Love of Life, Jack London [crime books to read .txt] 📗

cooking, while the man sliced bacon and fired the stove. The light in the cabin was dim, filtering through in a small window made of onion-skin writing paper and oiled with bacon grease, so that John Messner could not make out very well what the woman looked like. Not that he tried. He seemed to have no interest in her. But she glanced curiously from time to time into the dark corner where he sat.

“Oh, it’s a great life,” the doctor proclaimed enthusiastically, pausing from sharpening his knife on the stovepipe. “What I like about it is the struggle, the endeavor with one’s own hands, the primitiveness of it, the realness.”

“The temperature is real enough,” Messner laughed.

“Do you know how cold it actually is?” the doctor demanded.

The other shook his head.

“Well, I’ll tell you. Seventy-four below zero by spirit thermometer on the sled.”

“That’s one hundred and six below freezing point - too cold for travelling, eh?”

“Practically suicide,” was the doctor’s verdict. “One exerts himself. He breathes heavily, taking into his lungs the frost itself. It chills his lungs, freezes the edges of the tissues. He gets a dry, hacking cough as the dead tissue sloughs away, and dies the following summer of pneumonia, wondering what it’s all about. I’ll stay in this cabin for a week, unless the thermometer rises at least to fifty below.”

“I say, Tess,” he said, the next moment, “don’t you think that coffee’s boiled long enough!”

At the sound of the woman’s name, John Messner became suddenly alert. He looked at her quickly, while across his face shot a haunting expression, the ghost of some buried misery achieving swift resurrection. But the next moment, and by an effort of will, the ghost was laid again. His face was as placid as before, though he was still alert, dissatisfied with what the feeble light had shown him of the woman’s face.

Automatically, her first act had been to set the coffee-pot back. It was not until she had done this that she glanced at Messner. But already he had composed himself. She saw only a man sitting on the edge of the bunk and incuriously studying the toes of his moccasins. But, as she turned casually to go about her cooking, he shot another swift look at her, and she, glancing as swiftly back, caught his look. He shifted on past her to the doctor, though the slightest smile curled his lip in appreciation of the way she had trapped him.

She drew a candle from the grub-box and lighted it. One look at her illuminated face was enough for Messner. In the small cabin the widest limit was only a matter of several steps, and the next moment she was alongside of him. She deliberately held the candle close to his face and stared at him out of eyes wide with fear and recognition. He smiled quietly back at her.

“What are you looking for, Tess?” the doctor called.

“Hairpins,” she replied, passing on and rummaging in a clothes-bag on the bunk.

They served their meal on their grub-box, sitting on Messner’s grub-box and facing him. He had stretched out on his bunk to rest, lying on his side, his head on his arm. In the close quarters it was as though the three were together at table.

“What part of the States do you come from?” Messner asked.

“San Francisco,” answered the doctor. “I’ve been in here two years, though.”

“I hail from California myself,” was Messner’s announcement.

The woman looked at him appealingly, but he smiled and went on:

“Berkeley, you know.”

The other man was becoming interested.

“U. C.?” he asked.

“Yes, Class of ‘86.”

“I meant faculty,” the doctor explained. “You remind me of the type.”

“Sorry to hear you say so,” Messner smiled back. “I’d prefer being taken for a prospector or a dog-musher.”

“I don’t think he looks any more like a professor than you do a doctor,” the woman broke in.

“Thank you,” said Messner. Then, turning to her companion, “By the way, Doctor, what is your name, if I may ask?”

“Haythorne, if you’ll take my word for it. I gave up cards with civilization.”

“And Mrs. Haythorne,” Messner smiled and bowed.

She flashed a look at him that was more anger than appeal.

Haythorne was about to ask the other’s name. His mouth had opened to form the question when Messner cut him off.

“Come to think of it, Doctor, you may possibly be able to satisfy my curiosity. There was a sort of scandal in faculty circles some two or three years ago. The wife of one of the English professors - er, if you will pardon me, Mrs. Haythorne - disappeared with some San Francisco doctor, I understood, though his name does not just now come to my lips. Do you remember the incident?”

Haythorne nodded his head. “Made quite a stir at the time. His name was Womble - Graham Womble. He had a magnificent practice. I knew him somewhat.”

“Well, what I was trying to get at was what had become of them. I was wondering if you had heard. They left no trace, hide nor hair.”

“He covered his tracks cunningly.” Haythorne cleared his throat. “There was rumor that they went to the South Seas - were lost on a trading schooner in a typhoon, or something like that.”

“I never heard that,” Messner said. “You remember the case, Mrs. Haythorne?”

“Perfectly,” she answered, in a voice the control of which was in amazing contrast to the anger that blazed in the face she turned aside so that Haythorne might not see.

The latter was again on the verge of asking his name, when Messner remarked:

“This Dr. Womble, I’ve heard he was very handsome, and - er - quite a success, so to say, with the ladies.”

“Well, if he was, he finished himself off by that affair,” Haythorne grumbled.

