I want you to remember is that four months ago you saved my life. And for that, now I'm able to, I intend to see that you are adequately rewarded."

"That was nothin'," she protested. "An'——"

But he cut her short. "And quite beyond that, there are a few other things for which the Cavers have to balance up your ledger of life. It's coming to you, Aurora Mary, and you can't escape it. The only thing is, I'd like to know where we stand and how we can work it out."

A little of the color faded from her dusky face as she sat down on a camp-chair made of elk-antlers.

"You mean that?" she asked, with the earlier crusading light momentarily gone from her eyes.

"I do," he asserted, slightly abashed at his own secret emotion. "And on this occasion any promises I make will be kept."

The solemn and cloudy eyes were still studying his face.

"Will you take me into your own home?" she slowly exacted.

If he hesitated, it was only for a moment.

"I will," he proclaimed.

"An' keep me there until I've a chance to better myself an' make myself into something you wouldn't be ashamed of?"

"And not only keep you there," he added with a belated small tingle of enthusiasm, "but contrive to have you get the best teaching and tutoring that can be got in all America."

"I was thinkin' more about my boy," she said.

Still again the elemental simplicity of the woman astounded him.

"Your boy?" he echoed.

"Ain't he mine?" she demanded. "Ain't somebody got to mother that poor little unwanted toad?"

"Of course," agreed Caver, trying to keep an absurd and altogether unexpected lump out of his throat. He was remembering, at the moment, his own daughter's recent and mercilessly embittered cry: "I've paid my price, and now I'm through with it." It seemed an unnatural cry, in a way, but perhaps the whole thing had been pervertingly unnatural.

"Of course," repeated Caver, compelling himself to calmness, "he's yours. He should belong to somebody who loves him. And that love, Aurora Mary, will make you richer than you imagine."

There was a tremolo in his voice which he could no longer control. He even reached out for her hand, her brown and toil-hardened hand, and took it in his own, as though a compact were being sealed between them. And his confusion deepened as he saw an answering flame of friendliness break through the fixed moroseness of her gaze. She had, after all, had very little love in her life. And she would be true to her trust. He could even see the great breath that tightened the faded khaki across the Artemis-like breasts still lunar with youth. She was uncouth, but in her own way she was superb—superb, at least, in her own setting. She was, of course, asking for the impossible. Tutors and teachers could never make her over. And her childlike faith in the city would soon come a cropper. But she was entitled to her illusions. She might even surprise him, he amended as he studied the rapt brown face with the pioneering light in the wide-set eyes, for she possessed what the other women of her age seemed so forlornly without, ardency, intensity, a passionate singleness of purpose.

"It will take some time," she was warning him, "to git me civilized complete."

"The longer the better," he could afford to assure her. He even smiled a little at her solemnity, for he was conscious, as he glanced out the window to where Joan basked motionless and remote in the autumnal sunlight, of the lessening of more than one load that day. "And what's more, I propose to accept you as one of my family, as such legally and officially."

He was not unconscious of the harder light that crept into her eyes.

"Then since we're talkin' musquash," she ventured, "I s'pose this could all be put down in writin'?"

"Of course," he agreed, though he wasn't quite sure what talking musquash meant. But she didn't, apparently, entirely trust him as yet.

"An' when you or your womenfolks want me out o' camp, I'll be told so open an' honest?"

His laughter, over that, was inelastic and ended abruptly. It was, he saw, the shadow of her own sex, the women of his household, that prompted her distrust.

"Our womenfolks, all things considered, are a trifle too much in your debt not to remember it."

He wanted to say more, since she had given him the awaited opening, but he noticed that she was no longer listening to him. She was listening, instead, to the hoarse barking of her husky-dog down by the boat-landing. She put aside the feeding-bottle which she had taken up in her abstracted fingers and stepped frowningly to the door, where she stood silhouetted against the strong light, oddly magnified in stature as, with arms akimbo, she blocked that narrow portal. But her call was blasphemous as she silenced the bristling wolf-dog.

"What is it?" asked Caver, following her into the open.

"It's Bill Little-Beaver," she answered over her shoulder. "He must've paddled up after us from Duck Landin'."

A lean half-breed in checkered shirt and corduroy trousers was pulling a much-patched birch-bark up on the shore. He advanced irresolutely, stopped, and stared wonderingly about. It wasn't until he caught sight of Aurora Mary that he moved forward again.

Joan, for some reason, laughed openly from under her rugs at that unheroic figure. He had little of what one could look for in a courier-de-bois.

But from his hand Aurora Mary had taken a soiled and crumpled envelope, over which she stood frowning long and intently.

"It's for you," she finally announced, handing the sweat-dampened message to Caver. And he, with a flash of annoyance, took it and opened it, as Bill Little-Beaver caught sight of the portly Kippewa Kate and sagaciously drifted kitchenward.

It was Joan, once more settled back in her rugs, who glanced about at Caver's small throat-sound of dismay.

"What is it?" she demanded.

"It's Somer," he answered, without looking up from his yellow-sheeted message.

"What about him?" was the sharp-noted inquiry.

"It's a night-letter from Gail," Caver said, speaking as quietly as he could. "The Bear Lake operator must have sent it up to Duck Landing. It——"

"What about Allan?" interrupted the over-tense girl in the chair.

Caver, however, did not answer until he had read on to the end. Then he stared for a moment over the pearl-misted water.

"Gail says that he's on his way up here. He got no letters and no word for two months, nearly, and he seems to be so worried about it all that he's insisting on digging you out."

"Oh, God!" gasped the girl in the enmuffling rugs.

Caver's unhappy eyes met Aurora Mary's. But her glance, he found, remained as non-committal as a shuttered window.

"I can't see him!" the other woman was crying. "I won't! I daren't—yet!"

"Then what are you going to do?" demanded her father.

Joan threw off her burdening rugs and rose to her feet with unexpected vigor. "I'll get out of here," she said with equally unexpected passion.

Caver's gesture was a deprecative one.

"Perhaps we can head him off," he suggested.

"You don't know Allan," was the grim-noted retort. "When would he get here?"

Caver reconsidered the telegram. "To-morrow, apparently," he said with a sigh.

Joan swung about on Aurora Mary.

"Isn't there some other way of getting out of this camp," she demanded, "of getting down to where the railway is?"

She colored a trifle under Aurora Mary's assizing glance, but her mouth remained firm. And Aurora Mary, Caver noticed, was still keeping the shutters closed across the window of her soul.

"You could go out by Indian River and the Little Waubigo," the wilderness girl was explaining, "an' by portagin' back to the Kokomis, you could hit the steel at Mashagon Falls. But it's three days' hard goin' by canoe."

That consideration, however, Joan waived promptly aside.

"Who could take us?" she demanded.

"Us?" repeated Aurora Mary, a sudden cloud shadowing her face. It made Caver think of a wild animal with its young unexpectedly threatened.

"My father and me," answered Joan. She even smiled, mirthlessly, as her gaze met and locked with that of the other woman. Yet it was a moment or two before that other woman, breathing deep, could speak with the quietness she wished.

"You couldn't git a better man than Bill Little-Beaver," she answered in a slightly deadened voice.

It was Caver who spoke next. "But what good will that do? You can't——"

"I can't see Allan," was the tight-lipped response.

"But what's to be said to the man? Whatever his feelings may be about you, he's not altogether a fool."

"Neither am I," retorted Joan.

"Then just what word, under the circumstances, do you propose leaving for him?"

"That all depends on Rorie."

"Why on Rorie?"

"Because she'll have to explain to him how the spot cleared up on my lungs and how I left for home, or what's even better, for three weeks of Pinehurst."

"But is that fair to her?" demanded Caver.

"It's as fair as I can afford to be, at a time like this."

Caver winced at the half-weary shrug from his own daughter. It said so much, yet left so much unsaid.

"But have you stopped to think just what you're running away from?"

"Rorie and I understand each other," was Joan's abrupt reply. "We both know what we want."

Caver, as he stared at the two oddly diverse figures, battled against a belated sense of frustration. Women, after all, were eternally incomprehensible to him. But he remembered, as a man of the world, that the absconder seldom found absolution in flight.

That mist of perplexity touched with apprehension still hung over him when, after his hour of hurried packing, he saw Joan step into the room where Aurora Mary was stooping over the outlandish swing-cradle of plaited deerskin. But Joan, he noticed with an involuntary tightening of the throat, did not once look down at the papoose-frame so gently swung from side to side by the intent brown hand.

"And you're going to see this through?" she challenged, her hard young eyes fixed on the abstracted Indian-brown face.

"Yes," was the quiet yet determined answer.

"You'll—you'll have to lie for me," exacted Joan.

"I know," answered Aurora Mary.

"And you will?" demanded the other.

"Till hell freezes over," proclaimed the girl in the smoke-stained hunting-suit.