“And the woman was a termagant - at least so I’ve been told. It was generally accepted in Berkeley that she made life - er - not exactly paradise for her husband.”

“I never heard that,” Haythorne rejoined. “In San Francisco the talk was all the other way.”

“Woman sort of a martyr, eh? - crucified on the cross of matrimony?”

The doctor nodded. Messner’s gray eyes were mildly curious as he went on:

“That was to be expected - two sides to the shield. Living in Berkeley I only got the one side. She was a great deal in San Francisco, it seems.”

“Some coffee, please,” Haythorne said.

The woman refilled his mug, at the same time breaking into light laughter.

“You’re gossiping like a pair of beldames,” she chided them.

“It’s so interesting,” Messner smiled at her, then returned to the doctor. “The husband seems then to have had a not very savory reputation in San Francisco?”

“On the contrary, he was a moral prig,” Haythorne blurted out, with apparently undue warmth. “He was a little scholastic shrimp without a drop of red blood in his body.”

“Did you know him?”

“Never laid eyes on him. I never knocked about in university circles.”

“One side of the shield again,” Messner said, with an air of weighing the matter judicially. While he did not amount to much, it is true - that is, physically - I’d hardly say he was as bad as all that. He did take an active interest in student athletics. And he had some talent. He once wrote a Nativity play that brought him quite a bit of local appreciation. I have heard, also, that he was slated for the head of the English department, only the affair happened and he resigned and went away. It quite broke his career, or so it seemed. At any rate, on our side the shield, it was considered a knock-out blow to him. It was thought he cared a great deal for his wife.”

Haythorne, finishing his mug of coffee, grunted uninterestedly and lighted his pipe.

“It was fortunate they had no children,” Messner continued.

But Haythorne, with a glance at the stove, pulled on his cap and mittens.

“I’m going out to get some wood,” he said. “Then I can take off my moccasins and he comfortable.”

The door slammed behind him. For a long minute there was silence. The man continued in the same position on the bed. The woman sat on the grub-box, facing him.

“What are you going to do?” she asked abruptly.

Messner looked at her with lazy indecision. “What do you think I ought to do? Nothing scenic, I hope. You see I am stiff and trail-sore, and this bunk is so restful.”

She gnawed her lower lip and fumed dumbly.

“But - ” she began vehemently, then clenched her hands and stopped.

“I hope you don’t want me to kill Mr. -er - Haythorne,” he said gently, almost pleadingly. “It would be most distressing, and, I assure you, really it is unnecessary.”

“But you must do something,” she cried.

“On the contrary, it is quite conceivable that I do not have to do anything.”

“You would stay here?”

He nodded.

She glanced desperately around the cabin and at the bed unrolled on the other bunk. “Night is coming on. You can’t stop here. You can’t! I tell you, you simply can’t!”

“Of course I can. I might remind you that I found this cabin first and that you are my guests.”

Again her eyes travelled around the room, and the terror in them leaped up at sight of the other bunk.

“Then we’ll have to go,” she announced decisively.

“Impossible. You have a dry, hacking cough - the sort Mr. - er - Haythorne so aptly described. You’ve already slightly chilled your lungs. Besides, he is a physician and knows. He would never permit it.”

“Then what are you going to do?” she demanded again, with a tense, quiet utterance that boded an outbreak.

Messner regarded her in a way that was almost paternal, what of the profundity of pity and patience with which he contrived to suffuse it.

“My dear Theresa, as I told you before, I don’t know. I really haven’t thought about it.”

“Oh! You drive me mad!” She sprang to her feet, wringing her hands in impotent wrath. “You never used to be this way.”

“I used to be all softness and gentleness,” he nodded concurrence. “Was that why you left me?”

“You are so different, so dreadfully calm. You frighten me. I feel you have something terrible planned all the while. But whatever you do, don’t do anything rash. Don’t get excited - “

“I don’t get excited any more,” he interrupted. “Not since you went away.”

“You have improved - remarkably,” she retorted.

He smiled acknowledgment. “While I am thinking about what I shall do, I’ll tell you what you will have to do - tell Mr. - er - Haythorne who I am. It may make our stay in this cabin more - may I say, sociable?”

“Why have you followed me into this frightful country?” she asked irrelevantly.

“Don’t think I came here looking for you, Theresa. Your vanity shall not be tickled by any such misapprehension. Our meeting is wholly fortuitous. I broke with the life academic and I had to go somewhere. To be honest, I came into the Klondike because I thought it the place you were least liable to be in.”

There was a fumbling at the latch, then the door swung in and Haythorne entered with an armful of firewood. At the first warning, Theresa began casually to clear away the dishes. Haythorne went out again after more wood.

“Why didn’t you introduce us?” Messner queried.

“I’ll tell him,” she replied, with a toss of her head. “Don’t think I’m afraid.”

“I never knew you to be afraid, very much, of anything.”

“And I’m not afraid of confession, either,” she said,